Fixing the African State

Community-based development' (CBD) or'community-driven development' (CDD) has been the predominant approach to international development in recent years. Drawing on fieldwork and first-hand experience, this book explains why CBD/CDD produces outcomes that are incompatible with its underlying assumptions and intended objectives.

'In this carefully researched and compelling account, Brian Dill confronts the mantra of community participation with the limits of community-based service delivery in Tanzania. This will be required reading on the African state and the politics of development in contemporary urban Africa.' - Claire Mercer, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

'Brian Dill's Fixing the African State is a long overdue and refreshingly unsentimental account of the rise of community-based organizations (CBOs) in Tanzania. Dill's fair and even-handed report documents the legitimate contributions of CBOs, but leaves no doubt that they are boxed in by an African state that is just as pathological as ever. Anyone who intends to go to a slum in the global South to teach people to help themselves needs to read this book first.' - Samuel Cohn, Professor, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University, USA

'This beautifully written and profoundly disturbing book embodies a significant advance in our understanding of processes of urban social change in Africa. Dill's sustained ethnography has enabled him to re-conceptualize an era of ideas and funding about development, opening potential new directions for political action and more effective and equitable social practice in the future.' - Ben Crow, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of California-Santa Cruz, USA

Brian Dill is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.