Shifting Perspectives on Development: An Actor-Network Study of a Dam in Costa Rica (Report‪)‬

I. Introduction The anthropological study of development, anthropology's "evil twin" (Ferguson 1997a), has gained increasing importance and recognition as a distinct subfield of anthropology as a discipline. Lewis and Mosse (2006) distinguish three approaches in the anthropology of development: (a.) instrumental ones, which promote social progress through the means of more effective development interventions, institutional reforms, or the establishment of new methods; (b.) deconstructivist approaches, which criticize development politics and economics as a distinct hegemonic discourse (Escobar 1995, Ferguson 1997b, Sachs 1992); and (c.) sociological interactionism, which promotes a sociology of development based on the empirical investigation of the interactions between developers, developees, and the "brokers" in between (Arce and Long 2000; Bierschenk, Chauveau, and Olivier de Sardan 1999; Olivier de Sardan 2005). This paper takes some insights from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to show, first, how these three approaches can be combined to give a more complex picture of development processes, and second, that each one of them reflects the perspectives of actors' positions in the development context.