This article uses the concept of discourse to analyse an assessment of the impacts of a development project. Impact assessment can never achieve the objectivity that development practitioners seek. The truth is not something ‘out there’ waiting to be documented, but rather a story to be written by those performing the assessment. Moreover, the resistance and negotiation strategies used by both the ‘assessors’ and those being ‘assessed’ can have a profound influence on what is known about a project and its impacts.
Arce, A. and N. Long (1992) ‘The Dynamics of Knowledge: Interfaces between Bureaucrats and Peasants’, in N. Long and A. Long (eds) Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development, pp. 211–246. London: Routledge.
2.
Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
3.
Crush, J., ed. (1995) Power of Development. London: Routledge.
4.
Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
5.
Ferguson, J. (1990) The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6.
Gardner, K. and D. Lewis (1996) Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge. London: Pluto.
7.
Hobart, M. (1993) ‘Introduction: The Growth of Ignorance’, in M. Hobart (ed.) An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, pp. 1–30. London: Routledge.
8.
Long, A. and N. Long, eds (1992) Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development. London: Routledge.
9.
Richards, P. (1993) ‘Cultivation. Knowledge or Performance?’, in M. Hobart (ed.) An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, pp. 61–78. London: Routledge.
10.
Said, E. (1991) Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
11.
Scott, J.C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
12.
Thomas, N. (1994) Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Cambridge: Polity.
