Reimagining Participation: Situating Trust within Agricultural Development in Ghana

This paper argues that a focus on trust and mistrust in relationships, partnerships and projects can provide insights into some of the failings and challenges of participatory engagement within international development. While trust may at times be assumed to be universally self-evident and commonly understood, this research illuminates an aspect of projects that is often overlooked – the dynamic and contested relational underpinnings of development projects. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews in Ghana with farmers, project implementers and donors, distinct experiences of trust are explored as well as the dynamic, quotidian practices that seek to produce and negotiate trust in the context of agricultural development. This research shows that an analysis of how trust is built and eroded is critical for understanding the micro-politics of development programs. The research found that the presence of trust and efforts to build trust are particularly important in project planning and the early stages of implementation. Mistrust is often the product of competition between the plethora of non-governmental organizations that are active in Ghana, decades of unfulfilled development expectations, inadequate participation, uneven transparency around funding and problems with communications. It was found that the framework of trust and mistrust provides a useful means to interpret the implications of development project failures, breakdowns in communications and challenges in farmer participation. In addition, as trust remains little theorized or empirically studied in development, this paper begins to exemplify how trust can be conceptualized as a generative line of inquiry into the relational politics of projects and programs. The paper concludes that situating trust as both a relational sentiment and an object that is produced and circulated may contribute to reimagining the politics of power and participation in development.