Raluca Pernes Current Project Raluca Pernes Curriculum Vitae Current Project My research investigates capacity-building development projects currently unfolding in rural Romania. Starting with the early nineties, development projects from all the "ages" of development have been implemented in the former socialist countries, with little assessment as to how they have benefited local communities over the long run. While international aid agencies, the European Union and specialized state agencies are putting huge efforts into making development industry work, questions are increasingly arising regarding the actual results and efficiency of their approach. I will analyze the interfaces between the relevant social actors involved in development and the way in which their understanding of development shapes the outcomes of the interventions. Moreover, looking at development through the different lenses I hope to illuminate how the assessment of the projects as failures or successes is related to the expectations and interpretations of the individuals. While community-driven development is not a new type of intervention, implementing it in the post-socialist context raises different problems and reactions as compared to the Third World countries, especially when it comes to issues of community leadership and the relations of donors with local/national coordinators. An additional issue, in Eastern Europe as well as elsewhere, is the ever growing concern that development ideology tends to become homogeneous, with multilateral agencies and NGOs heading towards the same unified vision and depending financially on the same resources. The fieldwork research will include participant observation in the local communities, interviews with facilitators and coordinators of projects, as well as document analysis with the purpose of grasping the assumptions and strategies of international donors.

Previous researches on the weak points of development projects have often placed their interpretations in the frame of discourse analysis. I, however, intend to focus more on the networks of power that shape the interactions between the actors involved at various levels, and do so with awareness that there are no clear-cut, fixed hierarchies. By involving a plurality of perspectives and focusing on context, I hope to achieve a clearer understanding of how real world development projects are simultaneously succeeding and failing, while involuntarily contributing to the perpetuations of some of the inequalities they attempt to diminish.