Studying What No Longer Exists: Methodological Reflections on Researching Defunct Development Projects

Abstract

This article explores the methodological and epistemological challenges of studying defunct development projects, development projects that have ceased implementation, lost visibility, or quietly disappeared from institutional discourse. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with the Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP), a collaborative development project between the International Labour Organization and the Government of Ghana, the paper reflects on reconstructing a project’s narrative and legacy in the absence of centralized records, active personnel, or formal evaluation. It demonstrates how institutional memory can be traced through interviews, personal archives, spatial remnants, and informal networks, and how narrative inconsistencies, silence, and affective memory become central features of post-project inquiry. The paper documents how the researcher navigated fragmented data, ethical tensions, and improvised encounters to build an account of the GDWP. It argues that studying what no longer exists expands the methodological repertoire of qualitative research, offering critical insights into institutional fragility, participatory breakdown, and the politics of remembering and forgetting development.

Introduction

Qualitative researchers are often drawn to sites of social change, institutional transformation, or ongoing development interventions. But what happens when the subject of inquiry no longer exists, when a project has been terminated, its documentation scattered, and its memory fading from institutional discourse? This paper addresses the methodological challenges and opportunities of studying defunct development projects: initiatives designed to endure but which have since collapsed, stagnated, or disappeared from view.

While many disciplines examine transformation and discontinuity, these conditions pose distinctive challenges for qualitative inquiry. Because qualitative research is concerned with meaning-making, lived experience, and context, the disappearance or fragmentation of a research object is not merely a logistical problem, it reshapes the epistemological conditions of the study. Absence, silence, and partiality, rather than being obstacles, can become data that reveal how people make sense of endings, how institutions are remembered or forgotten, and how power operates through what is unsaid.

Despite growing interest in “learning from failure” (Andrews et al., 2017; Mosse, 2005), the qualitative study of discontinued projects remains rare, especially in low- and middle-income countries where institutional memory and archiving are weak (Ferguson, 1994; Roe, 1991). Mainstream evaluation frameworks prioritise contemporaneity and measurable outcomes, often overlooking projects whose formal structures have dissolved even though these can yield insights into institutional fragility, the politics of implementation, and the social life of development beyond official timelines (Eyben, 2010; Li, 2007).

This paper adopts an interpretivist epistemology and constructivist design, treating knowledge as situated and co-produced through interaction. Studying defunct projects means engaging with fragmentary traces, retrospective accounts, and contested memories, making the research process inherently nonlinear and dialogic. It asks: How can researchers trace institutional memory and reconstruct narratives when faced with fragmented data and institutional silence? Drawing on the Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP) as a case study, the paper explores the interplay of memory, narrative, and material traces in post-project fieldwork.

In this article, I share methodological strategies developed while conducting fieldwork for my doctoral study (Arko, 2019) on the GDWP. The aim of the doctoral study was threefold. First, to examine the logics and processes involved in the translation and adaptation of international discourses of local economic development into local contexts in Ghana. Specifically, the study sought to identify the key actors involved, their rationalities and interests, and how those factors shape the trajectory of the translation process. Critical to this was unearthing the nature of the power relations among the actors and how that framed their involvement and the socio-spatial contexts responsible for the structural opportunities and constraints that shape the agency of the actors.

The GDWP exemplifies these dynamics. Launched in 2003 as one of Ghana’s first efforts to operationalise the ILO’s Decent Work agenda, it embedded social dialogue, employment security, and workers’ rights within local governance. Its Subcommittees for Productive and Gainful Employment (SPGEs) were celebrated as participatory innovations (ILO, 2004; ILO, 2006), and the programme was cited as a model for replication. Yet by the time of my fieldwork in 2016, its structures had disintegrated. Studying the project required navigating methodological uncertainty, reconstructing institutional memory, and piecing together evidence from interviews, archival fragments, and local narratives.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it argues that defunct projects are legitimate and valuable objects of qualitative inquiry, enriching understandings of temporality, institutional dynamics, and failure. Second, it offers a reflexive account of how qualitative methods can be adapted to study interventions that are no longer formally accessible, contributing to broader debates on methodological rigour and innovation.

This study also intervenes in contemporary debates about rigour, transparency, and values in qualitative research. Calls for reproducibility, and standardisation have intensified scrutiny of qualitative methods (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Tracy, 2010), often imposing positivist assumptions that obscure contextual and relational dimensions (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). Scholars increasingly advocate for articulating rigour on qualitative terms emphasising reflexivity, ethical transparency, and methodological creativity (Braun & Clarke, 2025; Pownall, 2025; Steltenpohl et al., 2023). By analysing absence, memory, and fragmentation, often seen as methodological limitations, this paper demonstrates how qualitative inquiry can redefine rigour and contribute to a more pluralistic research paradigm.

The paper is structured as follows: The first section after the introduction makes the case for studying defunct development projects; the second section outlines key conceptual and theoretical considerations; the third section discusses methodological challenges and reflexive strategies for reconstructing data; and the final section concludes with implications for qualitative research and development studies more broadly.

The Case for Studying Defunct Development Projects

Development research and practice are often oriented toward projects that are active, visible, and ostensibly successful. As a result, defunct projects, those that have ceased implementation, lost visibility, or collapsed without formal closure remain underexplored. This omission reflects deeper epistemological biases within aid and evaluation cultures: a preoccupation with measurable impact, linear progress, and demonstrable success (Eyben, 2010; Scott, 1998). Studying projects that no longer exist disrupts these assumptions, opening new methodological and theoretical avenues for understanding the real trajectories of development interventions.

Defunct projects provide fertile ground for investigating institutional fragility. Many interventions are designed with expectations of sustainability and replication, yet these aspirations often unravel in practice. By the time I entered the field, the Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP) once central to local economic development had ended, its structures dismantled, and no official archive existed to trace its closure. This absence proved analytically productive, demanding new ways of reconstructing institutional memory, navigating contested narratives, and interpreting “what happened.”

To study such projects is to ask not only what failed but how failure is understood, narrated, and managed. Yet “failure” itself requires careful unpacking. Not all discontinued projects are failures, and not all failures involve cessation. “Failure” implies a normative judgment, a deviation from expected outcomes and is often entangled with accountability and legitimacy (Ferguson, 1994; Mosse, 2005). A project may “fail” while still operating institutionally, or it may end without being judged a failure if framed as transformation or strategic completion. Terms like “abandonment,” “defunctness,” or “discontinuity” more neutrally describe a project’s operational state, while “absence” and “dissolution” capture its temporal dynamics. “Failure,” by contrast, is performative: it shapes how projects are remembered, disavowed, or learned from. Recognising these distinctions matters because the methodological stakes differ. Studying a defunct project requires reconstructing material absences, while studying “failure” requires analysing the politics of interpretation.

This distinction aligns with Mosse’s (2005) argument that projects are socially constructed realities, sustained by institutional performances and selective interpretations. Once implementation ends, those performances fade but residues persist in partially implemented policies, stakeholder memories, or adapted practices. Qualitative research, with its sensitivity to nuance, temporality, and meaning, is particularly suited to capturing these dynamics (Li, 2007).

Defunct projects also destabilise dominant narratives of development as linear and progressive. They expose tensions between design and implementation, donor expectations and local capacity, planned outcomes and lived realities. As Ferguson (1994) shows, interventions often disappear not through a single failure but via gradual deactivation as resources dwindle, champions depart, or priorities shift. These silences and absences themselves constitute valuable data.

The “politics of forgetting” further underscores the need for such inquiry. Failed or vanished projects are often excluded from institutional reporting to protect reputations and sustain narratives of continuous progress. Studying them becomes an act of epistemic recovery, involving the piecing together of unofficial reports, memories, and archival fragments. Such work is methodologically demanding but produces knowledge that is more critically attuned to the complexities of development practice.

Methodological breakdowns, too, can yield insight. In my research, the scarcity of formal documentation on the GDWP pushed me toward oral histories, institutional ethnography, and triangulation of grey literature. These approaches not only salvaged the study but revealed how development is remembered, reinterpreted, and sometimes strategically forgotten.

Finally, studying defunct projects carries practical relevance. It compels practitioners and donors to confront issues of institutional memory, documentation, and exit strategies. Evaluations often end with a project’s funding, overlooking the critical period when local actors must adapt or abandon interventions. By legitimising post-project inquiry, researchers can build a more honest, historically grounded, and contextually sensitive development practice.

Conceptual Considerations

The decision to study defunct development projects requires careful conceptual framing and theoretical grounding. It compels researchers to interrogate what constitutes a “development project,” when and how such a project can be considered to have “ended,” and what its “afterlife” might look like beyond its operational lifespan. These questions reflect deeper epistemological assumptions within development research and have significant implications for how we conceptualise temporality, institutional dynamics, and methodological practice.

The term defunct, though rarely used in formal development literature, is employed here to describe projects that have lost operational capacity, no longer receive funding, and lack formal closure mechanisms, even though remnants of their activities or discourses may persist. In official documentation, such projects are often labelled “phased out,” “inactive,” or “completed,” terms that obscure their fragmentation or abandonment. In this paper, defunctness is treated not as a singular event or static label but as a dynamic, temporal process that involves the gradual disintegration of infrastructure, institutional routines, and programmatic discourse. This process unfolds unevenly, with different dimensions - material, symbolic, and relational - decaying at different rates.

Projects can become defunct through multiple pathways, each carrying distinct methodological and analytical implications. Financial factors are common: abrupt funding cuts, withdrawal of donor support, or the expiration of time-bound grants without transition planning can lead to premature termination. Shifting institutional or political priorities may result in abandonment when projects no longer align with government agendas or donor strategies. Leadership changes and the departure of key personnel often undermine institutional continuity, while structural and contextual factors such as legal disputes, ethical controversies, or conflicts with stakeholders can halt operations altogether. Methodological and logistical challenges, including difficulties with data collection, community engagement, or inter-agency coordination, may also render implementation untenable. These scenarios show that defunctness is rarely a straightforward “failure.” Instead, it is the cumulative outcome of political, institutional, financial, and social dynamics that erode a project’s capacity to sustain itself over time.

Defunctness should therefore be seen not merely as institutional collapse but as a contested, negotiated, and uneven phenomenon shaped by how actors remember, reinterpret, and sometimes resist project narratives (Ferguson, 1994; Mosse, 2005). This perspective aligns with calls to examine institutional afterlives, the ways in which development interventions persist discursively or symbolically even after their material presence has faded (Li, 2007). Framing defunctness as a relational process of erasure and survival pushes qualitative researchers to engage with partial traces, narrative silences, and affective memories as legitimate and revealing forms of data. Such an approach challenges the linear, lifecycle-based logic of project evaluation frameworks, which assume a coherent sequence from planning to implementation to completion. In practice, projects often end ambiguously, without formal closure and with uneven termination across components and contexts.

The Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP), which underpins this study, illustrates this ambiguity. By the time fieldwork began in 2016, several years had passed since the programme’s implementation period (2003–2009), and its district-level structures, once central to its participatory ethos, had long disintegrated. In districts such as Ajumako Enyan Essiam and Effutu, Subcommittees for Productive and Gainful Employment (SPGEs) had become fully defunct by 2012 and 2015, respectively. This temporal gap introduced methodological challenges, requiring the reconstruction of institutional memory and an engagement with how projects fade from both documentation and public discourse. Yet traces of the GDWP remained embedded in narratives shared by former implementers and in the partial uptake of its principles by successor initiatives. This experience demonstrates that defunctness is not defined solely by cessation but by a gradual and contested process in which various dimensions of a project decline at different rates.

Understanding the temporality of defunct projects requires a shift from viewing interventions as bounded, time-limited activities to seeing them as historically situated processes with potential afterlives. Drawing on Li (2007) and Mosse (2005), development can be conceptualised not as a series of discrete actions but as a relational and discursive field in which interventions continue to shape expectations, power relations, and institutional identities even after their formal conclusion. Projects may dissolve materially while persisting discursively, and their collapse may not signal an end but rather re-appropriation, reinterpretation, or denial in subsequent governance cycles.

Taken together, these conceptual issues suggest that studying defunct development projects is not merely retrospective. It provides an analytically rich entry point into broader questions of institutional memory, governance failure, and the sociology of aid. It challenges researchers to think relationally and temporally, to follow the “ruins” of development not only for what they reveal about the past but also for how they shape the present and condition the future. Methodologically, this orientation calls for reflexivity, flexibility, and attentiveness to fragmentation. Researchers must accept that data will often be partial, contradictory, or politically charged, but rather than weakening inquiry, such conditions reveal the real-world complexity of development as it unfolds and collapses. In such contexts, qualitative research becomes not only a method of investigation but also a stance of engaged listening, careful reconstruction, and ethical attentiveness to memory and loss.

Methodological Challenges and Workaround Strategies

Undertaking qualitative research on defunct development projects introduces a range of methodological challenges that are often absent from studies of ongoing or recently completed development projects. These challenges are not simply logistical; they are deeply epistemological, affecting what can be known, how knowledge is accessed, and how it is ethically represented. My engagement with the now-defunct GDWP foregrounded these issues and compelled a rethinking of traditional fieldwork approaches in development research. The methodological challenges associated with studying defunct development projects are not simply practical difficulties, they are opportunities to reconsider what counts as data, how relationships are navigated in the absence of formal structures, and how knowledge is co-constructed through time, memory, and spatial improvisation.

Researcher Reflexivity and Positionality

As a Ghanaian researcher with both personal ties to the country and professional experience in the development sector, I approached the fieldwork for this study with a complex insider/outsider identity. My background as a Ghanaian citizen and brief tenure in civil society work shaped both my understanding of development challenges and my scepticism toward donor-driven interventions. Recognizing my tendency to sympathize with small business operators and to search for evidence of project failure, I adopted a reflexive stance, interrogating my assumptions and seeking to foreground respondents’ own rationalities. I also navigated how my status as a doctoral researcher studying abroad was perceived, balancing perceptions of privilege by intentionally dressing casually, speaking local languages, and relying on public transport during interviews. These strategies reflect a broader methodological commitment to relational ethics and humility, acknowledging that the narratives I gathered were always co-constructed, partial, and situated within complex social hierarchies.

Ethical Sensitivities

Even though there were no ethical clearance requirements from my university at the time, the relevant ethical considerations such as informed consent, anonymity, confidentiality, and causing no harm to research participants were adhered to. Researching defunct projects often involves an emotional terrain where informants may express disappointment, disillusionment, or resignation. In the GDWP case, several participants expressed frustration at what they perceived as the abandonment of a promising development project. One informant cited the absence of follow-up as evidence of donor inconsistency. These emotional registers are analytically important, but they also present ethical challenges. As Iddrisu et al. (2025) argue, engaging with vulnerable or marginalized participants in sensitive research domains requires a reflexive ethical stance that balances the researcher’s need for insight with the participant’s right to emotional safety and control over their narrative.

These sensitivities became especially evident when interviewing the relatives of deceased project participants. In one instance, a deceased participant’s relative allowed me to view the photo albums, which included images of training sessions and public ceremonies under the GDWP. These visual archives were not just sources of data; they were objects of grief, memory, and pride. As such, they demanded a deeply empathetic research posture, consistent with the ethics of care framework increasingly advocated in qualitative inquiry (Ellis, 2007).

Tracing Dispersed Actors

A central challenge in researching defunct development projects is the difficulty of locating and reconnecting with the people and knowledge that once held the project together. When a project ends, its institutional structures often disappear: offices close, contact information becomes outdated, and staff and stakeholders disperse into new roles, organisations, or locations. This means the research process can no longer rely on stable field sites or accessible archives. Instead, it becomes an exercise in reconstructing relationships and reassembling narratives that have been scattered over time and space.

The GDWP case illustrates this shift clearly. Because the programme was no longer operational, former staff and partners were dispersed across multiple institutions and districts, and reconstructing the project’s story required moving beyond fixed locations to follow people themselves. Fieldwork involved travelling to different parts of the country to reconnect with key actors. This approach aligns with what some scholars refer to as trace interviewing, a strategy that reconstructs project histories by following individuals across time, geography, and institutional changes. However, rather than relying solely on digital records, this research depended on more direct, embodied methods: snowballing through contacts, conducting field-based inquiries, and tapping into informal networks of current government staff who still held partial memories of the GDWP. Such methods become essential when little formal documentation or institutional memory remains. They allow the researcher to piece together fragments of information and understand how projects continue to live on in the experiences, recollections, and movements of those once involved, even long after their official closure.

These encounters, often taking place in unexpected settings, reflect the improvisation and flexibility required when conventional research infrastructures have dissolved. My attempt to engage a former official engaged in implementing the GDWP in the Ajumako Enyan Essiam district took an unexpected turn when the only means of engaging him physically was at a family funeral. Our exchange lasted for over an hour as he gave detailed information about the programme. However, approached for a follow-up, he declined. His reluctance to speak though not antagonistic was marked by discomfort and emotional distance.

Such silences are not absence but data. As Mauthner and Doucet (2003) argue, non-responses, refusals, or evasions in qualitative research must be read as socially situated practices. This moment reflects a “narrative of silence”, where individuals withdraw from research not due to disinterest, but because of reputational concerns, emotional fatigue, or ethical boundaries. In post-project settings, where evaluation rarely occurs and closure is informal, these refusals can signal unresolved tensions about failure and responsibility.

Memory, Recollection, and the Recovery of Institutional Narratives

Researching defunct development projects often means working with a form of evidence that is both powerful and precarious: memory. Retrospective fieldwork relies on recollections that are inevitably partial, selective, and shaped by present circumstances. Over time, memories decay, blend with other experiences, or become coloured by emotional and political considerations. In the case of the GDWP, these dynamics were evident throughout the research process: some participants conflated the programme with other donor development projects, while others struggled to recall key details such as timelines, objectives, or personnel.

To navigate these challenges, I employed multiple strategies to support and extend participants’ recollections. I used prompts such as recounting stories of specific programme activities to stimulate deeper memory. Revisiting physical sites associated with the GDWP, including kiosks provided to trainees or defunct training facilities, often elicited richer narratives and stronger emotional engagement. For example, a participant who initially provided only vague recollections was able to recall detailed interactions and training content once we visited a site together. Yet even with such techniques, some memories remained emotionally charged or politically sensitive, reflecting lingering ambivalence toward a project that had once been championed as a flagship intervention but ultimately ended prematurely.

Reconstructing the project’s story also required going beyond individual memory. Many original actors were no longer reachable, so I relied on current local government staff, who, though not directly involved in the GDWP, retained knowledge of its social footprint or had ties to former participants. In both Effutu and Ajumako Enyan Essiam districts, these informal networks initiated a snowballing process that led to interviews with ex-officials and beneficiaries who might otherwise have remained inaccessible. These interactions revealed that institutional memory often survives not in archives but in relationships, personal recollections, and community knowledge sources that are dispersed, dynamic, and vital for reconstructing the project’s afterlife.

Some of the most revealing insights emerged through embodied and sensory engagement with defunct project spaces. During a go-along visit with a former beneficiary to a disused palm oil mill built under the GDWP, the abandoned infrastructure, overgrown and derelict, triggered a cascade of memories: the initial training, the excitement of the opening, subsequent mismanagement, lack of maintenance, and eventual closure. None of these details had surfaced in earlier interviews. As Pink (2015) suggests, such sensory ethnography reveals that memory is not only spoken but also evoked through spatial and embodied experience. Even in decay, the mill functioned as a mnemonic device and a repository of unfulfilled aspirations, challenging the notion of development space as neutral or inert (De León, 2015).

This openness to field improvisation resonates with the argument that “failure” and deviation in fieldwork can themselves be productive. The erosion of spatial and institutional anchors demanded methodological flexibility, shifting interviews from formal to informal settings, adapting pacing and tone, and remaining open to emergent opportunities for engagement. Such adaptability proved essential for accessing participants and uncovering the layered ways in which projects persist materially, affectively, and narratively beyond their formal lifespan.

Engaging with physical artifacts and visual materials provided another powerful route into memory work. Several respondents shared personal photo albums containing images of training events, exhibitions, and study tours. Although originally kept as mementos, these images became narrative anchors, helping participants reconstruct sequences of events, recall institutional actors, and identify partner organisations. In some cases, participants’ narratives shifted and deepened as we reviewed the images together.

Secondary memory sources were equally valuable. A relative of a deceased participant allowed me to view her father’s photo albums, which included images of project ceremonies, workshops, and group visits. As we looked through the photographs, she recounted his hopes for the programme and his disappointment at its premature end. This encounter illustrates the methodological richness of family-held development memory and the relational ethics it requires: meaning is co-constructed in spaces shaped by mourning, pride, and inheritance (Ellis, 2007; Iddrisu et al., 2025). Importantly, these conversations revealed that the GDWP was not remembered only as a discrete development intervention but as part of a larger family and community history marked by both aspiration and loss.

Together, these strategies underscore the importance of methodological creativity when conventional data sources are absent. By combining memory prompts, snowballing techniques, embodied field encounters, sensory engagement, and the analysis of personal artifacts, it is possible to recover fragments of institutional memory and assemble a more nuanced understanding of projects that might otherwise remain obscured by their disappearance. Memory work, in this sense, is not merely a methodological necessity but a substantive lens through which to understand how development interventions continue to live on in narratives, silences, material residues, and affective landscapes long after they have formally ended.

Fragmented Documentation

The absence of comprehensive documentation is one of the most significant methodological obstacles in researching defunct development projects. Without complete project reports, formal records, or consistent accounts from participants, conventional forms of triangulation become difficult to sustain. In the GDWP case, official documentation was either incomplete or unavailable, and oral narratives were often fragmented or contradictory. To address this, I adopted what can be described as a multi-modal triangulation strategy, cross-checking accounts not only across different informants but also against a variety of alternative sources, including newspaper reports, online archived material from the ILO, local government records, and photographic evidence. This approach reflects what Kincheloe (2001) refers to as a bricolage in qualitative research: the construction of meaning from diverse, partial, and imperfect fragments.

An initial meeting with a key ILO official involved in overseeing the GDWP revealed the ephemeral nature of project archives. Despite the programme’s national significance, no structured repository of reports, evaluations, or planning documents could be retrieved. For some reason, I could not get access to the formal archive, if it ever existed, a phenomenon not uncommon in development practice where discontinuation often leads to institutional amnesia (Mosse, 2005).

It was in a more informal setting, a hotel in Winneba during a field visit, that the same official offered a richer, more reflective account of the project. Liberated from bureaucratic scripts, he candidly shared insights on donor pressures, administrative fatigue, frustrations and the unintended disintegration of decentralized structures. This encounter affirms what Ellis (2007) and Iddrisu et al. (2025) identify as the power of unstructured, relational interviews in eliciting emotionally resonant and ethically complex narratives. It also points to the importance of embracing off-stage settings in fieldwork, spaces not typically considered “research sites” but that nonetheless enable critical data generation (Goffman, 1959).

The fieldwork demanded not only a rethinking of space, but a reconfiguration of time. Tracing a former district administrator, now reassigned to Twifo Praso far away from the GDWP implementing districts, I found a wealth of programme-related materials, agenda notes and workshop outlines preserved not in an official database, but on his personal laptop. This instance echoes the insights of Dubois and Ford (2015) on trace interviews, where the movements and connections of individuals become the central organizing principle of research design.

Such moments challenge the ideal of institutional documentation and underscore the bricolage of development memory, where knowledge is held in fragments, personal archives, and partial recollections (Cleaver, 2012; Kincheloe, 2001). This encounter also suggests a methodological inversion: rather than searching for the project through documents, I found documents through people.

These methodological adaptations were not predetermined. Rather, they emerged as flexible responses to the realities of the field, where deviation from original research plans was not an anomaly but the norm. Approaching such deviations reflexively transformed them from potential setbacks into opportunities for deeper insight. This iterative and adaptive posture became essential to reconstructing the project’s history and understanding its broader social and institutional imprint.

Navigating Narrative Dissonance, Ethical Ambiguity, and Epistemological Shifts

Engaging with retrospective accounts of a defunct development project inevitably means confronting inconsistencies, contradictions, and shifting narratives. Participants’ recollections of the GDWP often diverged sharply. One former district officer described it as a model of participatory governance, while another dismissed it as “a donor formality” with little substantive follow-through. Similarly, a beneficiary who initially claimed to have received no support later recalled attending vocational training sessions and receiving a start-up kit. These discrepancies were not treated as data errors to be corrected but as meaningful expressions of evolving memory and affective interpretation (Ellis, 2007). Such dissonances offer valuable insights into how development interventions are remembered differently depending on individuals’ roles, locations, expectations, and subsequent experiences.

The accumulation of these encounters prompted a significant shift in the epistemological orientation of the research. Initially conceived as a retrospective assessment of GDWP’s outcomes, the project gradually evolved into what might be described as a memory ethnography, an approach that prioritises how interventions are remembered, reinterpreted, and sometimes mourned, rather than merely how they performed against predefined objectives. This shift allowed fragmented recollections, informal evidence, and emergent relationships to be treated not as inadequate substitutes for “hard” data, but as valuable knowledge forms in their own right.

Such repositioning aligns with broader calls in qualitative research to view silences, absences, and partial narratives not as methodological shortcomings but as analytically productive (Iddrisu et al., 2025; Mauthner & Doucet, 2003). It also underscores the methodological importance of humility, relational trust-building, and adaptability when researching the afterlives of development projects. In this sense, the study of a project’s aftermath becomes not merely a backward-looking exercise in evaluation but an exploration of how its meanings continue to evolve in memory, discourse, and lived experience long after its formal conclusion.

Conclusion: Rethinking Rigour Through the Study of What No Longer Exists

Studying defunct development projects requires more than creative field strategies. It demands a fundamental rethinking of how we conceptualise research objects, engage with absence, and produce knowledge in contexts shaped by institutional discontinuity. The methodological and epistemological lessons drawn from the Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP) extend beyond a single case study. They hold wider significance for qualitative researchers, development practitioners, and policy institutions concerned with how memory, failure, and silence shape the afterlives of interventions.

One of the most significant implications of this study is the need to broaden our understanding of what counts as data. In research on defunct initiatives, formal documentation is often inaccessible, incomplete, or non-existent. Yet data persist in non-traditional forms: recollections shared informally, photographs stored in personal archives, physical remnants such as kiosks or signposts, and even moments of silence or refusal. Embracing these fragments requires a bricolage approach (Cleaver, 2012; Kincheloe, 2001), in which researchers assemble meaning from diverse traces, oral narratives, embodied memories, and affective cues. Partiality and contradiction should not be seen as methodological flaws but as reflections of how institutional realities are lived, remembered, and contested.

These reflections intersect with ongoing debates about rigour and transparency in qualitative research. A dominant strand of methodological discourse driven by the so-called “crisis of reproducibility” and the push for open science has imposed pressures for standardisation, transparency, and replicability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Tracy, 2010). While valuable in some contexts, these criteria are often grounded in positivist epistemologies that are incompatible with interpretivist traditions, where knowledge is co-produced, situated, and deeply contextual. In response, qualitative scholars have proposed alternative criteria that foreground credibility, transferability, reflexivity, and ethical transparency (Mauthner & Doucet, 2003), while others have argued for approaches to openness that prioritise reflexive disclosure and methodological decision-making (Braun & Clarke, 2025; Pownall, 2025; Steltenpohl et al., 2023).

This study aligns with and extends these debates by showing how the methodological challenges of researching defunct projects: incomplete data, contested memory, institutional silence, and the erosion of archives can themselves become resources for redefining rigour. Rather than signs of weakness, these conditions reveal the value of methodological creativity, ethical reflexivity, and relational accountability. They invite us to view rigour not as a checklist of standardised procedures but as an evolving set of practices grounded in responsiveness, contextual sensitivity, and deep engagement with complexity. In doing so, this approach contributes to a broader epistemic conversation about values in social research, foregrounding humility, care, and accountability as integral components of methodological quality.

The temporal dimensions of post-project research also offer vital lessons. Defunct projects disrupt conventional fieldwork timelines, requiring historical reconstruction and temporal triangulation. Interviews may draw on events from a decade or more in the past, highlighting the enduring legacies of even short-lived interventions (Li, 2007; Mosse, 2005). Future research must therefore attend not only to what remains materially, but also to how the past continues to shape the present through memory, infrastructure, and institutional discourse.

For practitioners and policy institutions, these findings raise critical questions about institutional memory, project closure, and accountability. The lack of comprehensive documentation in the GDWP case was not merely an oversight but symptomatic of a broader development culture that prioritises forward-looking narratives over retrospective learning. As Ferguson (1994) notes, the development industry often disavows failure, narrating transitions rather than collapses, a “politics of forgetting” that conceals crucial lessons about sustainability, participation, and institutional ownership. Integrating structured exit strategies, robust archiving practices, and post-closure ethnographies into project design could support more honest and contextually grounded evaluations. Development agencies must recognise that what happens after a project ends are not peripheral, it is often where the true legacy of an intervention is realised.

Finally, the study of defunct projects highlights the importance of relational ethics, modes of engagement that emphasise attentiveness, adaptability, and care. Researchers must navigate refusals, grief, and disappointment, honouring silences as well as speech, and approaching each interaction as a co-constructed encounter shaped by power, emotion, and memory. These ethical commitments extend beyond development studies to any field grappling with institutional loss, community disruption, or historical trauma.

Perhaps the most important implication is epistemological. Development research has long privileged what is visible, operational, and ongoing. Yet, as this study demonstrates, there is profound analytical value in studying what no longer exists. Defunct projects illuminate institutional fragility, contested legitimacy, and the social life of interventions beyond their official timelines. By treating them as legitimate objects of inquiry, researchers open up new questions: How are development interventions remembered and narrated? What traces do they leave in institutions, communities, and families? How is “failure” processed, hidden, or reinterpreted?

Answering these questions demands new sensibilities, ones that embrace the fragmentary, the affective, and the informal as valid sources of knowledge. In doing so, qualitative researchers can contribute to more grounded, reflexive, and historically attuned understandings of how development unfolds and unravels over time.

Ultimately, this paper argues for the necessity of studying what no longer exists, not as an afterthought, but as a central methodological and epistemological project. It calls for the normalisation of post-project research, the redefinition of rigour on qualitative terms, and the recognition that absence, silence, and memory are not obstacles but opportunities. These insights reaffirm the place of qualitative scholarship in contemporary debates about research quality not as an outlier to be justified, but as a vital tradition with its own rigorous standards and critical interventions. By embracing methodological creativity, ethical reflexivity, and epistemic humility, researchers can expand the horizons of qualitative inquiry and deepen our collective understanding of development’s enduring legacies.