Ghosts of bilateralism: Collaborative research on the afterlives of a Finnish-Kenyan water development project

Abstract

With rising academic interest in heterodox perspectives on international development interventions, including their unintended consequences and so-called “afterlives” (Rudnyckyj and Schwittay 2014; McKay 2012; Gez 2021), identifying suitable research approaches to capture such complex aftermaths emerges as a new challenge for development studies. In what follows, we share insights from our attempt to adapt an existing research approach to generate evidence on development’s afterlives, including the cascading and unintended effects of past development projects, both tangible and intangible.1 In particular, we explore the valence of qualitative-ethnographic methods for diving deeply into the plurality of projects’ lasting legacies, well beyond their formal temporal and geographic boundaries.