‘We’ll Help Ourselves, but What’s in It for Us?’ Conflict, Development and Social Mobility among Roma in Romania

Abstract

Abstract Roma-related development and policy discourse often represents the Roma development ‘subjects’ as disempowered victims. Against the pervasiveness of such narratives, a close look at the local level conflicts arising during the implementation of a World Bank development project in destitute Roma communities from Romania lays bare the strategies of unassisted social mobility in which a group of Roma engage. Not large or well-defined enough to be constituted into a real ‘class’ in sociological terms, this strategic group is made up of Roma civil servants (mediators, local experts, Romani language teachers) who negotiate their engagement in development projects on their own terms and use the material and immaterial resources that projects offer to enact their own upward social mobility. Often, though, this comes at the cost of a growing socio-economic gap between themselves and the most destitute parts of Roma communities, which complicates their involvement in development projects. The article underlines the necessity of taking into account both the strategies of unassisted social mobility of Roma development brokers, and the internal power imbalances that the development apparatus inevitably ends up producing in Roma communities.