The work that NGOs now do has undergone significant change since they came to
prominence as development actors in the 1980s. NGOs in Africa are shaped by a
development donor civil society template that provides the resources and the
training to produce a distinct sector made up of recognizable and formalized
organisations which are to be organised in country-wide networks to play
anticipated roles in pro-poor policy-making and holding government to account.
Realizing this template in the forms of organisations demands specific kinds of
work through which civil society comes to be enabled as an actor in
development. This work can be characterised as contracting, volunteering, and
scalar work. Civil society work demands the performance of certain
subjectivities amenable to interstitial positionality. Contracted cosmopolitanism
plays an important role in the constitution of civil society working and in the
differentiation of civil society actors from the communities which are the object
of their endeavour. This paper examines the scope and constitution of civil
society work in two rural districts in Tanzania.