Botchway, Karl

Dr. Karl Botchway holds a PhD from the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, New School For Social Research, New York. He has taught at Kean University, New Jersey, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He worked as a Journalist in Ghana and was the recipient of the 1986 Promising Journalist of the Year Award. In 1987, he was awarded the Dag Hammarskjold Fellowship to cover the 46th General Assembly of the United Nations. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the New York City College of Technology, The City University of New York, where he specializes in the political economy of African Development.

Understanding

2004 0-7734-6224-4
In recent times, the development enterprise globally has incorporated into its vocabulary notions about “participation,” “empowerment” and “sustainability”. What do these concepts mean in practice? In this book, the author investigates an ambitious development project in the Northern Region of Ghana that talks of such a promise. The author problematizes the notion of development and studies development intervention as an arena of negotiations and struggle. The author makes the case that the institutionalization of these concepts is questionable when development interventions reflect a blindness to the wider socio-economic processes, which contributed to the need for development in the first place. This book will make an important contribution to methods of social research that enables us to best study and understand development interventions.