Introduction

Having presented empirical evidence on participation in Chapter Four, this chapter will explore the ownership of Bangladesh's Poverty Reduction Strategy paper (PRSP). It is very important to understand why the government of Bangladesh was keen on labelling the PRSP as a home-grown policy while it was evident that neither the government of Bangladesh nor its people felt the need to produce such a strategy. The claim of including ‘enough’ participation and, therefore, securing ownership demands closer investigation to discern the underlying intention. This chapter critically discusses the underlying reasons for declaring ownership of the PRSP and delineates the emergence of a comprador interest group that helped in claiming ‘ownership’ through a local form of ‘participation’. This group is the local development counterpart and can be seen as a national-level complementary wing of what Lewis and Mosse (2006) describe as development brokers and translators, and Bierschenk et al (2002) identify as a new social category. This is a useful tool to understand contemporary international development and the political economy of poor countries, focusing on the key features of different actors and stakeholders involved in the process. Hearn (2007) describes this as financial and political dependency. In other words, the lack of an independent source of funding creates a key intermediary role linking the North and the South, ideologically and materially, in a manner that perpetuates Northern domination. This chapter shows how the local experts, with their knowledge, networks and other technical knacks, negotiate and mediate an external development framework so that it is reconstructed as expected with a touch of local participation (and ownership). I will argue that all this is incompletely understood by the ‘brokers and translators’ frame that has recently become fashionable in the development anthropology gaze. Thus, while there has been scholarly attention to the creative roles of local development workers, attention seldom focuses on national elites and their international patrons and partners. Works that do address this group (Bierschenk et al, 2002; Mosse, 2005; Lewis and Mosse, 2006) are arguably only partially reflexive. The concept of ‘translation’ refers to mutual enrolment and the interlocking of interests.