Irrigation Infrastructure, Technocratic Faith, and Irregularities of Vision: Canada's Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in Ghana, 1965–1970 (2019)
Between 1965 and 1970, Canada's Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) took on an international development project in the newly independent African nation of Ghana. The PFRA was an agency of the federal government responsible for driving mid-twentieth-century agricultural adjustment on the Canadian prairies. This paper explores how the PFRA's technical experts conceptualized and experienced their involvement in the development of irrigation projects in northern Ghana, both in early optimistic moments and in the face of mounting challenges. I examine the strategies through which PFRA experts sought to manage unfamiliar professional contexts and, along with the families that traveled with them, to adjust to changed personal circumstances. Challenges ensued largely from the PFRA's failure to adequately grasp the environmental and cultural circumstances in which it operated, and these ultimately contributed to the agency's decision to abandon the project. Left in the PFRA's wake was a changed landscape defined in part by exacerbated risk of endemic disease. By examining PFRA efforts in northern Ghana, I demonstrate how a broad analytical approach—one that documents and contextualizes the irregularities of vision characteristic of what Michael Latham has called technocratic faith—contributes to nuanced understandings of international development processes.
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