Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2025.017

Who Pays, Rules: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Development Labor Market in Lebanon

Layla Bartheldi ORCID...
Fakulta sociálních věd, Univerzita Karlova, Praha

Critical postdevelopment literature has long been describing the development sector as inefficient, primarily criticising its inability to achieve its own long-term goals, such as ending global poverty and reducing inequalities. Ethnographic research on contemporary development practices provides a nuanced understanding of inefficiency by revealing unintended consequences that extend beyond official project documentation. As well as assessing inefficiency, this research highlights how the development sector inadvertently fosters a stable labour market for middle-class professionals. Members of this socioeconomic group most often hold positions as project coordinators, whose task is to translate project directives into the field and negotiate the challenges encountered in implementation. This paper, drawing on data from long-term ethnographic research, analyses a ‘Cash for Work’ project targeting small-scale farmers in northern Lebanon. The project seeks to establish a short-term labour market in a designated crisis zone identified as requiring intervention. The study examines the project\'s employment structure and shows that, unlike the other participants, the project’s coordinators have stable and financially lucrative employment. The study also examines the coordinators’ intermediary role, highlighting their function as key mediators between aid recipients and donors. The study investigates how the coordinators navigate the tensions inherent in their roles and the challenges of fieldwork and asks what strategies they develop to manage these complexities.

Keywords: development, postdevelopment, efficiency, Lebanon, agriculture, labour market

Received: February 16, 2024; Revised: May 26, 2025; Accepted: May 30, 2025; Prepublished online: June 23, 2025 

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