Millions of dollars are spent each year on international development. For the last thirty years, a significant proportion of this money has been channelled towards "good governance". Yet the question of what makes governance "good" is fraught in postcolonial states, where non-state actors act like a state, or fill gaps in areas where the state's authority is especially tenuous.

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Building on ethnographic, grounded, and actor-centred approaches to critical development studies, I study how the good governance agenda can reinforce or contest postcolonial statebuilding. Focusing on Karen State, I compare civil society in areas controlled by the Karen National Union (KNU) versus Myanmar government-controlled areas.

 

People use civil society as a vehicle for specific hopes and dreams, which are related to their own, localised experiences of war; but so are the challenges they face in navigating the international development regime. Karen State is also interesting because of its legacy of cross-border organisations, which leverage donor funds to challenge postcolonial statebuilding at immense risks to themselves. This has allowed for experiments in new forms of governance and territory-making, like the Salween Peace Park.*

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Much of my research has been done through participant observation with the organisations I write about. Thank you.

*I am in the process of writing up this research. Please contact me for drafts and/or a copy of my DPhil thesis.