Future-making in Burkina Faso: ordering and materializing temporal relations in the Bagré Growth Pole Project

Abstract

Visions for the future drive current practices and shape daily lives. Recently, the future has also become a ubiquitous theme in the social sciences. Starting from the observation that the future serves as an explanation and legitimization for the doings and sayings of different groups of actors involved in the Bagré Growth Pole Project in Burkina Faso, this paper offers an analysis of two instantiations of future-making. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso, I examine how the future is addressed and made by ordering and materializing temporal relations. In the first part, I focus on how the past–present–future triad is constantly cut, the past blanked and the future prioritized. I argue that this imperative of the future serves to silence contestations and conflicts from which possibly alternative futures could be derived. In the second part, I turn to the material dimension of future-making through infrastructure construction and maintenance. Infrastructuring in Bagré permanently alters landscapes and creates “as-if” spaces, thereby producing path dependencies that will channel future possibilities of living in the area. Shedding light on how specific futures are (un)made in practice provides a lens which may inform discussions about alternative and eventually more just futures.