One of the most striking features of the anglophone literature on NGOs is the diversity of NGO sectors and their contributions to civil society and democracy; yet, exploration of this complexity is often eschewed in favour of a normative approach in which the apparently mutually enhancing relationship between NGOs, civil society and the state is underpinned by liberal democratic assumption rather than an engagement with wider debates about the politics of development. Following a critique of this approach to NGOs, civil society and democracy, the paper argues that the role of NGOs in the politics of development is far more complex than much of the NGO literature would suggest, and calls for a more contextualized and less value-laden approach to the understanding of the political role of NGOs.

No abstract

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people's actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village-based women's groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women's participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women's groups. The overrepresentation of better-off and higher-status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women's groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.

This paper examines the new styles of houses under construction in contemporaryTanzania and suggests that they can be understood as the material manifestation of middle class growth. Through an examination of the architecture, interior décor and compound space in a sample of these new houses in urban Dar es Salaam and rural Kilimanjaro, the paper identifies four domestic aesthetics: the respectable house, the locally aspirant house, the globally aspirant house, and the minimalist house, each of which map on to ideas about ujamaa, liberalization and the consumption of global consumer goods in distinct ways. The paper argues that these different domestic aesthetics demonstrate intraclass differences, and in particular the emergence of a new middle class.

With the transnational turn in the social sciences attention has now turnedto 'global civil society', 'transnational civil society', 'transnational networks' and, most recently, 'migrant' or 'diasporic civil society'. Claims