Dependent Agency in the Global Health Regime

This volume examines how local actors respond to Africa's high dependence on donor health funds. It focuses on the large infusion of donor money to address HIV and AIDS into Malawi and Zambia and the subsequent slow-down in that funding after 2009. How do local people respond to this dynamic aid architecture and the myriad of opportunities and constraints that accompany it? This book conceptualizes dependent agency, and the condition in which local actors can simultaneously act and be dependent, and investigates conditions under which dependent agency occurs. Drawing upon empirical data from Malawi and Zambia collected between 2005 and 2014, the work interrogates the nuanced strategies of dependent agency: performances of compliance, extraversion, and resistance below the line. The findings elucidate the dynamic interactions between actors which often occur off stage but which undergird macro-level development processes.

Extends the nascent literature on African agency to examine local responses to global structures Provides a counterpoint to the Africa Rising narrative by illustrating the ways local actors find new opportunities for advancement within the structures of donor dependency and neoliberal discourses Utilizes rich ethnographic materials to provide concrete examples of the ways that local agents negotiate and maneuver in the environment of donor health programs

Autorentext

Emma-Louise Anderson is Lecturer in International Development at the University of Leeds, UK. She is author of Gender, Risk and HIV: Navigating Structural Violence and has also published on gender and HIV in the International Feminist Journal of Politics and the politics of Ebola in Third World Quarterly.
Amy S. Patterson is author of The Church and AIDS in Africa: The Politics of Ambiguity and The Politics of AIDS in Africa. She also is editor of AIDS and the African State and co-editor of The Politics and Anti-Politics of Social Movements: Religion and AIDS in Africa. She has published in numerous African studies and global health journals.

Inhalt

1. Dependent Agency and the AIDS Enterprise: Global Programs, Local Actions .- 2. Unique Opportunities in a Dynamic Aid Architecture: The Conditions for Agency .- 3. Performing, Extraverting, and Resisting: The Strategies of Dependent Agents .- 4. Complex Power on the Margins: The Implications of Dependent Agency.