Development brokers and gatekeepers: Two critical figures of public policies tackling rural poverty in South Africa

Abstract

This paper studies the implementation of national public policies tackling rural poverty in South Africa and draws a parallel with international development aid public policies, stressing in particular one of their common predicaments, i.e. their relative ineffectiveness. Building on the key notion of "brokerage" in anthropology, and coupling it with the notion of "gatekeeping" derived from the political science literature, this paper demonstrates how much brokers strive to become hegemonic intermediaries within a very competitive brokerage environment. This paper questions the relations between new and pre-existing figures of brokerage, i.e. between an irrigation committee's governing board and village's traditional elites.