Producing entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka's post-tsunami economy: re-thinking the relationships between aid, knowledge and power

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction and operation of the discourse and accompanying practices of entrepreneur development after the Asian tsunami of 26 December 2004 in Sri Lanka. Entrepreneur development formed the core of aid agencies' strategies to rehabilitate livelihoods after the tsunami. Based on a year-long research project in 2005 that included ethnographic and survey components, I analyze the process through which aid agencies converged on entrepreneur development as the answer to livelihoods rehabilitation, an approach that failed to produce a corresponding reduction in poverty and economic insecurity. I also study the reasons why poor people and the rural social movement Sarvodaya embraced this discourse. I argue that while entrepreneurship was perceived by aid groups to be a way out of poverty, poor people and Sarvodaya embraced it because they perceived self-employment as a path out of relations of patronage, and as an opportunity for building self-reliance. These differing rationales generated considerable challenges for Sarvodaya, as they attempted to work with larger aid groups. I conclude that aid agencies do exercise considerable power in the context of disasters, yet their discourses have staying power only in so far as they articulate with other processes shaping people's lives, livelihoods and ambitions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.