In 2004, the World Bank worked with the Moroccan government to create a poverty map at the commune scale. The results formed the basis for King Mohammed VI’s National Initiative for Human Development (INDH), a highly politicized and high profile national poverty campaign. Situated within the Ministry of Interior, the INDH is a neoliberal and top-down initiative aimed to reduce poverty in 403 rural communes and 264 urban quarters by improving basic infrastructure and access to services. The INDH eventually became an important public image tool for addressing citizen grievances as well as the international communities’ reports on inequality in the Kingdom. This paper discusses the INDH and the poverty-mapping-network associated with it as a technique of governance. While the technocrats who produce poverty maps argue that the tool is an objective, apolitical and efficient way to allocate resources, I argue that that the map and its associated interventions are highly politicized. I examine the contextual aspects of poverty hidden behind poverty maps and aggregate indicators and the spatial patterns associated with the poverty map as an intervention. Focusing on villages in the south of Morocco, I use interviews, participatory mapping workshops and ethnographic methods to analyze how the geographical targeting approach maps mask layers of scaled politics regarding the poor. Recognizing the map as an actant in a network, I trace the ‘life” of the tool, its effects on villages and villagers, and the frictions between poverty policy and practice. In contrast to most research on poverty mapping which focused on methodological issues, this research is concerned with the forms of measurement, the nature of knowledge and expertise mobilized, and the scalar and political impacts of poverty mapping as a mode of governance. The INDH symbolizes the attention of the King to marginalized and peripheral villages and yet enables the governing of formerly ungovernable spaces. I discuss how security-development and governing intersect across the poverty mapping network.

This paper analyzes the effects of foreign aid on Palestine’s nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector.  Specifically, it explores how aid has positioned NGOs as actors within civil society and affected their capacity to represent local citizen interests and lead social change.                   Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, Western aid has poured into Palestine and drastically expanded the country’s NGO sector.  Foreign funders doubled donations to NGOs between 1999 and 2006, enlarging the sector to approximately 3,000 organizations (Turner and Shweiki 2014).  This proliferation of NGOs has been read by many as a strengthening of Palestinian civil society. Such an interpretation reflects dominant theories of NGOs, which see these organizations as the sine qua non of civil society.  NGOs are thought to promote citizen participation, mobilize opposition to authoritarianism and occupation, and bring about social and political change.  A more critical approach to NGO-ization, however, suggests that NGO sectors built primarily through foreign aid are more likely to maintain the status quo than to promote substantive change.  When NGOs rely primarily on aid to survive, they shift their accountability from citizens to donors and structure their programs in ways that lead to the measurable results demanded by funders rather than the radical change preferred by the grassroots.   This paper argues that foreign aid to Palestine’s NGO sector has distorted NGOs’ roles within civil society by constructing a bloated sector of professionalized NGOs that maintain clientelistic relationships with donors and are disconnected from the grassroots constituents they proclaim to serve.  Drawing upon data from interviews with NGO leaders and civil society activists in Palestine, the paper argues that the grassroots-based advocacy organizations that explicitly oppose the occupation of Palestine and promote meaningful civic participation have been sidelined by the large, aid-funded NGOs that, reflecting the agendas of their Western donors, accomodate rather than combat occupational forces.  Co-optation of NGOs by foreign aid reflects the sector’s dependence on foreign funds for survival.  In order to receive funding, NGOs must comply with bureaucratic application and reporting procedures and must demonstrate measurable outcomes in short-term increments.  The influx of foreign aid to Palestine, and the clietelistic relations it has created between foreign donors and local NGO recipients, has created frictions within Palestinian civil society. In addition to sidelining grassroots advocacy organization, aid has produced a regime of governance that reflects foreign logics and goals rather than local needs and aspirations.

This paper is an initial reflection on an ongoing study that aims to excavate the intertwined geographies of housing and militarization, home and refugeeness, and informality and violence in one periphery of Beirut, Lebanon. The paper examines the different layers of local and regional conflicts along with rapid urbanization have restructured access to affordable housing for Lebanese families and more recently provided shelter for Syrian refugees. Many of these sites suffer from terrible environmental and living conditions. I focus here on analyzing the apparatus of governance and overlapping jurisdictions that have produced these contested geographies based on data collected from archival research and interviews with international aid agencies like the UNHCR and CHF, local mosques, charity organizations, residents (both Lebanese and Syrians), planning agencies, and local municipalities.