Ulrich Schiefer (born September 10, 1952, in Lauffen am Neckar) is a German rural and development sociologist and anthropologist.
After his Magister degree in sociology (1977) on Agricultural cooperatives in the People's Republic of China, he worked as a United Nations volunteer in urban and regional planning in Guinea-Bissau.
On his return, he studied the establishment of colonial commercial and administrative structures and their transformation in the post-colonial period in Guinea-Bissau for his Doctorate (PhD) (1984).
[1] In 2000, he obtained his Habilitation (state doctorate) in Münster on " Dissipative Economy: Development Cooperation and the Collapse of African Agrarian Societies“.
He carried out field research in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Angola and supported the introduction of the planning and evaluation methodology he developed in the successor states of the former Soviet Union as well as in Portugal.
Given the obvious failures of both theory and practice of development cooperation, based on the terminology and inspired by the work of Ilya Prigogines, Schiefer conceived the concept of "dissipative economy".
Meticulous studies show the destructive and often irreversible effects of the international development policy, mainly based on technology transfer, on agrarian societies.
The consequences are: decline in productivity, food crises, rapid urbanisation, political instability, forced migrations and violent conflicts which provide the background for post-colonial state failures and social disintegration in sub-Saharan Africa.
It describes the interactions between the development agencies and the respective national elites and their connection to the internal dynamics of African societies.
Together with Marina Padrão Temudo, he introduced the concept of resilience[29] into the debate on the disintegration and destruction of African agrarian societies.
Since 2008, he and Ana Larcher Carvalho have been conducting research on the link between development policy, migration and Food security.
This system, based on a participatory approach, allows for the operational integration of evaluation and planning and provides an alternative to the Project cycle management criticised by Schiefer.