My book manuscript, tentatively titled Bootstrapping Transnational Community Development: Dominican Hometown Associations and their Boundless Pursuit of Projects, examines collective grassroots projects carried out by migrants and their counterparts back home as a window into how community development takes place across borders. Although hometown associations (HTAs) are widely known for taking on projects geared towards improving economic, social and political opportunities for community residents, primarily in migrant-sending towns, their ability to successfully execute and sustain local development projects varies significantly. Based on six years of multi sited ethnographic fieldwork in the southern region of the Dominican Republic, New York City and Boston, I find that the variations stem primarily from the strategies they employ to decide on projects and the methods of achieving them, both within organizational structures and with diverse state actors. My research shows that HTAs are able to succeed at transnational community development when they pursue complex projects that help build cross-border cooperation, coproduction capabilities, and encourage the search for creative responses to unforeseen obstacles.
Focusing on three Dominican HTAs, Bootstrapping Transnational Community Development examines how the development experiences of the towns and organizations under study are influenced by the kinds of projects they choose to carry out. It also focuses on the structural characteristics and sequencing of projects to understand how they’re executed, the factors that lead to successes and failures, and how innovative development pathways are built.
Given that most of the scholarly attention on the migration-development nexus has focused on studying who moves, financial remittances flows and their effects, discussions have centered on measuring how much development occurs. These discussions come at the expense of a more critical examination of what kinds of development processes emerge in communities impacted by the transnational movement of people, money and ideas. Bootstrapping Transnational Community Development moves away from conventional analytical approaches that privilege economistic understandings and metrics, and pays closer attention to the political and social dimensions of HTA endeavors.