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From 1994 to 1997, a French NGO, GRET (Groupe de Recherche et d’Échanges Technologiques) implemented a rural electrification “project” in Mauritania whose “management” plans can with hindsight be associated with the ideological tendency for “good governance”. The first results of a series of anthropological surveys conducted since 2002 in Mauritania at the request of the AFD (French Development Agency, Agence Française pour le Développement) then of ADER (Agency for the Development of Rural Electrification, Agence du Développement de l’Électrification Rurale), both in the villages concerned and at institutional level, show that beneath many practices of the development professionals involved lies a desire to concretise a model of social organization that carries with it a fantasy of political intervention. Analysis of the kinds of resistance aroused by the “Alizés-Electric Project” opens up lines of research on the whole of the social field defined by “Development Aid”. It prompts questions on the structural concepts which underlie what is suggested to be termed “the benefits of development”.