Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

In most of my own writing as well as in the writings of scholars seeking to understand the financial crisis, the trope of neoliberal governance offers a lens into the workings of the "free market" logic that played out in the financialization of global political economy, in the large scale inequalities across the globe, and in the dissolution of regulatory mechanisms to keep in check the behaviours of financial firms. This macro-level analysis offers a big picture, an understanding of the absence of government structures and processes that would keep in check the behaviours of financial organisations. However, what this analysis does not do is offer an insight into the everyday workings of the people that inhabited  these transnational organisations, the values they embody, the goals in life they aspire toward and the meanings they make of their professions. The macro analysis also does not offer insights into the frames of reference through which the actors working in and...

Each time I am in the field, conversing with disenfranchised communities about projects of social change and finding entry points to collaboration, I hear a consistent narrative. This narrative is utterly sceptical of NGOs and the work done by NGOs. Consistent in this narrative across geographic spaces of marginalization is a consistent suspicion of the middle class NGO worker or the elite foreigner who comes in for occasional visits, may be once a year or once every two years. Like one community member shared, "NGOs are bastards." She noted how NGOs come and go, with their own donor goals and absorbing most of the donor monies to support their own goals and agendas. In the voice of another community participant in a disenfranchised Santali community, "The NGOs will do whatever they can to help themselves. So the fancy car, the fancy trips with foreigners, and the fancy life. You ask, how much of this money actually helps us?" In these narratives, communi...