Adventures in Aidland

The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development

David Mosse, David Mosse

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857451118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development's discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about 'pure' and 'applied' anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The Anthropology of Expertise and Professionals in International Development

David Mosse

This is a book about experts and professionals in the world of international development. It brings together ethnographic work on the knowledge practices of communities of development advisors, consultants, policy makers, aid administrators and managers – those involved in the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction. Recently, anthropological interest in contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to professional fields as diverse as global science research (Fairhead and Leach 2003), international law (Riles 2001), finance (Riles 2004, Miyazaki and Riles 2005, Holmes and Marcus 2005, Maurer 2005), accounting and audit (Power 1997, Strathern 2000), academic research and its funding (Brenneis 1994) and journalism (Hannerz 2004, Boyer and Hannerz 2006). Anthropology’s encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others (Ferguson 1997). This invites reflection on the relationship between policy making and anthropological knowledge. After all, as Maia Green notes in Chapter 2, both share a concern with categorization and social ordering, but ‘[w]hereas anthropology interrogates categorical constructions with a view to disassembling and hence render meaning explicit, policy makers are concerned with reassembling and reconstruction’ (this volume); they aim to alter social ordering, not just to interpret it, and to effect such transformations through the channelling of resources.

The anthropological critique of development initially began by dichotomizing the programmer’s ‘world-ordering’ knowledge and the indigenous knowledge that it dismissed while pointing to the ignorance and incompatibility involved in development encounters (Hobart 1993). However, the closer ethnography got to development practices, the harder it was to sustain the distinction. Attention shifted to dynamic knowledge interfaces and battlefields (Long and Long 1992), and to frontline workers in development who participated in apparently incommensurate rationalities, skilfully translating between them, but only ever being partly enrolled onto the outside planners’ projects (Long 1992, Lewis and Mosse 2006). But little attention was given to the knowledge practices at the top, which were commonly dismissed as ahistorical and depoliticizing managerial prescriptions that were inherently repressive or governmentalizing, being oriented towards the reproduction of power and knowledge hierarchies and stabilising boundaries around development professionals and those subject to development (Long 2001: 340).

This not only disabled anthropologists’ own engagement with visions of the future, social reconstruction or the connection to people’s capacities to aspire (Green, this volume, Appadurai 2004, cf. Quarles van Ufford et al. 2003), it also diverted attention from the knowledge producers themselves, anthropologists among them. One problem is that in anthropological hands, policy discourse is disembedded from the expert communities that generate, organize (or are organized by) its ideas. The products of the policy process, visible as documents, are privileged over the processes that create them (e.g., Escobar 1995); whereas documents can better be seen as sets of relations (Smith 2006). Consequently, the rich literature on the intended and unintended effects of development interventions on populations, regions and communities is hardly matched by accounts of the internal dynamics of development’s ‘regimes of truth’ or of the production of professional identities, disciplines and the interrelation of policy ideas, institutions and networks of knowledge workers who serve the development industry.

This book is about life within what Raymond Apthorpe (Chapter 10) refers to as Aidland. Its chapters constitute ‘aidnography’ that ‘explores the “representations collectives” by which Aidmen and Aidwomen say they order and understand their world and work’. The book closes with Apthorpe’s lighthearted allegorical pondering on the adventures of Alice in Aidland, a mysterious world in which she finds places-that-are-not-places, non-geographical geography, undemographical demography, uneconomics and history made from policy design. In Aidland’s political mathematics ‘doubling’ aid will ‘halve’ poverty, but its morality is that of the return gift, accruing larger benefits at home, protected by Aidland’s ‘firewalls against accountability’. Why, Apthorpe asks, ‘does the bubble that is Aidland not burst?’ Other chapters in this volume offer versions of an answer which remind us that Aidland may look like another planet, but its reality is not virtual. ‘The perpetuating institutions and “mechanisms” involved lie in the distinctly unvirtual Realpolitik of states, inter-state organizations, and international non-governmental organizations’ (Apthorpe, Chapter 10 this volume).

The broad questions implied in Apthorpe’s hyperbolic satirical sketch are how does international development produce ‘expertise’ and how does such knowledge work within the global aid system? This opening chapter provides the context for a discussion of such questions about expertise and professionalism, first by identifying recent policy trends within the aid industry; second, by setting out some different approaches to the study of expert knowledge; and third, by turning to the identity and social world of border-crossing professionals themselves. The chapter sets out an overall argument presented by the book as a whole. This concerns, first, the way in which extraordinary power is invested in ‘global’ policy ideas, models or frameworks that will travel and effect economic, social and (within a ‘governance agenda’) political transformation across the globe and, second, the way in which, in reality, policy ideas are never free from social contexts. They begin in social relations in institutions and expert communities, travel with undisclosed baggage and get unravelled as they are translated into the different interests of social/institutional worlds and local politics in ways that generate complex and unintended effects. And yet, in addition, the work of professionals of all kinds is precisely to establish (against experience) the notion that social and technical change can be and is brought about by generalizable policy ideas, and that ‘global knowledge’ produced by international organizations occupies a transcendent realm ‘standing above’ particular contexts (cf. Mitchell 2002), and a globalized ‘present’ that compresses historical time.¹ Such notions of scale and temporality are also constitutive of professional identities in development.

Finally, this introduction raises some important problems of method for anthropology. These arise from the authors’ concern with process rather than product, their interest in understanding international knowledge making, rather than debating policy ideas, and by the ethnographic engagement with expert informants that this involves.

‘Travelling Rationalities’

Perhaps never before has so much been made of the power of ideas, right theory or good policy in solving the problems of global poverty. There is today unprecedented expert consensus on how global poverty is to be eliminated and the poor governed, brought about by new processes of aid ‘harmonization’ or ‘alignment’.² Meanwhile, an emphasis on partnership, consultation and local ownership set the ideological conditions for aid such that aid agencies claim they no longer make interventions at all, but rather support the conditions within which development can happen (Wrangham 2006). At the same time, a growing demand for domestic and transnational accountability and transparency of aid signals a distrust of expert knowledge, even though the ‘accountability tools’ and arrangements put in place in fact further entrench expertise (Boström and Garsten 2008a).³

Between global expert consensus and citizen participation, much disappears from view: the institutional conditions of global policy thinking at the point of origin; the enclave agencies and expert communities involved in the unseen processes of international transmission; and the political processes and institutional interests which interpret and transform global policy at its points of reception. I will return to this ethnographic agenda but, first, what are the characteristics of the new expert consensus?

At the centre of the consensus is a marrying of orthodox neoliberalism and a new institutionalism, the latter being the notion that poverty and violence are the result of bad governance and what is needed are stronger institutions, or example, institutions for the delivery of services accountable to the poor (Craig and Porter 2006: 4–5). This is not a return to state provision but a matter of giving resources to governments to make markets work so as to reduce poverty (Fine 2006) or, as Craig and Porter put it, disaggregating and marketizing the state, that is, breaking up existing forms of state rule (dismissed as corrupt or patrimonial) and then ‘using markets to replace and reconstruct the institutions of governance’ (2006: 9, 100), while at the same time re-embedding markets in regulatory and constitutional frameworks such as the rule of law or freedom of information.

It is the characteristics of policymaking relating to ‘neoliberal institutionalism’, not the details, that are relevant here. First, the process involves what Craig and Porter (2006) refer to as ‘vertical disaggregation’: the delegation upwards of rule making and policy framing from poor country governments to the international stage, international agencies, private organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or companies; and the delegation downwards of risk to ‘responsibilized’ regions, localities, communities and ultimately individuals. Second, the policy models involved are formalistic, that is, framed by the universal logic of new institutional economics (rules/incentives) and law (rights/accountability/transparency). These are ‘travelling rationalities’ with general applicability in which ‘the universal [is asserted] over the particular, the travelled over the placed, the technical over the political, and the formal over the substantive’ (Craig and Porter 2006: 120), in which (as both Eyben’s and Rajak and Stirrat’s chapters – Chapters 7 and 8 in this volume – will point out) processes take over from places and categories from relations.

This is relevant for our understanding of expertise. The combination of formalism and internationalization (‘delegation upwards’) allows a technicalization of policy and the centralization of expertise. This enhances the status of a certain transnational class of experts entrenched at the national level in ways that involve unprecedented convergence (Woods 2006: 66, 67, 68). Development policy trends of the 1980s in particular demanded high levels of expertise and produced economic models that were rapidly internationalized, often in the context of crisis or uncertainty (2006: 66–67). Economics retained its pre-eminence as the diagnostic and rulemaking discipline of Aidland (ibid.).⁴

Then, the linking of formalism and ‘delegation downwards’ extends (quasi-) formal modelling from national economies to the intimate spaces of communities, bringing new interest in re-engineering institutions and state-citizen relations by changing incentive structures, modifying rules, introducing new forums for accountability or conflict resolution, or local competitive bidding for resources (e.g., Barron et al. 2006); in short, an interest in ‘get[ing] social relations right’ (as Woolcock, cited by Li, Chapter 3 in this volume, puts it). In Chapter 3, Tania Li shows how this, in turn, requires new forms of expertise and the deployment of social science (including ethnography) ‘to render society technical’, that is, conceived in terms of calculative rationality, neoliberal ideas of self-organization or the deficits/surpluses of social capital, so as to allow expert-designed interventions (see also Li 2007). Taking the case of a very large World Bank ‘community-driven development’ programme in Indonesia, Li shows how ethnographic description is used to identify norms, social practices and incentives for such ‘remedial interventions’. Here she understands ‘social development’ as a neoliberal governmental assemblage in which communities come to govern themselves in line with designs shaped by expert conceptions of society that allow economic and political structures to remain unaltered.

The point is that with such moves of decentralization and participation, expert knowledge does not work to impose universal modernist designs from the centre (the usual critique of technocratic knowledge, e.g., Scott 1998), but rather to disembed and recombine local institutions, processes or technologies. Through participation in expert designs for farming, microplanning or resocialization, citizens themselves become ‘expert’ at rationalizing – disembedding and recombining – elements of their own institutions or socio-ecologies, and acquire a new technical (disembedded) view of themselves and of processes of social or ecological change. Compliant citizens become ‘empowered’ by expert knowledge or, as Arun Agrawal (2005) recently argued in the case of Indian forest protection, their subjectivities are shaped by participation in formal institutions.⁵

Expert Models Unravelled

Ultimately, however, institutions or technologies (national or local) fashioned by expert techniques come to be re-embedded in relations of power that alter their functionality, as is plain from recent ethnographies of neoliberal reform. Gerhard Anders’ (2005) study of the life of civil servants in Malawi under the shadow of ‘good governance’ reform is a good recent example, showing how expert models of public sector reform did not enhance efficiency and transparency, but rather revealed faults and fissures, fragmenting the civil service and intensifying internal divisions within a professional hierarchy (e.g., between winners and losers, young economists and ‘old school’ officials). Anders’ work is part of a literature describing the many and unpredictable ways in which development’s ‘travelling rationalities’ (and technologies) get translated (back) into local social and political arrangements – perhaps through the interests of local collaborators, official counterparts or brokers – with unanticipated, maybe even perverse effects sometimes exacerbating the crises they claim to address. A retired Malawian Principal Secretary told Anders of his experience in government negotiating teams of feeling ‘outmatched and overwhelmed by the “expert knowledge” of World Bank delegates’, but equally of being bewildered by their ‘lack of insight into local conditions and their arrogant belief in the market’. However, rather than challenge unrealistic models, government representatives adopted a ‘sign first, decide later’ approach (Anders 2005: 83–84). The reform agenda is subsequently ignored and is subjected to delaying tactics and reversals, for example, when bureaucratic patrons rehire client employees following public sector reform retrenchment exercises.

In their recent book, Craig and Porter (2006) show more broadly how local power easily colonizes the spaces created by national poverty reduction strategy (PRS) programmes, turning new rules to different ends. Their careful case studies from Vietnam, Uganda, Pakistan and New Zealand show that donor-established liberal frameworks of governance (under PRS) are incapable of disciplining existing power. Instead they have the effect of pulling ‘a thin institutionalist veil over fundamental (often territorial) aspects of poverty, and making frail compromises with territorial governance around community, local partnership and some kinds of decentralization’ (2006: 27). They disabuse the formalist ‘delusion that agency can be incentivized to operate independently of political economy’ (2006: 11, 120) or that political orders can be reorganized by international policy or aid flows (cf. Booth 2005). In these cases, the effects of policy and expertise are real enough, but the point is that they do not arise from pre-formed designs imposed from outside, or from their own logic, but are brought through the rupture and contradictions they effect in existing social, political and ecological systems and their logics (Mitchell 2002: 77; cf. Mosse 20...