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Abstract

New African Thought proposes to re-think or reconstruct the notion of “development” as “prosperity”, and, much in line with the argument by Jean-Marc Ela that post-colonial Africa social science research is research focused on people’s real living circumstances, we make the argument that the ethnography of social engineering can serve as a source of inspiration here. While ethnographic research can be carried out from a variety of political positionings, we plead for a “critical reformist” stance, on the intersection of pure, applied and radical anthropology. This positioning can be traced back to early 20^th century European thinkers like Max Weber and Karl Popper, for whom the essence of social science was to critically accompany policy processes by identifying all intended and unintended outcomes of policies, but we also situate it in relation to various strands of contemporary policy ethnography. Our approach starts from the conception of a policy, reform, intervention or project as a space of confrontation of a variety of strategic groups at all stages in the policy cycle and the principle of epistemic equity tells us to give equal weight to all actors’ representations and practices. We also argue that the phase of “going public” needs to be given as much weight as the phases of fieldwork and writing in ethnographic research. The conception of social engineering as a political arena will also help researchers to think more strategically about how, and when to engage with different types of publics in different stages of the research process.