A Kundu relationship : translating development in the Papua New Guinea church partnership program

Abstract

This thesis addresses the puzzle of how a development policy model of partnership works by examining the case of the Papua New Guinea Church Partnership Program (CPP), involving seven Papua New Guinea churches, their partner Australian faithbased NGOs, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the National Government. By focusing on the effects on churches of engaging in a donor-funded program, the research adds to a particular strand in the anthropology of development literature concerned with how development interventions work, and to another in development studies concerned with the relationship between religion and development. This thesis uses a Foucauldian governmentality perspective to understand development and foreign aid as regimes of practice, shaped by a secular tradition that uses a language in which the policy model of partnership has become both normative and instrumental. It also understands Christianity as a regime of practice, shaped by a religious tradition that uses a particular language for talking about development. Employing the extended metaphor of the kundu or hour-glass drum, the thesis analyses processes of translation of the Christian and secular 'rhythms', or languages of development, being played by the partners. Key interlocutors carry out the work of translation in order to make their languages mutually intelligible. In so doing, they find themselves enacting a kundu relationship, which affirms their personal agency as partnership trustees. As partners with diverse interests are brought together to achieve CPP outcomes and their own organisational goals, being in a kundu relationship creates local translation spaces where the dynamic interaction of Christian and secular regimes of practice occur. These spaces present opportunities for manoeuvre on the part of the churches, and for the exercise of a productive form of power that simultaneously disciplines and empowers them in unanticipated ways. In this way, the thesis discerns continuities in the dialectical encounters between the global and the local in Papua New Guinea's missionary and colonial histories and the present-day development landscape. The conclusion is that Papua New Guinea churches are assuming organisational identities as agents of a form of development that is underpinned theologically and translated into the vernacular. The churches are framing their engagement with development as a means of fulfilling what John's Gospel calls 'life in all its fullness'. Show more