Translocal Development: Italy-Senegal

‘Translocal development’ refers to policies of coopération décentralisée, which decentralise aid practices to institutions below the level of the state, especially local authorities, and stress the importance of involving institutions in both North and South so that all are jointly engaged in an enterprise of codéveloppement. Our specific concern is with projects which include transnational migrants and their associations, and we examine how they might provide space for migrant workers to integrate their own (often prior) independent, individual and collective development initiatives with those of national and local governmental and nongovernmental agencies. This has been widely discussed in France under such headlines as ‘immigrants develop their country’, but hardly mentioned elsewhere. The case studies of Senegalese migrants in Italy, who embarked on micro-development projects aimed at their country of origin, lead us to emphasise the practical difficulties facing the implementation of such policies, and the complex (micro and macro) politics in which they are embroiled.