The Janus face of development brokers across migration borders

Employing an ethnographic approach, I analyse the agentive practices of a codevelopment project named Africoop, showing how it navigates the migration-development field by blending egalitarianism rights-based concerns with hierarchical political authority, foregrounding economic neoliberalism and translating development. Africoop advocated for migrants rights and opened up opportunities for social mobility and also reproduced gender asymmetries and power relations among Italian donors and Ghanaian recipients. By examining the organisational level of brokerage and the career trajectories of the main leaders, I unravel how social nets, aspirations and biographical paths are interwoven to reconfigure the brokers' representativeness and accountability across migration borders.