International organisations, migrants' associations, and economic actors as well as state institutions participate in the arena of the migration-development nexus. Each of these actors talks about diaspora, but what connotation are they ascribing to the term? Through the ethnographic lens of a co-development project named Ghanacoop, this article analyses, on the one hand, the emergence of new forms of political participation on the part of migrant groups in Italy and, on the other hand, the depoliticisation of development. Looking at Ghanacoop, which has become an important broker of development between Italy and Ghana, the article demonstrates how diaspora and development discourses are translated and enacted, allowing a new social and economic body such as Ghanacoop, to depoliticise development, thus becoming a political actor in the receiving countries as well as at transnational level. Lastly, following Bourdieu's notion of capital transformation, I will reveal how Ghanacoop leaders, by intertwining development discourses and cultural codes, social context peculiarities and the entrepreneurial idiom, paradoxically became new political actors in Italy and ‘big men’ in Ghana.
