This paper looks at the concept of development through a case-study of the formation of agricultural advisory services in the post-Soviet post-conflict Tajikistan. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the civil war in Tajikistan, knowledge available to farmers can be described as a mix of traces and fragments originating from the Soviet agricultural and educational system represented by universities, research institutes and academies of science, on the one hand, and Western-style knowledge, mainly introduced by development agencies, on the other. Donors are relatively new actors in the field of knowledge dissemination, but they are nevertheless very important ones. Under the 'development' framework, i.e. rhetorical, organisational and infrastructural development, different donors play their own parts, some of them geo-political. At the same time they provide support for the functioning of local NGOs and are used by Tajik political actors for their own purposes.
