What Price for Privatization? ― Cultural Encounter With Development Policy on the Zambian Copperbelt

"It takes a patient listener to write these stories on how local people experience development beyond its material properties. Beautifully written, Elizabeth C. Parsons's book will surely help development planners to reflect on the cultural dimensions of their work." uDorothea Hilhorst, Wageningen University

"This book tells a compelling story of an encounter, or rather a missed encounter, between two cosmologies: that of Western views of development and progress and that of the Zambians and their understanding and sense of the world in which they live. The author's detailed fieldwork provides overwhelming evidence that 'development' can only start with acknowledging one's own worldviews and those of others. Development is not making the other in one's own image. I hope that the development establishment will listen."uSeverine Deneulin, author of Religion in Development: Rewriting the Secular Script

What Price for Privatization? Cultural Encounter with Development Policy on the Zambian Copperbelt considers how one African community experienced the sale to foreign investors of its main industryua group of state-owned copper mines. Everyday Zambians saw a series of uncertain, shifting interactions among individuals, corporations, immaterial forces, and material interests as running counter to hard facts about the state of the mines and the country's overall economy. Supernatural or spiritual forces played a powerful, negative role in what Zambians understood to be happening as a result of privatization. But there was no place within dominant development policy talk to account for this sort of knowledge.

Indeed, many of the disappointments and failures that have long characterized development activities can be traced to profound discrepancies that exist when local knowledge infused with a particular worldview is overlooked by policymakers. The types of policies that have undergirded development interventions for almost sixty years have elevated economic, political, and operational interests over all others. But such ways of thinking about the world leave huge gaps in comprehension. This is particularly true in regard to the cultural and religious experiences of both the people who devise policies and those who live with the policy consequences. What Price for Privatization? documents such an instance and suggests some intellectual and practical means by which things might change on behalf of the global common welfare.

Elizabeth C. Parsons is lecturer and codirector of contextual education at Boston University School of Theology.