Studying What No Longer Exists: Methodological Reflections on Researching Defunct Development Projects

This article explores the methodological and epistemological challenges of studying defunct development projects, development projects that have ceased implementation, lost visibility, or quietly disappeared from institutional discourse. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with the Ghana Decent Work Programme (GDWP), a collaborative development project between the International Labour Organization and the Government of Ghana, the paper reflects on reconstructing a project’s narrative and legacy in the absence of centralized records, active personnel, or formal evaluation. It demonstrates how institutional memory can be traced through interviews, personal archives, spatial remnants, and informal networks, and how narrative inconsistencies, silence, and affective memory become central features of post-project inquiry. The paper documents how the researcher navigated fragmented data, ethical tensions, and improvised encounters to build an account of the GDWP. It argues that studying what no longer exists expands the methodological repertoire of qualitative research, offering critical insights into institutional fragility, participatory breakdown, and the politics of remembering and forgetting development.