Abandoned pasts, disappearing futures: further reflections on multiple temporalities in studying non-governmental organisation worlds

This paper briefly draws together ideas from the work presented by other contributors to this special issue and outlines some additional themes particularly in relation to nongovernmental organisations, temporalities and changing frames of ‘development’. A focus on multiple temporalities invites us to explore understandings of how time is and how time is experienced. Brief suggestive comments are offered in relation to time and temporalities at different scales within the field of development in which nongovernmental organisations are located – the individual, the organisation and within wider policy processes. For the development non-governmental organisation, perhaps both the past and the future have become sources of anxiety. The past is experienced in the world of development practice as a murky place where failures can be hidden, where there is an unwillingness to learn lessons, but where glimmers of an idealised past can sometimes be discerned and on occasion, lamented. The future is a place that is promised, and on which present activities are premised, but which never arrives.