Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development 9781978809000

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IMPLEMENTING IN­E QUALIT Y

IMPLEMENTING IN­E QUALIT Y The Invisible ­Labor of International Development

Rebecc a Wa rne Peter s

Rutger s Uni v er sit y P r ess

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peters, Rebecca Warne, author. Title: Implementing inequality : the invisible labor of international development / Rebecca Warne Peters. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019011049 | ISBN 9781978808966 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781978808973 | ISBN 9781978808980 | ISBN 9781978808997 Subjects: LCSH: Economic development—Angola. | Angola—Economic conditions—21st century. | Equality. | Globalization. Classification: LCC HC950.Z9 E444 2020 | DDC 338.9109673—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011049 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Warne Peters All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­rutgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

For David, Thomas, and Catherine

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

ix



Introduction

1

1

Development Hierarchies

17

2

Development’s Inputs and Outputs

38

3

Reinforcing Hierarchies: Monitoring and Evaluation

65

4

Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries

93

5

Partnership and the Development Praxiscape

120



Conclusion: Development without Borders

144

Appendix: GGAP Logical Framework (Logframe) 161 Acknowl­edgments 173 Notes 177 Bibliography 185 Index 195

vii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CBO CD CDC

community-­based organ­ization community development community development coordinator [coordenador de desenvolvimento comunitário] CDM municipal development coordinator [coordenador de desenvolvimento municipal] DLG Decentralization and Local Governance Programme FAS Social Fund [Fundo de Apoio Social] GEPE Office of Research, Planning, and Statistics [Gabinete de Estudos, Planeamento e Estatística] GGAP Good Governance in Angola Program GGL Good Governance in Luanda Proj­ect GTZ German Technical Cooperation Agency [Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit] ID international development ISCED Instituto Superior de Ciências de Educação do Huambo LFA logical framework analy­sis MA municipal administration MAT Ministry of Territorial Administration [Ministério da Administração Territorial at the time of the research; now the Ministério da Administração do Território e Reforma do Estado] MD municipal development M&E monitoring and evaluation MSF Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors without Borders] MDF municipal development fund MOU memorandum of understanding NGO nongovernmental organ­ization ODA Area Development Organ­ization [Organização de Desenvolvimento da Àrea] PIP Public Investment Program [Programa de Investimentos Públicos] RFA request for applications UNDP United Nations Development Programme USAID United States Agency for International Development ZOPP Goal-­Oriented Proj­ect Planning [Zielorientierte Projektplanung]

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Implement, n. 1. Any article or device used or needed in a given activity; tool, instrument, utensil, ­etc. 2. Any ­thing or person used as a means to some end. Implement, vt. 1. To carry into effect; fulfill; accomplish. 2. To provide the means for the carry­ing out of; give practical effect to. —­Webster’s New World Dictionary

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about international development work and development workers, particularly ­those engaged in implementation. It explains how development organ­izations see their work and their workers and how the development industry’s internal assessments could be improved upon in the interests of enhancing development outcomes. The research is driven by my deep re­spect for all ­those who work to improve ­others’ lives and by my concern that development interventions be as successful as pos­si­ble. The case study I draw on is the Good Governance in Angola Program, or the GGAP (pronounced JEE-­gap), implemented from 2007 to 2012 in selected Angolan provinces (see map in chap. 4).1 I followed the program in its earliest phases, using ethnographic methods to understand what it was like for GGAP staff members embarking on this democ­ ratization intervention in the first de­cade ­after the long Angolan civil war. At the time, Angola had only just experienced its first successful parliamentary elections and was struggling not to “rebuild” but, effectively, to build from scratch both the physical and po­liti­cal infrastructures of a peaceful, in­de­pen­dent country. It still strug­gles ­today. My contribution to reconstruction in Angola and beyond is to examine what logics, practices, and structures internal to the development industry itself can affect the success or failure of such endeavors. While many of Angola’s challenges are uniquely its own, the global structures of aid and intervention intended to assist that country and ­others like it also merit sustained examination lest they have unintended negative effects and certainly if they are to perform to their greatest potential (see also Autesserre 2010, 2014). The development work this book focuses on is the on-­the-­ground, everyday implementation of an international intervention in postwar Angola as it takes place among and between field staff, administration, and policy-­making professionals. Designing interventions, determining where they ­will be implemented, carry­ing them out with colleagues and beneficiaries, and tracking, evaluating, and reporting on them are all essential areas of daily development practice. Managing the ­people and organ­izations that do this work is another essential area of development practice, one rife with the “infrastructural vio­lence” (Crane 2016, citing Appel 2012) or even “structural stupidity” (Graeber 2015) of bureaucracy. 1

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Each task is undertaken by development professionals in moments of social intercourse—­they have conversations and arguments; they write, send, and read messages; they hatch and debate ideas; they seek out and interpret information; they decide among their options. Each and e­ very one of t­ hese is a social act, both requiring and being composed “of cooperation and competition, of solidarity and exploitation, or allying and betraying” (Ortner 1999, 23). Through ­these same acts, development agents also seek to accomplish their other, overlapping social goals—­ satisfying personal obligations like supporting ­family members through the instrumental means of their professional success, for instance. Everyday development is therefore doubly social in that agents pursue development ends through social means and, in ­these same actions, advance their own, privately relational proj­ects and goals.

Inside the Encounter: The Implementariat David Mosse (2005), among o­ thers, has previously detailed how the work of implementation field staff is deeply social: about building, maintaining, and making use of relationships with the local community members who are their intended beneficiaries (see also Goodman 2019). In the GGAP, however, it was field staff members’ relationships among their colleagues—­both their lateral peers and their hierarchical superiors—­that ­were of elemental concern to them, deeply impacting their relational work with beneficiaries. Members of the field staff working in provincial offices particularly fretted over how Luanda-­based administrative staff members saw them and understood their activities, and their social and relational work with beneficiaries was often dismissively misread by administrators as not-­work, as pre-­work, or as rote or physical, rather than intellectual, ­labor. The social and relational work of the administrative staff among their peers and colleagues both above and beneath them was more likely to be recognized and valued; however, it too was misunderstood, “suppressed rather than dramatized, just as the technical is emphasized” (Mosse 2005, 128). The social and relational work of administrators often substituted for rational, evidence-­based decision making without administrative staff recognizing that this was so. The operational challenges the GGAP faced largely originated in t­hese intrainstitutional relationships—­not the social interactions and relationships at the interface between development agents and recipients, commonly framed as “the development encounter” (e.g., Ferguson and Derman 2000; Peters 2000) but among the GGAP’s development professionals, themselves. This book considers t­ hese internal development encounters and their influence on interventions’ success or failure. The concept of encounter may actually work to obscure implementation agents, t­ hose lynchpin “­middle figures” of global intervention (Hunt 1999; Merry 2006), and so h­ ere I place them in central position for critical analy­sis. The broad

Introduction 3

concept of encounter presumes a meeting of two groups that would other­wise be separate from each other, “coming together from dif­fer­ent histories and for dif­fer­ ent reasons to accomplish a single task” (Ortner 1999, 17). Defined as such, international development intervention would at first seem an ideal fit for the concept, commonly ste­reo­typed as Northern aid professionals intervening to benefit Southern communities.2 Although such framing productively “emphasizes the intertwining and mutual production of the histories of the West and the Rest” (Ortner 1999, 17; see also Hall 1996 and Wolf 1982), such an approach also conceptually reinforces the artificial boundary between them, leaving groups and ­individuals who do not fit cleanly into one category or the other out of analytical reach. Consider, for instance, that among the roughly forty-­person staff of the GGAP, only two longtime members ­were expatriates—­citizens of another country coming to conduct development work in Angola. All of the other salaried, full-­time GGAP staff members w ­ ere themselves Angolan. Despite common ste­reo­types of international aid workers being white Eu­ro­pe­ans or North Americans, across the development and humanitarian response industries the vast majority of salaried employees are “national” staff members—­citizens employed by international organ­izations to carry out development programs in their own countries. It is not entirely clear which side of the “development encounter” they are on—­are they part of the global North ­because of their interventionist efforts, skills, training, or experience, or part of the global South ­because they are citizens of a developing country? Consider, too, that the GGAP’s two expatriate staff members ­were not white nor w ­ ere they citizens of a developed country—­both Osman, the program’s national director, and Shameem, its central grants officer, came from the same developing country in South Asia, having worked ­there as national staff members in international organ­izations and rising through the ranks to join the international cadre of development workers, as so many accomplished professionals now do (e.g., Roth 2015). As expatriates in Angola they ­were clearly development professionals from abroad, but they did not fit the ste­reo­typical image of the Western international aid professional. A large number of development workers—­and very many development tasks—­are easily overlooked or misunderstood if international development is thought of as a kind of “encounter” between ­those delivering aid and ­those receiving it. Too frequently that distinction is mapped erroneously onto global hierarchies of race and nation. As a remedy I examine the GGAP and, through the GGAP, international interventions more broadly, using work and work cohorts as an entry point, offering the analytical concept of the implementariat. The development implementariat is the class of development workers made up of t­hose rank-­and-­file staff members working in developing countries for international programs and organ­izations, wherever they may be from originally. They may make managerial decisions about intervention but are largely seen as responsible only

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to carry out the decisions of ­others—­donors, governments, policy makers. They are overwhelmingly field-­level staff working face to face with beneficiaries, but in-­ country man­ag­ers and administrators are also of the implementariat class. Th ­ ere are thus higher and lower statuses to be held, even within the implementariat—­ for instance, between a program’s in-­country administrators and its field staff, or between a program’s expatriate staff and its local staff.3 The defining feature of the implementariat is that this class of development workers is tasked to realize development plans and policies: “to give practical effect” to them, as in the dictionary definition found in the book’s epigraph, rather than to determine what they should be from the outset. The implementariat—­both national and expatriate staff members of development’s in-­country “field offices”—­has therefore roughly the same hierarchical relationship to the development industry’s central “means of production” that Marx identified as characteristically distinguishing the bourgeoisie from the proletariat in a cap­i­tal­ist society.4 If, in capitalism broadly conceived, the bourgeoisie maintains control over the industries, factories, policies, and plans of cap­i­tal­ist production and the proletariat is that group of workers engaged in production only through the exchange of ­labor for wages or salary and having l­ ittle control over t­ hose means of production, then within the development industry the relationship between its broad internal “classes” is roughly similar. Policy makers, analysts, con­sul­tants, and donors are international development’s bourgeoisie, maintaining control over what the industry w ­ ill do and what its trajectory w ­ ill be through their determination of programmatic goals and standards. Implementers then make up the laboring class: following o­ rders, carry­ing out plans, and putting into practice the policies and programs as assigned by industry elites. Their work in development may often be more skilled and more bureaucratic than Marx ­imagined for the laborers of industrialized capitalism, but in their lack of influence over the policies and plans they are tasked to implement, both within their organ­izations and across the wider industry, their relationship to the means of the development industry’s “production” is analogous. Looking closely at the implementariat effectively selects out what Bourdieu termed “the dominated fraction of the dominant class” (2010 [1984], 229 and 439). ­These workers are not volunteers hoping to attain full-­time employment by making the leap from beneficiary to local development worker (Maes 2012; Watkins and Swidler 2013, though see Englund 2006). They are no longer, if they ever w ­ ere, such hopefuls looking to break into the industry. They are development workers, full stop—­relatively well educated and fully employed as long as the program is funded and their work is found satisfactory. They almost always have more social and other kinds of capital than do their beneficiaries, though this line is blurry in a democ­ratization program like the GGAP, wherein officers of the local government are also a targeted group of beneficiaries (see ­later discussion). In comparison to most ordinary Angolans, members of the GGAP’s implementariat ­were

Introduction 5

privileged—­a clear part of the “dominant class” in a country with low literacy, low employment, and so on. Within the social field of development workers, however, they ­were the dominated—­tasked only to carry out the o­ rders of o­ thers and only contingently eligible for employment. Indeed, in larger Angolan society t­ hese workers ­were also dominated members of the dominant class as they w ­ ere not often part of the most privileged elite working in the government or private industry. Following Marx’s prescription to attend to the dialectical interplay between the social structures of, ­here, an industry and the actions and decisions of ­those working and living within t­ hose structures, my analy­sis of international interventions adopts a practice theory approach emphasizing, as Ortner explains (2006, 2), “the articulations between the practices of social actors ‘on the ground’ and the big ‘structures’ and ‘systems’ that both constrain t­ hose practices and yet are ultimately susceptible to being transformed by them.” The “practices” of development’s social actors consist of, on the one hand, the actions, be­hav­iors, and decisions of international development policy makers, and on the other hand, t­ hose of in-­country man­ag­ers, field agents, and recipients. Th ­ ese practices are constrained by the industry’s internal structures and the related global structures of national and racial in­equality, but they si­mul­ta­neously hold the potential to alter t­ hose constraints. Adopting the perspective of the implementariat suggests that the potential to change international development’s structures and systems in fact lies within the industry, rather than only in re­sis­tance to its structures and systems from below or outside it. A practice theory approach acknowledges how development professionals are themselves “subjects” of their industry. Most critical analyses of development would rightly point to the intended recipients of interventions as being subjectified by the industry and its institutions, but subjectification inside any ideological system envelopes all participants (see also Hodžić 2017). Consider Althusser’s classic “theoretical theatre” in which he explains the creation of a subject by an ideological state apparatus: he describes a policeman hailing a potential suspect by calling out “hey, you ­there!” at which “the hailed individual ­will turn round. By this mere one-­hundred-­and-­eighty-­degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject” through his be­hav­ior, as by turning he acknowledged the officer’s right to hail him (1971, 174). In Althusser’s exemplar, the interaction between the state’s agent and the citizen, based as it is on the knowledge and relational self-­ assessments of each party, results in the willed, participatory subjectification of the citizen to the ideology of the state, demonstrated in his appropriate response. Althusser emphasizes that ­there is no before and no ­after to the interpellation—­ the hailing—of the individual as a subject, as the “existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same ­thing” (175). The policeman in this theater, notably, has also been ­interpellated in the interaction as a dif­fer­ent kind of subject of the state and of i­ deology: as its agent

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acting appropriately in its interests and furthering ­those interests through his interactions with other ­people. As an agent of the state or a dif­fer­ent genre of ideological subject, to hail the suspect as described, to hail with more or less vigor or force, or to sometimes look the other way, are also practices that instantiate the larger ideological system, with impacts on the citizen hailed, the person of the officer himself, and any witnesses or bystanders too. In the international development industry, nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs) and their staff members are the most vis­i­ble institutions and agents “hailing” the intended recipients of development programming. That ­these NGOs are themselves hailed by donors, states, and peers is central to the internal dynamics of the industry. Th ­ ese development organ­izations are “ideological state apparatuses,” as Althusser terms the institutionalized accretion of power, practice, and imaginary that is characteristic of states and other influential structures, such as the church, the f­ amily, even systems of po­liti­cal belief or aesthetic taste (compare Trouillot 2003). Last, their agents are another kind of subject hailed—­hired, trained, deployed—by the institution and capable of accepting, altering, or rejecting such subjectification (Peters 2019b). In examining the articulation between development’s structures of institutional thought and organ­ization and development actors’ daily practices, this book contends that implementation work is consistently misrecognized and undervalued by the development industry as “mere” practice—­formulaic, rote, and mechanical—­rather than as the delicately social, po­liti­cal, and intellectual work that it is. Such misrecognition, Althusser asserts, is as essential to ideology as is recognition and, in international development, serves to reinforce hierarchical inequalities within the industry, wrongly relegating the implementariat and especially its lowest rung, its rank-­and-­file field agents, to a subordinate and inferior status in the industry.5 A central goal of the book is to describe how daily practices in development work—at all of its hierarchical levels and among all of its dif­fer­ent “classes”—­both produce the implementariat and deny it influence in the industry. The nature of the tasks undertaken by development actors, even the seemingly small and inconsequential ones, are often deeply, unavoidably social and creative endeavors with im­mense impact on the industry’s larger goals. Development implementation is centrally composed of social practices that institutions seldom recognize as consequential to their work, however. This misreading of the social at all levels of the industry reproduces inequalities even among development professionals and, inadvertently, prevents well-­intentioned interventions from realizing their goals. An analy­sis of development work using the concept of the implementariat can help identify and improve t­ hese dynamics. The utility of considering international development as a social field and examining the position of the implementariat within it is that the analy­sis becomes expressly relational. A social field is not, ­after all, an empirical object but “an analytical space defined by the interdependence of the entities that compose a struc-

Introduction 7

ture of positions among which t­here are power relations” (Hilgers and Mangez 2015, 5). In any social field, ­there are conditions of membership and claims to knowledge deemed more or less legitimate by ­those in the field. ­These politics of recognition in a social field shape its bound­aries and the actions of its members. Seen this way, development work is a “serious game”: a set of con­temporary ­human experiences seen as “some inextricably interwoven fabric of images and practices, concepts and actions in which history constructs both p­ eople and the games that they play, and in which p­ eople make history by enacting, reproducing, and transforming ­those games” (Ortner 1999, 23–24). For the social field of international development, the internal politics of (mis)recognition shaping actors’ be­hav­iors—­the “games” they are engaged in at work and throughout their ­careers—­have serious stakes indeed: nothing less than the industry’s ability to achieve its goals of social improvement and the eradication of global inequalities.

Implementation as Internal and External “Social Work” The GGAP intended to improve the participation of local communities in their own municipal-­level governance through three sets of activities. First, members of each GGAP field office w ­ ere seconded to municipal government offices to provide expertise in administrative theory and practice, particularly in bud­geting, proj­ect planning, and citizen engagement. Second, other members of each field office worked directly with local communities to create new community-­based organ­izations called ODAs (Organizações de Desenvolvimento da Àrea, or Area Development Organ­izations) to represent local needs and resources in discussions with municipal government officials. Last, the program brought the ODAs and other community members into structured contact with local government agents by organ­izing public events such as municipal forums. With ­these concerted activities and o­ thers, the GGAP intended to strengthen self-­governance and the citizen–­state relationship in selected Angolan municipalities, making them more demo­cratic. Most all of this work was deeply social and relational, w ­ hether conducted one-­on-­one between GGAP staff members and individual government officials or local community members as “beneficiaries,” or w ­ hether organ­izing public events in which, the GGAP staff hoped, the relationship between government agents and community members would be strengthened. Many of ­these work tasks and the goals of t­ hese activities can clearly be considered externally oriented—­GGAP staff members interacted with beneficiaries who ­were not their in-­house colleagues and sought to bring about their changed thinking and be­hav­ ior. In coordinating this external social work, however, the GGAP field staff also had to conduct a g­ reat deal of internal social work that usually went unnoticed and unsupported.

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Consider the events of a public forum held in December 2008 in Andulo, in Bié Province. The forum was the culmination of months of joint work between GGAP field staff, municipal government officers, and many local citizens to prepare proposals, reports, and pre­sen­ta­tions for the forum. Field staff members ­were enthusiastic about the forum and their broader democ­ratization work, but they purposefully stayed in the background at the daylong citizens’ engagement event itself. As development workers in a good governance intervention, their intention was not to make themselves the main attraction but for Andulo’s municipal administrators and local citizens to take center stage in the day’s activities. They did not stand idle, however, as even development’s “backstage” is a very busy place. On the day of the forum, GGAP staff drove community participants to the forum and readied the meeting hall. Throughout the day, they then fetched materials, recorded the proceedings, gathered data from participants, and offered refreshments. They translated between Umbundu and Portuguese for several attendees.6 They worried over how to pre­sent the events of the day to their supervisors in Luanda. Formally, the GGAP as a program, its parent NGOs, and their donors considered the Andulo forum successful, and a meaningful interventionist achievement. Though proud of their efforts during the hectic days of the forum and its preceding workshops, members of the Andulo field staff w ­ ere far more critical of ­these happenings than ­were their administrative superiors in Luanda. An im­mense amount of work, over many months, had gone into preparing the ODAs, meant to serve as structures and conduits of public participation in governance. For nearly two years, GGAP field staff had traveled to even the most remote communities of the large rural district, iteratively convening smaller public meetings, coaching dozens of ODAs through incorporation and officer elections and instructing them on how to lead their communities’ participatory elaboration of priorities in the postwar period. At the forum, the field staff had anticipated witnessing the results of this tedious, delicate work in the form of well-­evidenced requests from local communities to the municipal government officials pre­sent, and in thoughtful, committed responses from the government officials to the community. They came away disappointed. Paulo, the most experienced member of the Andulo team, thought the municipal administrator7 had prevented community groups from fully presenting their own opinions and conclusions. Though the staff broadly admired this administrator and they enjoyed working with her, they felt she had not fostered true “dialogue” in this meeting and had not been forthcoming with answers to the citizens’ direct, concrete questions.8 The GGAP staff fretted that members of the ODAs would be frustrated by this experience and, further, that ­these groups might consider their own work over the past many months wasted. Staff members ­were anxious to visit with the ODAs in the coming weeks to see how they

Introduction 9

had perceived the event and what news was traveling around about it. They ­were particularly concerned about ­whether or not the ODAs would agree to continue working with the GGAP ­after the way the forum had unfolded—­even ­whether the groups would remain intact. The field staff, ultimately, was concerned that the program’s democ­ratization goals had actually been threatened, rather than furthered, by the events of the forum. While the Bié field staff worried about the content of the public meeting and both its immediate and long-­term consequences, se­nior administrative staff in Luanda seemed to consider the forum and similar events successful simply b­ ecause they had happened at all; even more so if many ­people ­were in attendance (see also Schuller 2012, 42–45). Busy with administrative demands in the GGAP’s Luanda (headquarters) office, Osman, the program’s director, had not traveled to Andulo for this forum and was only seldom able to visit its provincial implementation sites. As director of the program across its several field sites, Osman relied on the implementation teams to keep him abreast of its pro­gress, accomplishments, and challenges through their periodic reporting of monitoring and evaluation data and through personal correspondence. He frequently interpreted the data and messages he received differently than did the field staff, however, partly ­because of his lack of familiarity with rural Angolan contexts and partly b­ ecause his institutional position demanded that he evaluate such information for dif­fer­ ent purposes than theirs. As the major conduit for programmatic information to be transmitted to the GGAP’s parent NGOs and its donors, his understandings became, de facto, the program’s self-­representation. ­There ­were no formal mechanisms for the field staff to communicate e­ ither the content of the forum or their concerns about it—or any other aspect of program implementation—­directly to donors, central government agencies, or their peers in other GGAP field sites. ­These disparate opinions about similar—­and even the very same—­events within one relatively small development program demand deeper examination of the structures and practices of the development industry itself as a “social field” “with its distribution of power and its monopolies, its strug­gles and strategies, interests and profits” (Bourdieu 1975, 19). On-­the-­ground implementation of programs like the GGAP requires two distinct sets of workers to collaborate, in a sense, as members of development’s social field. Field agents like Paulo and his colleagues conduct the delivery of a program face-­to-­face with beneficiaries in its targeted communities and are almost always “national” or “local” staff. In-­country administration staff is then made up of supervisors who, like Osman, rarely interact directly with beneficiaries but do carry managerial responsibility for the program’s health and effectiveness. They have traditionally been expatriates but are increasingly national staff. In the development industry, both sets of professionals are usually considered “field staff ” b­ ecause their work is based physically in a developing country. For my purposes, I reserve the term field staff

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for only t­hose professionals working face-­to-­face with beneficiaries and use the term administrative staff for in-­country professionals who bureaucratically manage program implementation within ­these development organ­izations. Together, as a group, field agents and in-­country administrators are the development implementariat.

Good Governance as “Development” in Angola Among the first international development interventions in Angola ­after the close of the long civil war, the GGAP was funded by the Western bilateral aid agency I call WestAid with contributions from an oil com­pany and a diamond com­pany. It was implemented in two phases through the collaborative efforts of three large international NGOs—­one American, one British, and one Canadian—­with two main, complementary objectives.9 The first was to work directly with local government employees as themselves a class of program beneficiary to improve their administrative practices, the idea being that “good governance” must have something to do with the competencies and approaches of government officials. To this end, a member of the GGAP field staff was seconded to municipal government offices in each site to act as a trainer or, better, a “coach” on ­matters of bud­ get preparation, computer literacy, accountability and transparency mea­sures, and citizen-­engagement practices. In the second objective of the program, dif­fer­ent staff members worked directly with local citizens to improve civic participation. These staff members or­ga­nized the new community groups called ODAs—­ pronounced “OH-­dahz”—­working with each ODA to deliberate community priorities and share them productively with local government.10 Bringing t­ hese two arms of the intervention together, GGAP staff then hosted periodic public engagement forums in each targeted municipality, where local government officials interacted directly with the public, and the officers of the ODAs openly presented their work to ­those local government agents. Fi­nally, the GGAP also offered competitive “micro-­project” grants to the ODAs for small initiatives—­a new roof on a school, or similar—­and considered ­these a type of dual-­purpose development investment/pedagogical tool for proj­ect management. The GGAP’s programmatic logic was that the local state–­citizenry relationship could be improved if both sides w ­ ere separately addressed by such “capacitating” or capacity-­building intervention and then, in structured and supervised moments, ­these newly improved parties engaged with one another in dif­fer­ent and more constructive modes. This focus on “good governance” has gained increasing traction in international development policy since the 1990s, particularly for Africa and for postsocialist socie­ties (e.g., Abrahamsen 2000). The GGAP was just one among several such interventions deployed in postwar Angola by Western bilateral aid agencies, the United Nations, and the World Bank. As a participatory intervention emphasizing capacity building and aiming to address, rather than just patch

Introduction 11

over, the under­lying prob­lems of development, the GGAP was not unique to Angola but part of a new generation of international development programs. The idea that government is foundational to economic success and is therefore a valuable interventionist goal became part of mainstream development thinking with the 1992 publication of the World Bank’s booklet Governance and Development. The Bank had come to consider government procedures and efficacy as part of its reaction to the 1980s and 1990s failures of its structural adjustment programs. Th ­ ese programs had, as a conditionality of the Bank’s loans to poor countries, liberalized (i.e., privatized, deregulated) many national economies in the developing world in order to f­ree them of the perceived inefficiencies of planned and often centralized economies. Th ­ ese changes to poor countries’ governmental policies and institutions w ­ ere meant to “create an enabling environment for growth” (World Bank 1992, 4). The expected growth did not occur, however, and the Bank’s borrowers—­the governments of poor countries—­were increasingly hard pressed to pay back their loans and the interest the Bank charged on them. Worse, though less acknowledged by the Bank at the time, public ser­vices and citizen well-­being deteriorated significantly ­under ­these programs as they demanded that borrower states cut social welfare programming to the bone (e.g., Pfeiffer and Chapman 2010). In the 1990s, the Bank examined why t­ hese liberalization policies did not spur economic growth and concluded that it was b­ ecause the borrowing governments had been unable to effectively carry out its prescribed adjustments. It attributed the failures to ­these governments’ own structural and institutional weaknesses rather than to the Bank’s prescriptions. Such a conclusion is the result of “principal-­agent” thinking, discussed in chapter 1, in which failures are first attributed to faulty implementation—­where implementing agents are specifically at fault—­rather than to poor policy prescriptions. Thus, instead of revising its liberalization policies in the face of their apparent failure, the Bank saw a need for “further improvements in the institutional framework for development management” in t­hese countries to improve in-­country implementation capacities (World Bank 1992, 4).11 The bank began to insist on governance reforms as a further condition for the receipt of loans. Then and now, however, what precisely good governance is—­how you can tell when a country has it and how you can determine what might be missing, exactly, if a country does not—is heavi­ly disputed. Just over a de­cade ­after that seminal World Bank report, po­liti­cal scientist Merilee Grindle could proclaim that “the good governance agenda . . . ​is unrealistically long and growing longer over time” (2004, 526). Grindle’s review of successive years of the World Development Report, published annually by the Bank since 1978, allowed her to enumerate the governance characteristics meant to be addressed in order to realize development in poor countries. She found that each successive year’s report dramatically increased the number of ­things a development professional working ­toward “good government” in any context might need to worry about.

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­ ese characteristics, ranging from bank regulation to public transportation Th ser­v ices to land reform policy, increased in number from 45 to 116  in just six years, for instance. Given the highly complex nature of t­ hese sorts of concerns—­ including the guarantee of a f­ree press, an in­de­pen­dent judiciary, and laws to protect biodiversity—­even one would be a daunting task for a development intervention to take on. Considering that over a hundred of them might legitimately fall ­under the purview of a program tasked to promote or improve good governance, the endeavor has become not just Sisyphean but also Medusan. If 116 topics are quite obviously too many to include in a single development intervention, ­there are still broader characteristics that are seen as core to a nation-­ state with “good governance”: participation, equity or fairness, efficiency, effectiveness, accountability, transparency. All of ­these, in ­today’s development thinking, should be pre­sent in a government’s institutions, policies, and practices and are best assessed from the perspective of the citizens subject to being governed by ­those institutions. For her part, Grindle argues not for good governance but for “good enough governance” as a way to temper the madness. Her well-­founded critique of the agenda is that governance’s relationship to economic growth and stability is, and ­will remain, unclear—it may well be that good economic growth and stability are the precursors for stable and effective government rather than the other way around. The only way forward is thus to work t­ oward both good enough governance and economic growth at the same time and to guard against one set of concerns eclipsing the other. Working in this broader development industry milieu of government-­ improvement-­as-­economic-­development, the designers of the GGAP arrived at their own respectable answers about what good governance should look like in Angola and what was yet missing. The program’s designers and implementers thought that dialogue between municipal officials and the residents of a municipality should be more frequent, and dif­fer­ent in form and content. Most of their work sought to change and intensify communication between the citizenry and the municipal government. This is why the program worked, in one arm, to improve local government officials’ capacity and responsiveness to citizens and, in a second arm, to or­ga­nize citizens into well-­structured local groups to more efficiently channel their participation in government activities, bringing both arms together in periodic events. This idea to focus on citizen–­government communication structures came from the assumption that good governance, at the very least, has something to do with transparency and accountability, understood as government offices and personnel making their procedures, logics, and decisions vis­i­ble to citizens. In the idea of transparency, it is not simply that citizens should be informed of government decisions ­after they have happened but also that the pro­cesses and logics by which such decisions are reached should be made vis­i­ble to everyday ­people. Government is thus transparent if its inner workings can be seen and judged by citizens.

Introduction 13

“Accountability” in this rubric then presumes not only that citizens pass judgment on the decisions, rationales, and actions of the government but that they have some recourse to change t­ hese if they disagree or find fault. Transparency and accountability are thus paired in discussions of good governance, as t­ here would seem to be no need for transparency without convincing ave­nues to accountability and no potential for accountability without successful transparency. ­After all, it would be difficult to change a decision or procedure if you ­were unaware of its existence and its foundations; at the same time, though, awareness does not itself impart the power to do anything with that knowledge. The GGAP strug­gled far more with the accountability half of this equation: in this era (and as of this writing, still), ­there ­were no local elections for municipal or even provincial-­level officials in Angola; all local government officers w ­ ere appointed from Luanda by the party in control of the national government. Since 1975, that party has been the Movimento Popu­lar de Libertação de Angola, the Popu­lar Movement for Angolan Liberation, or the MPLA. Accountability in rural districts thus came, if at all, in the form of public discussions with appointed officials in which citizens could—­but did not always—­state their judgments about aspects of the officials’ work, and ­after which the officials’ work could—­but did not usually—­change in form or substance. Though unable to mandate that local elections be held or some other form of definitive accountability be put into place for Angola’s rural municipalities, the GGAP’s designers and implementers worked ­toward transparency and accountability in ­these other ways.

Research Methods and Chapter Sketches Studying the development implementariat ethnographically required negotiating permission12 to observe the GGAP for a period of twelve continuous months in 2008–2009, as the program was nearing the midpoint of its first phase. As my observation period included the GGAP’s phase I midterm review, this turned out to be a particularly salient period of self-­reflection and critique among the staff, which benefited my study greatly. I spent roughly eight months observing and conducting interviews in the GGAP’s central office, ­housed within the American NGO’s country headquarters in Luanda. While in Luanda I also routinely visited the headquarters offices of the other two implementing NGOs and accompanied Luanda-­based staff as they periodically visited provincial field sites.13 I then moved my f­ amily from Luanda to Huambo City for four months, splitting my time between the GGAP’s provincial field offices in Andulo and Chicala Cholohanga (see map in chap. 4). In Huambo City, my husband, infant son, and I lived in the British NGO’s guest­house; while in Andulo I roomed with a GGAP staff member and her ­family as my own ­family stayed ­behind in Huambo City.14 My focus was on the GGAP staff proper—­its administrators and technical advisers in Luanda and its field agents in the provinces—­but understanding their

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working experience meant also interviewing and coming to understand their relationships with extraprogrammatic colleagues working elsewhere inside the three NGOs, at the donors’ offices, and at other peer institutions. Among the central arguments of the book is that t­ hese lateral professional relationships, both within and between organ­izations, shape development work as much as, or even more than, vertical relationships do. This insight comes directly from my observations and interviews with field staff, each of whom impressed upon me the fact that understanding their work with beneficiaries necessitated understanding their own positions among their colleagues and within their institutions. Most all of my participant observation and in-­depth interviews ­were conducted in Portuguese, which I had been studying intensively for several years before undertaking this study. My Portuguese was competent enough when I began my research but, unsurprisingly, improved greatly over the course of the fieldwork. While in Luanda I met regularly with a Portuguese tutor at the Catholic University, which helped im­mensely with the Angolan colloquialisms and pronunciations I was learning but was helpful in many other ways, also. I was fortunate, in retrospect, to have contracted as a tutor a young college student who had no interest whatsoever in international NGOs and for whom many of the technical terms I learned ­were nearly unintelligible. We discussed, instead, materials sourced from Luanda’s several weekly newspapers and the state-­run daily, O Jornal de Angola, popu­lar ­music lyr­ics, and, as my tutor—­now a lecturer at the Catholic University and an economist with the state cellphone com­pany Unitel—­remains deeply interested in Angolan lit­er­a­ture, we also read together novels by Manuel Rui, Pepetela, and Ondjaki, all of which expanded my understanding of Angolan culture and history. The Angolan development professionals I was studying also listened to and read many of the same cultural materials, and some ­were particularly keen to discuss new books as they came out; being familiar with them gave me more opportunity to discuss t­ hese professionals’ ideas and experiences with them. Fa­cil­i­ty with t­ hese materials also set me apart from most of the other expatriates that Angolan development professionals routinely come into contact with who are often on short-­term assignments and cannot pursue language study so assiduously as their work demands frequent rotation through dif­fer­ent countries (see Roth 2019 on language use among international aid professionals). While accompanying them, I certainly pitched in to aid GGAP staff where pos­ si­ble, though I held no formal responsibilities with the program or its parent NGOs.15 This proj­ect necessitated my demonstrable in­de­pen­dence from the administration of the program and the sponsoring and implementing organ­ izations in order to assure field staff that their interactions with me ­were solely for the research study and ­were not mandated as part of their duties. I was able to assure GGAP staff that their employers had no right to my data, nor to any right of final approval of my findings. The condition imposed for such privileged access was, however, that I pseudonymize not only the individuals involved in the GGAP,

Introduction 15

but the program itself and its parent institutions. For this reason, I refer to the GGAP’s funders as WestAid, the Oil Com­pany, and the Diamond Com­pany, and to its implementing organ­izations as the American NGO, the British NGO, and the Canadian NGO. All personal names are also pseudonyms. The sociality of conducting development work—of seeking to change society—­ presented several specific challenges for the GGAP. The book highlights throughout what t­ hese programmatic challenges ­were, where they came from, how staff worked with or around them, and what they mean for the larger development endeavor. Th ­ ese programmatic challenges are best seen as the “effects” of the social field of international development: decisions made by members of the field in competition with one another to attain and retain social capital as it is defined and made legitimate within the field itself (Bourdieu 1986; Hilgers and Mangez 2015). Such decisions include the classification of tasks and workers, decisions about where development intervention should be focused and what methods should be employed, and decisions about what information and whose perspectives should carry the most weight in making ­these determinations. Development workers are motivated by deep desires to help, to improve society, to be in ser­ vice to o­ thers, but accomplishing t­ hese goals requires each professional to instrumentally attain, and retain, the social capital required to pursue that work. Development workers, on the ­whole, are not primarily motivated by the professional standards of their field and its internal competitions, but in order to remain engaged in the social improvement work they are driven to do, they must successfully master and navigate ­these standards (Bourdieu 1975). Development’s field effects therefore become incorporated into the “common sense” of the industry: classifications and hierarchies that appear self-­evident, as though they are part of the natu­ral world and can be taken for granted (Bourdieu 1998). The book is roughly or­ga­nized around the “effects” of the social field of international development: not the effects in terms of outcomes for its intended beneficiaries (cf., Ferguson 1994; Li 2007) nor even the state effects of intervention for the interveners and donors (Trouillot 2001), but rather t­ hose concepts, presumptions, and procedures internal to development work through which differently situated professionals must engage one another and by which the industry polices itself and its members. This focus on internal effects is conceptually grounded in chapter  1, which orients readers to the specific conceptual landscape of development management, introducing the foundational logics that are taken for granted in the administration of development institutions and especially the management of the donor–­implementer dyad as a special kind of contractualized, professional relationship.16 The chapter highlights how dif­fer­ent kinds of work efforts are unequally valued in development organ­izations and how the industry conceives of its own composition, including its characterizations of the relationships that dif­fer­ent development professionals have to one another and to their work.

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Chapters 2 and 3 detail the social skills and effort that go into on-­the-­ground implementation work, explaining how this work is effectively “unseen” in the industry’s core procedures and by its most power­ful actors (Geissler 2013). Chapter 2 focuses on the industry’s commonly used approach to depicting programmatic action and its required resources: Logical Framework Analy­sis (LFA), an analytical approach formulated to reassure man­ag­ers that they would not be held responsible for conditions outside their control and to educate them on the causal logics of designing development interventions. The approach focuses attention on the highest-­order conceptual relationships of programmatic outputs to purposes and goals, leaving unaddressed the foundational, day-­to-­day work of frontline field agents. Chapter 3 then considers staff interactions around how the GGAP was monitored and evaluated, focusing on how the work of the field staff appeared to Luanda-­based administrative superiors and how intraprogrammatic negotiations about what information was valuable to whom morphed into an exercise in reinforcing hierarchies among staff members. Chapters 4 and 5 then examine the sociality of development work among the industry’s administrators and policy makers, where the social and relational work of development professionals among their peers is more likely to be valued but is still commonly misrecognized. ­These chapters detail how the GGAP came to be, tracing how strategic decisions about the program’s locations and methods w ­ ere drawn from social hierarchies and patterns of practice in the industry rather than site-­and goal-­specific analyses. ­These final chapters depart from a close focus on the development implementariat itself to consider the sociality of the international development industry at a dif­fer­ent scale, illuminating how the implementariat is situated in the larger body of the industry. In the book’s conclusion, I address the troublesome fact that the singular industry meant to combat social inequalities in the wider world plays host to them internally, and offer some directions in which this work could be re­imagined.

1 • DEVELOPMENT HIER ARCHIES

International development can be seen as, at base, an effort to realize new kinds of relationships. It imagines how social relationships inside and between countries can be better, posits how to arrive at ­those changed relationships from current conditions, and designs interventions to produce t­ hose changes. Seen in this way, it is a paradox that this global enterprise to reengineer social relationships cannot or w ­ ill not critically apprehend its own internal sociality. This chapter briefly reviews the hierarchies of power and influence inside the development industry that reproduce global inequalities within the very ranks of development workers themselves. For prac­ti­tion­ers, such distinctions among workers are common knowledge and even common sense, though practicing professionals are also among the first to recognize and decry them, as discussed in this chapter.1 As the book as a ­whole argues, the most well-­known inequalities in the industry, ­those of race, national origin, and gender, are buttressed by a related hierarchy of work-­tasks that privileges t­ hose making institutional decisions and policies over ­those tasked with carry­ing them out—­the implementariat. My central argument in this chapter is that the development industry has uncritically a­ dopted ideas and practices from the administrative sciences that mischaracterize the social, relational aspects of both implementation and policy making. I describe the widely held logics of the industry on ­these ­matters and provide a conceptual background for the book’s larger assertion that much of the a­ ctual, everyday, social and relational work of development professionals is actively unseen and “depreciated” (Schmidt 2015). L ­ ater chapters strengthen this assertion with ethnographic analyses of the GGAP and its staff; this chapter’s conceptual critique brings into analytical focus the under­lying ideas and presumptions that inform, following Mary Douglas (1986), how development institutions “think.”

The Development Industry and Development Ideology As development institutions and particularly NGOs increasingly professionalize and look to both public and private institutions as exemplars, industry wisdom 17

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about its internal structures and relationships increasingly, but indirectly, derives from ideas prevalent in the management, administration, orga­nizational be­hav­ ior, and policy sciences. Th ­ ese fields offer ideas that, like ideology conceived of in the Althusserian sense, also “represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derived from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of ­those individuals to the real relations in which they live [or in this case, work]” (Althusser 1971, 164–165). Althusser ­here addresses how individuals enmeshed inside any po­liti­cal economic system at any scale—­inside an institution, a state, a profession—­see themselves and their position in that system according to their beliefs about it. Ideology in this thinking is not a set of po­liti­cal or religious commitments, but a set of taken-­for-­granted ideas about how one’s social world is or­ga­nized. It is how one “imagines” the pattern of social organ­ization, not in the sense that it is fictitious or purposefully in­ven­ted but simply in the sense that it is what one finds meaningful while making sense of one’s social location. Such sense making is an inherently social phenomenon, and shared, institutionalized social imaginaries, or ideologies, shape how ­people make sense of their place in the world and determine how best to act in it. Althusser’s concern was to examine how institutions can lead individuals to act, for instance, in ways that are more beneficial to the state than to themselves. Applying Althusser’s concerns to international development, development institutions can be seen as “ideological apparatuses” functioning through a broadly shared development imaginary. A key tenet of the development imaginary is that the world is clearly split into developed versus developing countries such that the endeavor of development intervention is i­ magined as an encounter between ­these two parties (Hart 2001), leading to an oversimplification of each side and of their relationship to each other. This chapter considers how the professional side of the development encounter is only anemically and uncritically envisioned within this conception of international development and how this neglect of the industry’s interior relational dynamics is, in part, a result of its increasing professionalization and adoption of managerialist thinking and bureaucratic practice. The development imaginary, or what could also be called development’s “common sense,” has been ­shaped by an understanding of the professional endeavor as a ­matter of institutional be­hav­ior and international relations. From this perspective, international development (ID, in ­these intellectual camps), is a prob­ lem best addressed intellectually by the policy sciences and pragmatically by policy professionals in government and civil society. The prob­lem of (­under) development in this thinking is one of national-­level institutions, though increasingly of the international relationships among and between them (Bern­stein 2006).



Development Hierarchies 19

Embedded in this conceptualization of international development is the presumption that the be­hav­ior of ordinary p­ eople in poor countries is directed by the structures (mostly the failures) of inherently flawed or weak national institutions (e.g., Ang 2016). Policy making and intervention design in development thus seek to “fix” poor countries’ national institutions both as its own worthy goal and as the means to correct ordinary ­people’s be­hav­iors so their actions come to ­support their own advancement (for a diverse se­lection of approaches see, e.g., Andrews 2013; Chibber 2003; Evans 1979, 1995; Grindle 2004; Rodrik 1999; Sen 1999). Clifford Geertz notes that the power of common sense stems from its insistence “that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience,” thereby denying its true nature as “a relatively or­ga­nized body of considered thought” (1983, 75). Common sense, that is, is a worldview made up of presumption and received wisdom masquerading as the self-­evident, firsthand truths of an in­de­pen­dently experienced world; as such it can deflect logical and intellectual challenges. For the international development industry, the very poverty of poor countries is the first such “deliverance of experience” that validates professionals’ common sense, imbuing both development’s many workers and their work with a cascade of meanings. Well-­intentioned prac­ti­tion­ers and even scholars seem ready to believe that poor countries are poor ­because they are not rich; an observation usually interpreted within a framework of methodological nationalism to mean that poor countries are poor ­because they are inherently dif­fer­ent from rich ones: that if they held the knowledge or practiced the traditions of richer countries, they too would be prosperous (see also Ferguson 1994; Mitchell 2002). Consistent with this set of presumptions about why poor countries are poor and where solutions to their poverty are most likely to come from, thinking about what to do in development comes to seem far more consequential than does the work of actually d­ oing it. Development common sense holds that good decision makers are rare, having traveled from afar and acting out of generosity for the benefit of o­ thers to whom they are other­wise not obliged. Doers, meanwhile, ­were “­here” in the poor country all along (and without intervention, ­here they would remain), in­effec­tive and directionless, unable to act even for themselves, much less for ­others, ­because they did not know or could not imagine what to do. Alternatively, doers are sometimes seen as parasitically working only for themselves rather than for all (e.g., Bayart 1993; Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999).2 The industry thus si­mul­ta­neously classifies workers and task categories: designing and carry­ing out development intervention is broken up into discrete component parts and hierarchically ordered into a set of categories overlapping with the hierarchy of personnel as ­either deciders or doers, expats or nationals, si­mul­ta­neously naturalizing both sets and their overlap. Deciding what to do becomes the component presumed to require real skill and expertise, presumably foreign, while carry­ing out what has been de­cided is presumed to be the

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work of mere practice, performable by undifferentiated masses of national staff: doers who seem interchangeable, even expendable (Maes 2016a). What follows is a description of how development institutions operating in this international relations-­cum-­administration sciences mindset think about their staff members, staff members’ relationships to development’s “relations of production,” and the varied tasks of development intervention, which become bifurcated into ostensibly higher-­order decision-­making duties (policy making) versus lower-­order acts of carry­ing out institutional decisions (implementation). It is a critique of certain foundational ideas and presumptions in the management sciences as t­ hese are concerned with policy implementation in general for insight into the managerialist thinking of con­temporary development organ­ izations. This reading of management lit­er­a­ture does not intend to contribute to that lit­er­a­ture’s own purpose lest, as Douglas warns for the anthropology of institutions broadly, the prob­lems identified by ethnography become “automatically transformed into their own orga­nizational prob­lems” (1986, 92). I maintain an in­de­pen­dent stance, producing a critical, conceptual analy­sis elucidating the managerial sciences’ under­lying presumptions as they are increasingly influential to the emic perspective of the professionalized development industry. Throughout, I argue that as management thought itself neglects the sociality of bureaucrats, policy makers, and implementation agents and their work, ­these oversights are reproduced in international development as part of the industry’s increasingly professionalized practice. The managerialization of development institutions is one ave­nue through which development professionals are led to neglect their own sociality even as they conscientiously work ­toward inherently social ends in the wider world (see also Kothari 2005).

Professional Inequalities Development workers identify a variety of hierarchical inequalities in their profession—­for instance, the differential power and influence enjoyed by the staff at international headquarters versus ­those at in-­country “field offices.” Such distinction is further complicated b­ ecause while any “in-­country” (that is, “in a developing country”) office is considered a field office from the perspective of t­ hose working at international headquarters, t­ here are similar in-­country distinctions, between the national headquarters office or “country office,” and satellite field offices or implementation offices, situated nearer to beneficiaries.3 Where one works—at international headquarters, a country office, or a local implementation office—­both reflects and determines what influence one holds in the larger organ­ ization. ­These positions also shape professionals’ perspectives on the organ­ization and its operations. Another distinction common in the development industry is the moving target of determining who is “international” or “expatriate” staff and who is “national”



Development Hierarchies 21

or “local” staff. At base, any workers holding citizenship foreign to the developing country in which they are working are international professionals, referred to colloquially as expatriates (“expats”). Any workers who are citizens of the country in which they are working are “national” or “local” staff members, terms often used interchangeably. Increasingly, and increasingly successfully, citizens of developing countries seek to advance within the development industry and travel to work in a dif­fer­ent developing country, becoming part of the international, or expat, staff (Redfield 2013b; Roth 2012, 2019). Thus, while the ste­reo­type of an “expat aid worker” is a white person from North Amer­i­ca or Eu­rope, the backgrounds, physical characteristics, and citizenships of international staff are actually quite diverse (see Benton 2016; Roth 2015). ­These distinctions—­between headquarters and field, between expat and national—­and the hierarchies to which they give rise, are structures by which status is determined in the industry. Increasingly, ­these structures’ overlap with the global inequities of race and citizenship make them contentious in the industry. The news outlet the Guardian, for example, began hosting a new series on its website in 2015 called “Secret Aid Worker,” in which international development professionals are encouraged to anonymously post personal essays about their experiences to the online “global network” of aid workers. A popu­lar series, its submissions address aid workers’ romantic entanglements, the sexual harassment they experience, both their loss of compassion for t­ hose in need as well as their deepening emotional involvement in the work, and many other topics that give a sense of the personal consequences that come from conducting international development and humanitarian relief work. ­There is a strong sense of exposé in many of the essays—an air of revealing the unseemly “underbelly” (Fechter 2012, 1393) of what might other­wise be considered unequivocally virtuous work. The series’ essay of June 16, 2015, discussed one Secret Aid Worker’s experience of a medical emergency while working in an unnamed African country. The contributor, a foreign con­sul­tant stricken with intractable malaria, recounts how he was quickly and expensively evacuated to a nearby country for treatment entirely paid for by his employer, an international NGO. He recounts how a local colleague employed by the same organ­ization contemporaneously suffered severe injury from an on-­the-­job traffic accident. In contrast to the author’s experience, this colleague was made to wait nearly three weeks for the surgery necessary to repair his shattered leg. He would have endured excruciating pain. Further, he was then asked to pay over half the cost of his (eventual) evacuation and care: more than USD 20,000. The Secret Aid Worker recounts how the man could no more afford to pay this sum than he could have repaired his own leg and that the cost of his care was, in the end, borne privately and collectively by his colleagues through the type of “social insurance” among friends that cannot equal the ease nor security of the formal schemes called upon for the author’s own treatment.

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The message of ­these twinned on-­the-­job medical crises—­and, indeed, the title of the posting itself—is that t­ here is “one standard for local staff and another for expats” within the development industry. Most development professionals have a raft of similar stories about inequities inside their industry, culled from personal experience, firsthand observation, and professional lore. The majority of t­ hese tales concern the unjustifiable distinction between national and expatriate staff. Although organ­izations often deny that such inequalities are tolerated in their own ­houses, a two-­tiered system distinguishing between foreign and local workers is common across the development profession, with consequences far beyond what care might be made available in a medical emergency. In the piece referenced h­ ere, the Secret Aid Worker enumerates and roundly refutes many of the justifications commonly offered as explanation for such inequitable treatment: cost, accepted practice, feasibility, and so on. The essay is heartening in that industry insiders can and do recognize the inequalities of their profession, are familiar with their justificatory logics, and are largely aware of how unjust t­ hose logics actually are. How such inequalities then remain clearly demands close investigation. As argued throughout this book, the inequalities that the Secret Aid Worker rails against—­ between expatriate and national workers—­are produced by related inequalities between development’s field staff, its administrative staff, and its ruling class of policy makers and institutional elites, not all of whom are themselves from developed countries. Inequities such as differential access to resources between development workers presumed “local” to their place of work and t­hose assumed foreign—­ even while working together on the same proj­ect in the same place—­are also familiar outside the industry, at least in the developing countries in which ­these injustices predominantly play out. The arts and public media of many African countries have proven themselves able critics of the “developmentalist configuration” (Olivier de Sardan 2005), particularly through parody of the national–­ international staff distinction. The Samaritans (Xeinium Productions 2013), for instance, a tele­vi­sion series pi­loted in ­Kenya, is a comedy set inside the country office of a fictitious international NGO called Aid for Aid.4 Two initial episodes portray the introduction of a new country director, a young, inexperienced, white Westerner, portrayed for comic purpose as dim and socially unaware. His arrival antagonizes the interim country director, an accomplished, black ­Kenyan ­woman who had e­ very right to believe the permanent posting was g­ oing to be hers even if, again for comic purpose, she is presented as pompous and abusive to her colleagues. In The Samaritans, no one is wholly villainous nor wholly virtuous, and the centrally organ­izing plot ele­ment of in­equality between national and international staff in a development organ­ization is so familiar to a K ­ enyan audience it requires no elaboration as a basis for satire. Institutional differences between ostensibly international and national staff are, however, social accomplishments that have ­little correlation with the require-



Development Hierarchies 23

ments of development work or the ­actual backgrounds of development workers (Peters 2016). ­These differences have to do, instead, with the development imaginary: widely held beliefs about the relationships ­people in the industry have to one another and to their conditions of existence (Althusser 1971). The development imaginary is most vis­i­ble in its presumptions about what kinds of workers are suitable to what kinds of work, and why, and the industry’s resulting institutional structures. Navigating ­these structures through relationships with one’s colleagues is an enormous part of any development worker’s job, as perhaps it would be in any large industry or organ­ization. As in other systems of hierarchized power, t­ hose on development’s bottommost rungs are more heavi­ly burdened with the “interpretive ­labor” of understanding and responding appropriately to the perspectives of their superiors than their superiors are burdened with understanding theirs—an i­ nequity that effectively reproduces itself and shields itself from view (Graeber 2012). The other in­equality that undergirds this widespread and long-­standing hierarchy of the international and the local in development work is a related set of distinctions between dif­fer­ent kinds of work that both draws on and reinforces the international–­local distinction and attendant inequalities of value and influence in the industry. Work that is seen as predominantly analytical, intellectual, and innovative—­like policy making—is valued more highly than is work considered more pragmatic, rote, or routine, as management and implementation often are. Policy making in development, including technical consulting, is the most highly valued work, largely monopolized by international elites in, and usually from, “core” or developed countries. Management and administration, while more highly valued than implementation, are not considered as elite as is policy making b­ ecause man­ag­ers are seen as, effectively, the highest level of implementation worker. The distinctions drawn between policy making, management, and implementation rest on estimations of intellectual complexity and scale—­policy making is seen as more demanding and far-­reaching than management is, and management as slightly more so than implementation. While field-­level implementation has always been the province of national cadres, in-­country management was traditionally staffed by expatriates but is now the level of work most visibly and easily “nationalizing” in the industry ­today. ­This is perhaps an advance for national staff as a ­whole but is facilitated and restricted by the relatively low rank of in-­country administration—­ certainly part of the implementariat—­within the larger industry.

Principal-­Agent Thinking and Development’s Common Sense International development as an industry, including its reformers and critics, increasingly draws from the managerial and administrative sciences to ask critical questions and posit new approaches to the endeavor.5 In this thinking, ­making

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decisions and carry­ing them out is largely formulated as a “principal-­agent” prob­ lem: principals have the power and responsibility to make decisions, whereas agents are ­those tasked to carry them out (Eisenhardt 1989). Though the larger structure of the international development industry is emically framed as one large principal-­agent prob­lem, with donors and international organ­izations lamenting the inability of recipient countries to implement their recommended policies, my interest ­here is development thinking at the intrainstitutional level. Inside organ­izations, the principal-­agent formulation holds that the relationship is inherently problematic b­ ecause agents’ motives may not fully align with principals’ purposes. Agents are also presumed to have access to dif­fer­ent and perhaps more information than principals, foremost about their own be­hav­ior and its immediate context, such that principals may not detect u­ ntil too late that agents are acting against principals’ interests. In this formulation of bureaucratic work, policy makers arrive at prescriptive plans and take decisions about what to do with resources over which they hold authority as principals. In most characterizations of orga­nizational structure and action, some individuals must answer to higher authorities such that they are si­mul­ta­neously principals in one set of relationships and agents in another. In a demo­cratic government, for instance, politicians and policy makers should be considered the agents of the citizenry, which as a w ­ hole is the principal acting through pro­cesses of po­liti­cal participation. In private industry, corporate man­ag­ers are principals acting through their employee-­agents, but they are themselves agents of the corporation’s true principals, the shareholders. In e­ ither arena, the ultimate “agents” most suspected of acting against principals’ interests are the frontline workers: they are not seen as tasked with decision making but with simply carry­ing out what has already been de­cided by o­ thers. Principals thus see agents as resources (­human resources) to be managed, monitored, and incentivized to ensure that they behave in the prescribed manner. Po­liti­cal scientist Michael Lipsky’s foundational text on frontline agents, Street-­ Level Bureaucracy (2010 [1980]), focused on the structural similarities of American public servants across disparate sectors to argue that their work as teachers, police officers, judges, social workers, and beyond effectively “made policy” through the accretion of their daily actions and their exercise of discretion (cf., Mosse 2005). Scholarship on this topic has diversified in the nearly four de­cades since the original publication, but it is hard to overstate the impact Lipsky’s work has had on con­temporary thinking in administration and policy. His concept of the “street-­level bureaucrat” as one who chooses among the options given by policy makers and the precepts of “agency theory” about constraining and guiding ­those choices via policy are ingrained in international development’s common sense. Many professionals operate with t­ hese precepts, in fact, without necessarily knowing their specific origins.



Development Hierarchies 25

Lipsky’s analy­sis hinged on recognizing the structural positions of frontline workers as the public-­facing members of any bureaucracy: ­those individual professionals directly engaged with members of the public on behalf of their governmental organ­izations regardless of the specific goals of the engagement. In this perspective, teaching, granting governmental status, releasing governmental funds or goods, seizing private goods or restricting citizens’ freedoms (as in the case of arresting a citizen on suspicion of having committed a crime) are all activities of public policy implementation that require direct contact with citizens. Previous analyses had focused on the differential content and intended purposes of such work—­and ­there are im­mense differences between the methods and goals of education, medical care, policing, and so on. In contrast, ­Lipsky’s innovation was to set aside ­these differences and focus instead on the social positions of ­these implementation agents as they are tasked with realizing ­these disparate outcomes through interpersonal interaction with individual members of the public. He, too, was examining the rank-­and-­file, lowest-­rung members of formal institutions, but he focused on the “encounter” between t­ hese members of the implementariat and their clients, members of the public, rather than on their in-­ house social relationships. Comparing frontline agents across public sectors, Lipsky argued that street-­ level bureaucrats had to balance nearly endless need with perpetually insufficient resources. To do so, they “­people pro­cess,” triaging which members of the public genuinely require resources, which ­will make good use of them, and which ­will aid the bureaucrats in meeting their own responsibilities. Through t­ hese criteria, the street-­level bureaucrat treats individual members of the public differently ­because ­there are not sufficient resources with which to treat them all the same. This sense of constraint is achingly familiar to development workers, and a careful look at such agency theory reasoning suggests how it is that certain kinds of work come to be relegated to the realm of the invisible in development and elsewhere. Further, it suggests how certain conditions of work, particularly inequitable resources for dif­fer­ent hierarchical levels of assigned duty, are seen as natu­ral and unavoidable rather than the result of bureaucratic organ­ization. Using Lipsky’s rubric, it is fairly straightforward to assert that development field workers are street-­level bureaucrats—­whether the “downstairs” or the “back office” staff, t­ hese are the development professionals who interact directly with beneficiaries rather than the “upstairs” or “front office” staff who face donors and government agencies on behalf of the organ­ization (see Schuller 2012). Lipsky (2010[1980], 27–28) identifies five conditions as ordinarily faced by street-­level bureaucrats in their work: 1.

Resources are chronically inadequate relative to the tasks workers are asked to perform. 2. The demand for ser­v ices tends to increase to meet the supply.

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3.

Goal expectations for the agencies in which they work tend to be ambiguous, vague, or conflicting. 4. Per­for­mance oriented ­toward goal achievement tends to be difficult if not impossible to mea­sure. 5. Clients are typically nonvoluntary; partly as a result, clients for the most part do not serve as primary bureaucratic reference groups. On the face of it, each of t­ hese conditions applies to development field workers, especially the final one. This last condition is not as carefully examined as are the ­others, however, and may be the most impor­tant for international development. Moreover, certain of ­these assertions do not always hold even for Lipsky’s own examples. Examining ­these yields insight into the deeply held presumptions of the administrative sciences more broadly. Consider the second assertion, that demand for ser­vices ­will always grow to meet, and likely exceed, available ser­vices. The assertion is inappropriately generalized as Lipsky argues, for example, that “in the arena of health, as in virtually ­every other area in which street-­level bureaucrats operate, ­there is no imaginable limit to the amount of health care the population would seek and absorb if it w ­ ere truly a ‘­free good,’ available without significant explicit or implicit costs” (2010[1980], 34). I assert that ­there are always intrinsic costs to health care (and other) ser­vices as would guarantee limits to public demand. Even if it ­were ­free, for example, more ­people would not demand open-­heart surgery than would medically benefit from the procedure. ­There are ­actual limits to individuals’ desires and populations’ needs that are par­tic­u­lar to the types of ser­vices ­under discussion. ­There are, additionally, professional ethics among ser­ vice providers that ­will also cap the use of ser­vices outside the simply bureaucratic limitations of supply, cost, and con­ve­nience. Heart surgeons would not offer their ser­v ices to healthy ­people, who would in fact be harmed more than helped by their offerings, any more than members of the public would demand they do so. Likewise, with policing, l­ egal ser­vices, education, and so on—­there are intrinsic limits to the helpfulness and appropriateness of ­these ser­vices beyond which ­there ­will cease to be rising public demand. In the realm of development intervention, it is easier to imagine that the demand for ser­vices could be practicably infinite, though for the specific case of the GGAP as a good governance intervention t­ here are obvious mechanical limits to how much of the program’s offerings could be taken up by its two beneficiary classes. In the case of the municipal governments and their employees who made up one class, Angola has only so many municipal administrations, and ­these cannot multiply in­def­initely so as to take up inexhaustible intervention resources from programs like the GGAP. Although 118 municipal administrations is surely a daunting number, it is also a discrete and finite one. In the case of the community development arm, and especially b­ ecause the goals of this intervention and of development generally are “ambitious, vague, or conflicting” ­there could c­ onceivably be



Development Hierarchies 27

a continuously morph­ing demand for attention and intervention from development professionals. From forming and training ODAs through to planning and executing vari­ous micro-­projects, ­these offerings could change with the needs of local communities so as to be almost perpetually desirable. In the broader management sciences, Lipsky’s assertions have come to hold the status of received wisdom and his pronouncement that demand for ­human ser­vices may have no conceivable end has come to justify an enduring condition of the work of street-­level bureaucrats—­that they are perpetually underresourced to do the work asked of them. The underresourced state of frontline agents, that is, is understood to be the result of the natu­ral condition of their work in the face of limitless demands, not the consequence of bureaucratic decision making that does not adequately understand what resources are needed and directs them elsewhere. If t­ here ­really is no limit to what is asked of street-­level bureaucrats, then perhaps such conclusions do logically cohere. But the theoretical or even apparent limitlessness of work is not coterminous with what is or should be expected of an individual frontline worker. Simply b­ ecause ­there could theoretically be an infinite number of ODAs formed and trained in Angola by field-­level democ­ ratization staff, for example, does not logically translate into any individual worker being assigned the goal, however implicitly, of “forming as many as pos­si­ ble” (see chaps. 2 and 3). Reasonable, accomplishable workload targets can and should be set, and the resources necessary to meet them made available. Most impor­tant to my arguments about the nature of everyday development work was Lipsky’s broader characterization of frontline work as the exercise of discretion, as this occasioned much of the policy and management sciences to neglect the social and intellectually creative nature of implementation work. In his discussions of police work and the decision making that officers are asked to do as regards wrongdoing, danger, risk, and need, for example, Lipsky describes police officers’ actions as “people-­processing,” and while he acknowledges this as a kind of decision making, he renders frontline agents’ decision making only anemically, as “discretion”: as though frontline agents are simply choosing from a menu of preselected options, assigning already existing titles or categories to the case in front of them and following the consequent procedures. This remains the way implementation work is i­ magined by policy makers and policy analysts, and perhaps by some frontline agents as well. My ethnographic analy­sis of the GGAP reveals that such decision making is often, if not usually, far more than the term discretion allows—­such decision making is a creative, analytical, synthesizing, and supremely intellectual act that does more than assign preconceived categories— it creates new options for action and understanding. Pace Lipsky, the ethnographic evidence presented in the following chapters demonstrates that field agents—­the largest portion of development’s implementariat—­are policy makers b­ ecause their work is to innovate and make decisions and not b­ ecause their actions accrete together to instantiate policy. The

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i­ ntellectual work of making decisions on a ­human scale, with the individual person in front of them and the immediate context of the interaction taken fully into consideration, is the same work policy makers are engaged in—­though with higher resolution and more immediate consequence to ordinary ­people. Instead of mere “discretion,” development’s implementation agents are engaged in many kinds of work throughout the course of their day, their month, and their ­career. The implementariat, made up of both office-­dwelling, in-­country administrators and beneficiary-­facing field agents, should be seen as engaged in deeply social and relational work as well as the innovative decision making of “articulation work.” This work, of getting ­matters “back on track” and dealing with unpredictable contingencies, is the very heart of implementation which, in development especially, draws upon a wide variety of intellectual and embodied skills. But, “the most impor­tant ­thing about articulation work is that it is invisible to rationalized models of work” (Star 1991, 275, italics in original). Examining ­those rationalized models against the experiences of development workers reveals t­hese other hierarchies of the industry: t­hose of task and duty, as well as citizenship and race. As Susan Leigh Star has noted, “some ­people’s daily work . . . ​seems especially rich in articulation; ­others, such as executives and royalty [policy makers certainly fit the class] are able to delegate large parts of it” (1995b, 504). Within the development industry, and perhaps policy-­directed bureaucracies more broadly, the work of the implementariat is clearly richest in articulation work and other kinds of “shadow” or “invisible” work that have been misrecognized by the industry’s common sense.

“Shadow Work” in Development Shadow work or invisible work is made up of activities that, though wholly necessary, are devalued as unworthy of the term work. ­These activities are often denigrated as not productive, unskilled, rote, or motivated by personal fulfillment or love, or they are taken to be performed or performable by “nonpersons” (Star and Strauss 1999). Ivan Illich asserts that “the economic division of l­abor into a productive and a non-­productive kind, pioneered and first enforced through the domestic enclosure of w ­ omen” caused shadow work to come into existence alongside waged l­abor (1981, 107). “The condition for wages to be paid,” ­these activities are requisite before workers can engage in waged l­abor but are not formally remunerated as work (107). The distinction that emerged between unproductive and productive work rankled early feminist economists, who insisted on the worth and worthiness of “reproductive work” as a concept to replace any sense of the “unproductive” manner in which ­women ­were presumed to be spending their time as they maintained homes, raised families, and supported the conditions necessary for waged ­labor (e.g., Waring 1999). But this bifurcation between the productive and the unproductive, as James Ferguson explains, plagues all questions



Development Hierarchies 29

about the worthiness of an activity well outside considerations of waged or not-­ waged ­labor: “in our usual way of speaking and thinking, it is a denigration, almost an insult, to say that someone is ‘unproductive’ ” (Ferguson 2015, 102). The example of the GGAP demonstrates how judgments about productivity are made even within the categories of waged or unwaged ­labor and not only as a distinction between them. One paradox of development implementation revealed in this ethnography of development work and management is, for instance, that the very same actions can be judged ­either productive or unproductive depending on w ­ hether or not their output fits the desired frame: on ­whether or not they ­were “successful,” rather than inherently worthy as actions. The worthiness of actions also intersects with other social hierarchies of prestige and power as when in private industry the CEO’s office commute is worthy of support and recompense but the receptionist’s is not (see also Ho 2009 on institutional hierarchies and ranks). For the field staff of the GGAP, as detailed in chapters 2 and 3, only ultimately successful visits and conversations with community members—­those that eventually resulted in the formation of an ODA—­became vis­i­ble in the accounting system of the program, obscuring not only the many failed, or simply still ongoing, attempts but also the iterative, social nature of even the successful work. The value of social, iterative work was more vis­i­ble for administrative staff as they circulated among peers and donor representatives, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5, but was also frequently misread as concrete exchanges of information and knowledge rather than the relational and reputational work it ­really was. Ideas of “productivity” and the differential worthiness of dif­fer­ent tasks pervade most modern workplaces, and development interventions are certainly no dif­fer­ent. The GGAP was structured like many interventions are, w ­ hether focused on good governance, population health, livelihoods, or any objective of social improvement—it had a headquarters office in the capital city of Luanda, housing between three and five staff members at any given time to address program administration, with field teams of four to five ­people in each provincial field site. The GGAP headquarters office in Luanda was physically situated inside the American NGO’s country office and benefited from their other managerial staff well beyond the efforts of just the GGAP-­dedicated staff. This small central team in Luanda, while essential to the program’s in-­country implementation and therefore members of the implementariat as I define it, had only the most infrequent contact with program beneficiaries—­none of them would properly be called “street-­level bureaucrats” in mainstream policy or po­liti­cal science. The GGAP’s real street-­level bureaucrats worked, instead, in the five provincial field offices. ­These provincial field teams of (usually) four p­ eople ­were tasked with nearly impossible demands, though their impossibility could be denied in that most of the work the field teams ­were required to do was never formally identified as work in the program’s logframes or job descriptions.6 Chapter 2 details the experiences of the field staff ’s community development coordinators (CDCs), f­ ocusing

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especially on one w ­ oman, Rita, as she carried out duties in the GGAP’s Chicala Cholohanga office. The task of the CDCs, as Rita and ­others saw it, was first and foremost to form, train, and support new community-­based organ­izations—­the ODAs that w ­ ere the backbone of the GGAP’s interventionist method. Each office retained only one CDC, meant to work throughout exceptionally large, rural municipalities. As Rita explained and as I witnessed firsthand, CDCs therefore had to conduct an im­mense amount of logistical, orga­nizational, and communicative work in order to create the conditions for ­these ostensibly first-­order tasks of establishing ODAs. The bulk of their time was thus spent in activities that did not merit credit as development work in the formal systems of the GGAP and donors; activities like confirming which roads had been recently de-­mined, determining which vehicles and ­drivers ­were available for what length of time, driving out to dif­fer­ent communities to arrange ­future meetings, and so on. This work was not just overlooked by Luanda staff but was perhaps actively “unknown,” as is much of the work of the field staff in African clinical research ­trials (Geissler 2013). Rita’s assignment in Chicala Cholohanga, like that of the other CDCs in the other GGAP implementation sites, was plainly too large for any one person to reasonably fulfill as a set of professional responsibilities, alone or with a driver. The formal design and monitoring systems of the program could not recognize this fact, however, and much if not most of the interactions and communications that occurred between the GGAP’s five field offices and its headquarters office in Luanda involved misunderstandings about how much work could reasonably be expected from the field staff, and when and how that work could be accurately reported to Luanda. The crux of the issue was that much of the work CDCs and other members of the field staff engaged in was necessary, but not immediately, or even ultimately, “productive.” Such are many of the tasks and activities of implementation, falling therefore out of sight and into the broader category of development’s shadow work as the concept is developed ­here. In ­earlier formulations, shadow work denoted activities that should be considered valuable work but that po­liti­cal and social inequities cause to be seen as not at all work. Such activities are relegated instead to the categories of home, the personal, the voluntary, even hobbyist or leisure activities, rather than publicly vis­i­ ble, wage-­worthy ­labor. Shadow work for some theorists is, again, coterminous with the “reproductive ­labor” that feminist scholars identify as the unpaid, undervalued, and often even unacknowledged work of generational and daily social reproduction in a cap­i­tal­ist system. The gen­er­a­tion­ally reproductive work of having and raising c­ hildren and the quotidian reproductive work of caring for laborers current and ­future is now understood to be necessary to sustain industrial economies and systems. Such activities are still popularly derided, however, as inexpert and despite their necessity are often not categorized as “work” in the way wage-­earning ­labor is. Even when made part of waged ­labor, and then usually assigned to ­women and ­others of lower social rank (see, e.g., Daniels 1987), t­ hese



Development Hierarchies 31

tasks are commonly considered “­labors of love” that result from decisions made for personal fulfillment or as part of some natu­ral order that stands elementally apart from skilled, professionalized effort. Regularly regarded as personal, voluntary, and intrinsically rewarding, much of the work of maintaining a ­house­hold, cooking, cleaning, raising ­children and seeing to their daily needs does not qualify for wages or public support in the form of retirement or health care benefits ­unless conducted outside the home as a waged position. Moreover, seeking any such recompense outside that of a waged position threatens the purity of purpose so often presumed of ­these activities. Feminist scholars and social commentators note the double bind inherent in ­these attitudes: in placing (usually) ­women on a pedestal for the morally superior acts of caring for ­others and reproducing society, they become imprisoned in a socially inferior position. While the GGAP’s community development coordinators and the development implementariat as defined h­ ere is engaged in salaried l­ abor rather than reproductive ­labor in this sense, feminist and Marxist analyses of how ­women’s work is devalued provides a foundation for more expansive accounts of shadow or invisible work. Illich (1981), for one, recognizes as such work ­those activities that are much closer to wage-­earning ­labor but are equally overlooked, undervalued, and considered unworthy of the title “work.” Consider again a worker’s commute: this is time, effort, and often material resources expended in a wholly necessary act of preparation and movement in order for the worker to be able to undertake the tasks for which he or she earns wages. But the time, effort, and expense of most workers’ commutes are thought to be spent in­de­pen­dently, as a ­matter of private preference rather than a formal part of wage-­earning duties or hours. In the cap­ i­tal­ist conception of work, readying or preparing to work is not itself work, neither on the scale of the everyday nor that of the lifetime or ­career, in which years spent in training programs or apprenticeships are considered personal investments rather than productive work. Most workers in this framework do not have rights to recompense or support for activities directly in support of, or required by, waged ­labor. The existence of com­pany cars, with or without a driver, and other support ser­vices for more elite workers, however, reveals both the essential nature of t­ hese tasks and how social hierarchies intersect with the value such tasks are assigned. Within the GGAP, management staff, national and expatriate alike, held rights to program vehicles ­after hours and on the weekends, whereas field staff found to be making personal use of NGO vehicles ­were disciplined or even fired (Peters 2019b). More recently, writer Craig Lambert (2015), originally trained as a sociologist, ­adopted Illich’s use of the term shadow work to consider how the determination of what counts as work in popu­lar thinking has perhaps even regressed in the twenty-­first ­century as some activities have been redistributed out of the category of wage-­worthy ­labor and back into individuals’ private lives. Lambert writes about tasks that w ­ ere once or­ga­nized as wage-­earning positions, such as the ser­v ice station attendant, the

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travel agent, and the grocery store checker, that are increasingly but still only partially automated, now reor­ga­nized as consumers’ private responsibilities in the form of self-­service stations, direct booking websites, and the like. The daily, iterative actions taken by CDCs and other members of the GGAP’s field staff ­were not invisible to them, of course. Th ­ ese actions ­were very vis­i­ble and real to them and their intended beneficiaries and ­were definitely considered work on both sides of the development encounter. The formal information structures of the GGAP, like most development interventions, however, did not capture or value ­these actions as work: the closest-­to-­the-­ground data that the program could recognize about the CDCs’ work w ­ ere attendance figures at vari­ous meetings and events, not the time or effort required to or­ga­nize such events, and the “number of ODAs formed” rather than any of the pro­cesses and procedures required to form an ODA. Con­temporary monitoring and evaluation (M&E) procedures should be able to document how implementation agents spend their time and other resources but, as detailed in chapter 3, ­these procedures and instruments also “see” development work primarily from the rationalized point of view of the field’s intellectuals rather than its experts of practice and implementation.7 The institutional vision of implementation work as pre-­work or not-­work, or, within the under­lying framework of principal-­agent thinking, as the exercise of “discretion,” should be seen ­here as a kind of Althusserian misrecognition: ­these are acts that drive and are driven by institutional imaginaries, imposing and achieving ignorance of power relations as a necessary facet of their reproduction and maintenance (Althusser 1971, 182). Inside the development imaginary, and within the structures of the development industry’s common sense, the work of the field agents is considered difficult: acknowledged as laborious and tedious, but not as challenging in an intellectual sense. Further, ­these difficulties are presumed to organically derive from the inherent characteristics of their duties and place of work—­working with ordinary ­people in rural, impoverished Angola—­where demand for interventionist time and energy is presumed infinite, adapting to absorb any and all resources available. The difficulty of fieldwork is not thought to be in any way the result of fieldworkers’ bureaucratic position at the bottommost rungs of an institution, or of their constricted access to professional resources. Their conditions of work are accepted, naturalized in the larger thinking of t­ hese development institutions ­because they are misattributed to poverty and the need for development work itself rather than to the design flaws or institutional be­hav­ iors of the global response to that poverty.

Development Work and “Making Policy” This study of the GGAP suggests that policy work and implementation work are fundamentally similar as they are both deeply social and relational undertakings. The most impor­tant relational work undertaken by development professionals—at



Development Hierarchies 33

any hierarchical level in the industry—is that work done to manage impressions and social relationships among colleagues, ­whether to establish and defend hierarchical bound­aries between groups or to promote one’s position within a group. The innovation and creativity that policy making is often credited with as intellectual work, and therefore more prestigious and worthy than the mere practice of implementation work, is shown in the case of the GGAP to be only so much sharing of already existing practices and ideas across the networks of foreign aid elites. This social aspect of development intervention, like much “shadow work” (Illich 1981), is wholly necessary to the endeavor, but has been rendered invisible within and outside the industry. David Mosse interrogates the relationship of policy making to proj­ect implementation in the development industry, finding that “practices produce policy” not in the sense that Lipsky and the policy sciences consider it, but in the sense that “actors in development devote their energies to maintaining coherent repre­ sen­ta­tions regardless of events” (2004, 640). Mosse traces the implementation of a large agricultural intervention in India over more than a de­cade, identifying how the proj­ect continued along its route despite changing policy conversations and trends at the higher echelons of the global industry. The same proj­ect, he explains, with the same practices and procedures, was variously interpreted to match first one policy preference and then another to “maintain coherent repre­sen­ta­tions” of policy adherence, revealing that practice on the ground does not follow policy in the manner the policy sciences would presume but rather “produces policy” as agreement between, and reputational work among, donors and institutions. My analy­sis of the GGAP owes much to Mosse’s work, and chapters 4 and 5 consider the distributive work (Ferguson 2015) of elites in the development industry by looking into the GGAP’s founding—­how it came about as a program, how it ­adopted its par­tic­u­lar methods of “good governance” intervention, and why it was implemented in the par­tic­u­lar municipalities of Cabinda City, Chitato, Chicala Cholohanga, Andulo, and Cuito Cuanavale. If the social and relational work of field staff is relegated to the shadows or rendered invisible in the development industry’s rationalized models of work, the social and relational work of policy makers, elites, and even in-­country administrators who occupy the upper tier of the implementariat class is differently misrecognized. It is not wholly dis­appeared, as is the work of the field staff, but instead is taken to be something it is not. The social, relational, and reputational work of “making policy” in the sense that Mosse cogently identifies is misread in the industry and often in the policy and administrative sciences as the applied practice of making evidence-­based decisions. Misrecognition (Althusser 1971) at this level of the industry hinges on uncritical determinations about what counts as evidence: in the place of real information ­there are instead relationships and reputations, the bound­aries of which shape whose ideas and opinions are sought and whose are attended to most carefully.

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Attending to the ideas and opinions of peers is experienced as quite “productive” in the higher echelons of the development industry, and provides a compelling comparison for how “unproductively” the field staff are seen to be spending their time. Ferguson highlights a similar distinction (what Illich terms discrimination), between the productive and the unproductive in con­temporary parlance in order to argue for a redefinition of certain “unproductive” activities as nevertheless socially valuable b­ ecause they move resources around. Ferguson focuses on this “distributive ­labor”; that which “seeks to secure the transfer of resources from t­ hose who have them to ­those who ­don’t” (2015, 101). While his focus is on the more virtuous work of moving resources away from ­those who have plenty ­toward t­ hose who do not, the concept of considering distributive l­ abor—­the work of moving resources around—as a kind of production applies also to development’s elites and helps elucidate the hierarchies of work in the development industry. As detailed in chapters 4 and 5, policy makers at WestAid and its peer institutions attended to one another’s needs and experiences to a far greater degree than to ­those of the implementing agencies or local communities in designing where and how the GGAP would work. The end result was an intensification of intervention in many of the same Angolan sites, and an overlapping of institutional presence among large interventionist peers such as WestAid, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Seen as a type of distributive ­labor, such decision making about use of resources is still productive work in the sense that Ferguson urges us to consider, though it does not effect any decrease in resource in­equality—­very much the opposite. Much of the work of development policy making and the management of development institutions in the case of the GGAP, as perhaps is true of elite work in other industries, served to police the bound­aries of who has access to resources, enforcing a concentrated and focused distribution. This is still distributive work, though not redistributive in its results or effects. In presenting this work as the exercise of evidence-­based decision making, it is also part of the way development “NGOs and their collaborators construct themselves as rational” (Hodžić 2017, 11). Despite its effects of reinforcing in­equality and hierarchy, distributive work in the sense of controlling or directing access to resources, including rationality, is ­here seen still to be a kind of shadow work: social l­ abor, often invisible or misrecognized, required for the conduct of more obviously productive work but not always regarded as work in its own right. It is actually among elites, though, that this sort of shadow work is most often recognized as work in the form of elite networking and relationship work (Gershon 2017). The broad lit­er­a­ture on “policy implementation” in development and beyond has mistaken the nature both of implementation work and of policy making work, thereby inadvertently inscribing an unjustifiable hierarchy between them. Lipsky’s analy­sis of implementation agents is simply one example—­though a foundational



Development Hierarchies 35

example—of such work, focused nearly exclusively on the interactions and relationships between public-­facing bureaucrats and their clients, members of the public. He did ­little to consider the other aspects of sociality inherent in bureaucratic work, such as street-­level bureaucrats’ cooperation or competition with one another, or their relationships with superiors or extrainstitutional professional peers and colleagues in academia, the private sector, and beyond. The broad policy and management sciences follow this tunnel vision when theorizing the position of front-­line agents, neglecting to reflect on the position of ­those agents within their institutions and their professions. This is despite an active agenda in ­these fields that attends to the competition and relationships of organ­izations—­taken as a whole—to one another. ­These modes of thinking in the professionalized development industry privilege development NGO narratives of themselves as ­whole entities interacting with individuals and communities as recipients (their relationships with ­those “below”), with donor institutions and the governments of rich countries as superiors (their relationships with ­those “above”) and with the governments of poor countries and other interventionist institutions as lateral peers (relationships with “partners”). This emphasis on the vertical relationships between foreign aid donors and recipients as other­wise in­de­pen­dent except for this “helping” relationship mirrors the broader international development conception that poor countries are poor simply ­because they are, rather than ­because other countries are rich. Also hidden from view in development’s managerialist thinking—­despite Lipsky’s attentions to the “dilemmas of the individual in public services”—is the cross-­cutting sociality of groups and individuals inside any of ­these institutions, just as the cross-­cutting sociality of countries and groups of countries is often overlooked (but see Hughes et al. 2009; Paxton, Hughes, and Reith 2015). The oversight of internal sociality masks the industry’s misunderstanding and subsequent underestimation of implementation work and the implementariat, common as it is across scholarship, government, and popu­lar culture. Misrecognizing implementation work allows and perhaps even produces the structural constraints that street-­level bureaucrats—­and ­here, development’s implementation agents—­face. Rather than characterizing implementation as the exercise of discretion, or as the simplistic se­lection of choices among predetermined sets of pos­ si­ble options, implementation agents’ work should be seen as the creation of new options—­just as policy makers are usually credited with ­doing. Scholars, prac­ti­tion­ers, and the public should consider such frontline decision making as equally, perhaps even more, creative, intellectual, analytical, and innovative as other decision making is commonly understood to be—­specifically the decision making that happens in the arenas of policy design and analy­sis. Mark Schuller offers a cogent example of frustrated autonomy in his case study of the Haitian NGO he calls Sove Lavi, whose frontline staff could not so much as issue participation certificates to beneficiaries without approval from the NGO director, who

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in turn often sought donor approval for even such small actions, constringing the momentum and success of their interventions. Schuller intimates that in a more successful NGO, Fanm Tèt Ansam, frontline staff routinely took such decisions on their own, effectively exercising greater autonomy and, therefore, meeting with more success for their efforts (Schuller 2012, 103–106). Understanding implementation as more than mere “discretion,” as instead the exercise of a kind of autonomy, as Schuller and o­ thers urge, would justify significant changes to the structural organ­ization of such work and allow for dif­fer­ent, and differently informed, voices to wield influence. Likewise, acknowledging the existence and effects of social and relational work at higher echelons of the development industry would reveal the distributive l­ abor of the administrative and policy making classes, and the lack of interpretive ­labor they engage in, in contrast to the implementariat (Biruk 2016; Ferguson 2015; Graeber 2012). Lipsky’s and o­ thers’ arguments align with a broad development studies lit­er­a­ture debating the relative merits and influence of “local” or contextual knowledge versus “international” or expert knowledge; lines often taken to be concurrent with t­ hose between administration and fieldworkers or between policy makers and the implementariat. Such debates, however, wrongly characterize both the local and the international, both contextual knowledge and context-­ independent “expertise” (Holmes and Marcus 2005; Peters 2016). Though conversation around the relative worth of “local knowledge” has been a valuable lit­er­a­ture within development studies and beyond, my argument does not center on the differential influence of “local knowledge” versus a presumably “global” knowledge, divisions that hinge on the scope and content of what one knows. My argument throughout the book is that the nature of implementation work in international development is misunderstood as a qualitatively dif­fer­ent genre than the work of administration and policy making; it is this mischaracterization of what implementation staff do, not what they know, that reinforces older, overlapping inequalities of race, citizenship, and even gender. The implementariat exists at the lowest tier of development work: administrative science considers implementation professionals to be frontline agents, much like the military’s infantrymen are on the “front line” of a war. Frontline development workers are engaged in day-­to-­day communication with beneficiaries, which in development necessitates first setting the conditions for ­those communicative exchanges to take place. In the GGAP, staff-­beneficiary interaction was meant to be very carefully tracked and supported, but the essential tasks that brought t­hose exchanges about ­were nearly invisible in the formal structures of the program or ­were derided as just so much mindless, repetitive minutiae—­inexpert and inconsequential busywork, or grunt work. In the larger industry, ­these tasks are often implicitly, and even explic­itly, assigned to “volunteers” or “community workers,” deprofessionalizing the industry’s basal tasks and removing them entirely from systems of support and recompense (Carruth 2016;



Development Hierarchies 37

Englund 2006; Swidler and Watkins 2009; Watkins and Swidler 2013). Much as capitalism credits only waged activities as “work” and takes for granted the (re) productive actions of maintaining homes, raising ­children, caring for laborers, and preparing them to ­labor (Daniels 1987; Illich 1981; Waring 1999), the GGAP credited only certain kinds of beneficiary engagement as development work proper, neglecting the im­mense effort necessary to bring ­those interactions about. As discussed in detail in the following chapters, the GGAP’s field agents often appeared inefficient, possibly idle, and ­were even sometimes suspected of perpetuating fraud on the program through lack of work despite their own experience of intense work effort and frequently feeling overwhelmed at the demands they faced. In the same way that w ­ omen or other “shadow workers” or “invisible workers” are denied credit for their efforts despite the larger cap­i­tal­ist system’s clear reliance on them, development’s common sense dictated that such logistical and deeply social work was not specialized, intellectual, or expert, and was therefore not highly valued. In development’s “common sense,” the work of policy making and administration is the work of analy­sis, comparison, reflection, and, fi­nally, making decisions on what should be done. Implementers then “simply” do—or, as Lipsky holds, enact using what discretion they are allowed by their superiors and within the material possibilities allowed by the structures of their work. Applying this reckoning to development work in everyday practice, the constructs of “local knowledge” versus “global knowledge” are subsumed into the hierarchy of ­doing versus thinking. Historically, again, it is Westerners, Northerners, white p­ eople, and men who think. All o­ thers—­those from the South, brown and black p­ eople, ­women—do as they are assigned. In its overlap with ­these older hierarchies, the distinction between administration or policy making and implementation amounts to an “occupational segregation” (Thomas and Clarke 2013, 317, citing Pierre 2012) in the international development industry. Development industry inequalities w ­ ill be difficult to challenge without recognizing the multiplicity of ways in which development workers are internally divided and how dif­fer­ent professional hierarchies intersect with and reinforce the international/national divide (see also Roth 2012).8 Of par­tic­u­lar concern are the ways development workers are categorized in relation to tasks and awarded differential rights and responsibilities according to what duties they perform. Examining the development implementariat—­seeing the development industry through its hierarchies of task or duty—­demonstrates how the work of implementation is devalued as though on its own (deficient) merit and that this lesser prestige is transferred to members of the implementariat class as workers. Moreover, this analytical perspective demonstrates how members of the implementariat can themselves inadvertently contribute to the misrecognition of their work and their worth as they relate to their colleagues, superiors, and intended beneficiaries within ­these systems of professional in­equality.

2 • DEVELOPMENT ’S INPUTS AND OUTPUTS

Episodic events in which the GGAP field staff encountered their community and municipal government beneficiaries came in forms both large and small. ­W hether a large event attracting over two hundred ­people, like the Andulo municipal forum mentioned in the introduction, or a more quotidian training meeting with the dozen or so members of an ODA created and supported by the program, t­ hese encounters ­were essential for the GGAP. The GGAP’s implementariat, its in-­country administrative and field staff, considered ­these formal interactions the mechanisms by which the program could effect change in local Angolan governance; such formal events w ­ ere the very heart and soul of program implementation. This chapter considers the im­mense amount of behind-­the-­scenes work required to bring ­these formal encounters about, focusing on how and why this work was not commonly credited in the GGAP’s accounting structures. Arranging ­these events had “become expected, part of the background, and invisible by virtue of routine (and social status)” (Star and Strauss 2015 [1999], 362; see also Goffman 1959). Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss’s analy­sis of the “layers of silence” about what work is valuable and what actions are even considered “work” in professional organ­izations offers further insight into why tasks performed by the development implementariat are effectively concealed by ostensibly rational models of intervention. Members of the GGAP’s field staff in its five provincial offices toiled at highly social “preparatory” work as they brought about the proj­ect’s required meetings and exchanges between GGAP staff and beneficiaries, and among the dif­fer­ent beneficiary parties themselves. Despite being necessary activities that w ­ ere in fact responsible for bringing about the formal encounters that the program considered its interventionist “inputs,” on the w ­ hole, administrative staff in Luanda did not see them as impor­tant responsibilities.1 On the rare occasion, moreover, in which administrative staff ­were themselves tasked with similar duties—as when Raul is sent to or­ga­nize an internal workshop for provincial staff (described l­ ater in the chapter)—­their skills are shown to be woefully inadequate. The actions, 38



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tacit knowledge, and specifically the social and relational work necessary to realize the GGAP’s central moments of training, discussion, and civic participation ­were considered pre­ce­dent to proper development work; simply the organ­izing and logistical pre-­work for the real development work presumed to happen during such encounters, but not before them. This chapter demonstrates how t­ hese foundational implementation tasks, in the GGAP and throughout the industry, get assigned to development’s backstage through the managerial presumptions and practices of implementing organ­izations that view such activities as falling ­under a type of “discretion” among frontline workers. ­Here, the daily experience of provincial GGAP field agents, tasked to interact directly with the program’s beneficiaries, is situated within the program’s formalized logics and the institutionalized perceptions of administrators and donors, who do not see the vast majority of the field staff ’s work ­because only office-­based activities are vis­i­ble to them. Field staff ­were deeply motivated to realize the formal encounters on which the GGAP’s methods rested, but as they w ­ ere never directly recognized nor supported in the necessary efforts to do so, a double bind was created for them. To do their jobs and achieve programmatic goals, field staff needed to engage in practical activities that ­were indeterminate, iterative, and contingent—­actions that certainly took them away from their desks, their e-­mail accounts, and their report writing. They needed to spend time parsing the local social situation in a multitude of communities and in communities-­w ithin-­ communities. They needed to communicate and negotiate with diverse sets of ­people, largely face to face. But spending their days getting to know their intended beneficiaries, or in the arduous travel required just to reach them physically, did not appear productive to their superiors ­unless such encounters could be enumerated as formal trainings or exchanges and confirmed with participant lists, minutes, photo­graphs, and after-­action reports. From the field staff ’s perspective, this was another development paradox: to achieve the most highly valued, formal encounters required work that was unsupported, even denigrated. The field staff knew, for instance, that in organ­izing a training or workshop one might neglect to invite locally impor­tant persons, w ­ hether through ignorance or carelessness, and that such a misstep would threaten the success of that singular event as well as the program’s reputation and therefore its ­future pursuits. Attending to such m ­ atters as finding out who the locally impor­tant persons ­were, however, and then establishing and maintaining relationships with them, did not count as work to GGAP administrators and was largely overlooked by them. While orga­nizational double binds are debated openly in development and humanitarian work, as in the case of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; Doctors Without Borders) (see also Fassin 2010), the individual dilemmas of frontline workers in development interventions are less well examined, leaving t­ hose in their grip to negotiate them ad hoc.2 Their decisions—­either to invest carefully in the preparatory social work of everyday development and risk being seen

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as unproductive by superiors or, alternatively, to pursue more vis­i­ble activities at the risk that ­these could turn out to be hollow facsimiles of real engagement or, worse, do real damage to the program—­heavi­ly impact programmatic success and clearly merit more detailed investigation. Such contradictions, or “lived dilemmas” (Lave 2015, 224), are exceedingly familiar to professionals in the development and humanitarian industries; a­ fter all, ­these are fields in which true professional success would mean putting oneself or one’s agency out of work. Examining similar contradictory prerogatives of humanitarian action in the case of MSF, Peter Redfield describes how the double bind in such work “motivates by a desire to satisfy competing injunctions, thus precipitating a prob­lem of choice, rather than necessity” (2012, 361). Humanitarian agencies and agents wish to satisfy what are, in the end, contradictory demands; for instance, to pay the national staff salaries that are equitable with ­those of international colleagues while si­mul­ta­neously leaving local economies undistorted and local candidate pools undepleted so as not to weaken national institutions (Redfield 2013b, 150–151). At a more granular scale, GGAP field staff wanted, similarly, to do two mutually exclusive ­things: (1) to engage in as many formal encounters as pos­si­ble, as the program design demanded, and (2) to do so well, by investing in the invisible, preparatory, behind-­the-­scenes activities necessary to ensure the success of such encounters. Field staff knew that to or­ga­nize formal encounters without this work was perhaps impossible and was certainly inadvisable; they ­were at odds with themselves as to how to strike the right balance. Looking ethnographically at the work of the GGAP field staff, particularly each provincial office’s CDC and his or her interactions with their colleagues, reveals how their everyday work is rendered invisible to higher echelons in the program and the industry. It also reveals “the politics of formalism” (Star 1995a), in which social relationships and hierarchies of power are played out through, and reflected within, ostensibly rationalized repre­sen­ta­tions of work. An example of t­ hese politics then comes through a close reading of the GGAP’s “logframe,” an instrument of development managerialism that means to structure work objectives precisely, preferably in quantified form, so they can be supported, tracked, and refined. Ironically, this very instrument dis­appears the field staff ’s work even as it is intended to clarify what work is impor­tant and how this work relates to an intervention’s desired outcomes. For the GGAP’s designers and administrators, and facilitated by the formalization of the logframe instrument, certain activities and expenditures are counted as development “inputs,” as are the “technically skilled staff ” themselves (see also the appendix). Together, t­hese are the “raw” materials of intervention as designed and directed by policy makers and man­ag­ers. The mentality that p­ eople are themselves “inputs” or “tools” dehumanizes members of the field staff (Maes 2016a) and serves to obscure the nature of their skills, activities, and contributions. Where job descriptions and the logframe state that the CDC was to spend his or her time “building the capacity of CBOs [community-­based

­­table 2.1.

Development’s Inputs and Outputs 41

The GGAP’s Intended Purposes, Termed “Results” in Program Documents

“Results” Sought by the Good Governance in Angola Program Result 1

Municipal planning, bud­geting, and proj­ect implementation routinely follow a pro­cess of broad and inclusive community participation; meet minimum standards for design, implementation, and accountability; and feed effectively into the provincial planning and bud­get pro­cess.

Result 2

Targeted communities can or­ga­nize themselves effectively to make decisions, feed into local issues, and demonstrate basic skills in participatory planning, management, and evaluation.

Result 3

Completed proj­ects demonstrate social inclusion value to the community, including sufficient community support to give evidence of sustainability.

organ­izations],” “empowering communities,” or “assessing the capacity of traditional authorities,” exactly what, on the daily level, does that mean for the field staff? The logframe as planning and evaluation artifact does not provide answers, despite being widely presumed to hold a thorough summation of interventionist action. In the end, field staff determined for themselves what their work should focus on, and how it should be or­ga­nized, but then faced administrative staff that did not understand their daily activities.

“Technically Skilled GGAP Staff . . .” In each provincial field site, the GGAP implementation office was staffed by a team of four or sometimes five ­people, alongside a support staff of guards, ­drivers, and a cleaning person/cook. The professional staff members w ­ ere each tasked with contributing to one or more of the GGAP’s formal goals, referred to in programmatic parlance as its “Results” (see ­table 2.1). Each office had a municipal development coordinator (CDM) and a CDC who led that team’s efforts ­toward Results 1 and 2, respectively. Each also had a grants man­ag­er, and most teams had an infrastructures officer. Leading efforts ­toward Result 3, ­these two positions held responsibility to help manage “micro-­projects” costing roughly USD 10,000 to 15,000 each. In the course of a micro-­project, local community groups, working with the team’s CDC, ­were supposed to deliberate on their community’s priorities and propose a community event or improvement to the GGAP, sized appropriately to the funds available. Putting a new roof on a clinic or school, contracting with the International Red Cross to conduct a traditional birth attendant training session, or purchasing livestock for the beginnings of a small-­stock breeding program are examples of some of the GGAP’s funded micro-­projects. Community groups w ­ ere meant to write a grant application to the GGAP for the funds

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and then to manage and oversee the proj­ect with the GGAP team’s support while communicating about it clearly to local municipal government such that it was not only properly approved, licensed, and so on but also well aligned with the administration’s broader municipal plans. With t­ hese three purposes, the GGAP considered itself to be tackling the prob­ lem of participatory local governance on both sides of the citizen–­state relationship si­mul­ta­neously and experientially. With Result 1, the GGAP expected that local government staff members would themselves be better able to do their jobs, including soliciting and making use of public opinion and conducting their work with greater transparency for their constituents. With Result 2, the GGAP was working on the citizen side, helping local communities or­ga­nize themselves efficiently and communicate their needs to their local government. Fi­nally, with Result 3, the micro-­projects ­were meant to be sites of experiential learning for both sides: communities would deliberate and prioritize their needs, learn to identify what could be accomplished with the resources at hand, and, in following a proposed improvement through to completion, become active, instead of passive, partners in their own governance. On the government side, the micro-­projects ­were meant to demonstrate to local government administrations how capable their constituencies r­ eally ­were, and government agents ­were meant to experience how delegating some of the tasks of social improvement and governance to the ­people themselves could be effective, if properly supervised and integrated into other plans. While many of the GGAP’s provincial field staff had responded directly to local announcements for specific positions, o­ thers came to the intervention through more circuitous routes, finding themselves assigned to the program without knowing much about it beforehand. In the Chicala Cholohanga office, Rita was among ­these latter fieldworkers in terms of her entrance to the program. Though ethnically Ovimbundu, Rita had not grown up in the Central Highlands and was just moving to Huambo City when she was hired as “local staff” for the GGAP through the British NGO (see discussion of similar cases in the Andulo office in Peters 2016). She, her twin ­sister, and her other siblings had been born in a campo militar in the north of Angola in Uíge Province, where her f­ather was stationed with the national armed forces as a nurse and teacher during the 1970s and 1980s. As an officer, he had been able to move the ­family to Luanda in advance of the 1991 elections, and Rita had come of age in the periurban Luanda neighborhood of Cazenga, training ­toward the médio degree at the national secondary school for social educators. At Angola’s professionalized secondary schools, students between the ages of about 15 to 20 receive training to a level that equates to somewhat more than the American high school diploma but less than the bachelor’s degree. Part of the distinction is the required completion of several professional internships as part of the degree. Gradu­ates are then eligible for entry-­level professional work in a variety of fields that in the United States would minimally require a ­bachelor’s



Development’s Inputs and Outputs 43

or associate’s degree. Rita, for instance, upon graduation had already worked for several months in a professional capacity with the United Nations offices in Luanda and thereafter had been assigned for six months to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) offices in Moxico Province, bordering Zambia in the far east of Angola. It was in Moxico that Rita r­ eally found her footing as a fieldworker and community or­ga­nizer. She learned firsthand that to work with the community is to first approach the sobas (traditional authorities) and then to make sure “that nothing happens that the sobas do not know about.” Hired on as permanent staff a­ fter her internship, Rita worked with the UNDP for three very tough but rewarding years in Moxico Province. She first taught literacy and Portuguese3 and lectured on ­human rights. Learning to speak Luvale, she then transitioned to the work of community organ­izing. She discovered she had jeito—­a talent, a knack—­for associational training and began to specialize in organ­izing local ­women’s groups ­toward social activism, even helping to found a w ­ omen’s training center that, at her departure from Moxico, had begun the pro­cess of formally legalizing itself. ­After so long in Moxico, however, Rita both longed to be closer to her f­ amily and had developed strong interest in pursuing a university degree. Originally from Huambo, her parents had moved back ­there from Luanda while she had been working in Moxico, and she set her sights on joining them in the center of the country. To support her transition, Rita took a short-­term consultancy with the French Cooperation Agency, participating in an evaluation of Mozambique’s 2004 elections. A ­ fter this four-­month assignment abroad, she arrived in Huambo and sat for the university entrance exam at the Instituto Superior de Ciências de Educação do Huambo (ISCED). She also prepared her résumé and dropped it off at each of the large international NGO offices in Huambo City, where the British NGO was the first to contact her. At first they offered her only a three-­month consultancy position with the GGAP ­because “they could not believe” she had r­ eally accomplished every­thing she claimed to have done in her application materials. ­After this contingency period had passed, all doubts had been dispelled, of course, and they told her “você vai ficar, vai ficar mesmo” (lit., you’ll stay right ­here): she was placed on the GGAP’s regular Chicala Cholohanga field staff as the CDC. Entering the GGAP was neither smooth nor easy for Rita. Moving to yet another new place, she felt isolated, although her parents’ presence in town helped. Like most of the other Chicala Cholohanga staff—­all of the professional staff, in fact—­she lived in Huambo City and commuted to the field office each day, largely in NGO vehicles but frequently in public “taxis.” And though it had quickly become clear that she was an excellent fieldworker and that the organ­ization should keep her on, it had taken two additional months for them to prepare her new contract and for her to be officially established as the CDC in Chicala Cholohanga. As the position had been vacant for a period of months before her arrival, the British NGO had asked her to begin certain tasks in the meantime; she

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worked during this transition without a proper contract and found some of her introductions to key interlocutors awkward or frustrated as a result. She l­ater heard from some of the d­ rivers that many of t­ hese negotiations had been contentious among other members of the GGAP staff, which she chalks up to a certain machistidão (sexism, male chauvinism). Evidently the rest of the field team, all men at the time, had originally had concerns that a w ­ oman would be able to aguentar (to suffer or to tolerate) the rigors of the CDC position. Part of their concern may well have been a type of sexism—­Rita was still quite young, was unmarried, and happens to be physically pe­tite. While none of ­these ­factors predict an (in)ability to do the job, many may have had concerns. She also stuttered quite badly when she was ner­vous, as she frequently was among colleagues and in the formal offices of the British NGO. What some of her supervisors and colleagues would not have been able to know beforehand was that her stutter nearly dis­ appeared when she was conducting fieldwork among beneficiaries; she simply exuded energy and lifted every­one’s spirits as she led her groups. ­After her rocky start, though, Rita excelled in her work; a­ fter just six months of work as a permanent member of the GGAP field staff, she had even developed some renown in the communities and among most of the provincial staff as a tenacious fieldworker. When I spoke with Rita at that point about her first weeks and months in her GGAP position, she described being very dissatisfied with the training and orientation she had received: no one had been assigned to train her about the GGAP as a program or her specific position within it, and no par­tic­u­lar resources ­were available to orient her to the intervention and its objectives. She had pieced together some of the program’s goals in her period as a con­sul­tant, however, and then simply fell to organ­izing the ODAs in the manner she had been using for ­women’s groups in Moxico. Rita described having an im­mense amount of work to do to form new ODAs as well as revive ­those formed by her pre­de­ces­sor. Upon her entry, it turned out that existing ODAs had not been kept informed of the GGAP’s staff changes. Many groups ­were angry that they had not received any recent programmatic attention, complaining to Rita when she visited that “we ­were formed, elected, registered—­then nothing!” Repairing just ­these relationships occupied Rita for quite some time. Additionally, she had already known when she accepted the permanent position that the field office’s official rec­ords on the ODAs w ­ ere not exactly accurate—­reported statements and rec­ords as to what ODAs had been formed and what training they had received on what topics, and so on, w ­ ere not wholly corroborated in Rita’s first visits to many communities. It seems that e­ ither the reporting of Rita’s pre­de­ces­sor had been overly optimistic regarding his accomplishments or, that vis-­à-­v is the double bind described ­earlier, he had made a dif­fer­ent choice than Rita would have made between visibility and substance. In many of the municipalities’ small communities, therefore, Rita had to conduct the work of forming new ODAs that the program erroneously thought had already been completed.



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On an everyday level, the tasks required just to establish an ODA in the rural Angolan municipalities in which the GGAP worked translated into an im­mense amount of logistical organ­ization, communication, and travel. For this community-­ level work, t­ here was one sense in which the first step was of course for Rita to visit each of the municipality’s rural communities to introduce herself and the GGAP as a program and to discuss the GGAP’s goals and each community’s needs. This was best done by approaching each local administração da comuna (village-­level administrator), who could then also alert local sobas, and such introductory meetings could begin. The true first step, however, was simply to arrange this first meeting itself. Traveling around the Central Highlands of Angola, even as an Angolan and with the resources of an international development program ­behind you, is still no easy task, nor is it fast or straightforward. Bringing about even a first meeting was itself a remarkable feat of tenacity, persuasion, goodwill, and perhaps luck. Although the GGAP was formally in good standing with the provincial and municipal administrations with which it “partnered” (see chap. 5 for further discussion of the GGAP’s methods), ­these relationships ­were complicated in each field site and did not, even in the best cases, always carry down to the most local level of the comunas and communities. Knowing with whom to speak and where or how to find them to arrange for such meetings is an unacknowledged foundation of development work and is largely a realm of knowledge that resides with implementation staff and often specifically with ­drivers (see also Peters 2019a). Rita was very disappointed with the GGAP’s Chicala Cholohanga office on this count, as they w ­ ere assigned ­drivers out of the larger Huambo City driver pool, and, though certain ­drivers had developed knowledge of ­these par­tic­u­lar communities, o­ thers had not. Still o­ thers did not seem to want to, simply driving and then staying with the vehicle upon arrival in a community rather than participating—as her ­drivers had all very helpfully done in Moxico—in the activities ­there. Only ­after arranging for a first meeting, then, could Rita introduce herself and the program and begin the long pro­cess of forming the community groups through which she was then meant to conduct “capacity building.” Sometimes Rita might be able to bring along a colleague from the municipal administration or, very rarely, the provincial administration to corroborate their pre­sen­ta­tion and encourage local communities to participate in the program, but often Rita would conduct ­these pre­sen­ta­tions alone—or if her driver was interested in participating, as a duo with him.4 On the ­whole, Rita and other CDCs relied heavi­ly on word of mouth to conduct much of the pre-­meeting organ­ization and logistical arrangements, asking at each meeting for her community interlocutors to speak about the program with their extended ­family, friends, neighbors, fellow parishioners at their churches, and so on, such that as she made her way through the rural municipality, her reputation preceded her, and dif­fer­ent communities came to expect her arrival.5

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­Matters often ran fairly smoothly ­after the first pre­sen­ta­tion, and a series of f­ uture meetings could begin to be arranged wherein other impor­tant community leaders could be brought together to hear Rita’s explication of the program. Rita could at t­ hese second or higher-­order meetings ask for community leaders’ permission to hold an open-­to-­the public meeting to announce the program, such that she could then begin to solicit potential officers and participants for the ODAs from among the broad populace. Sometimes she had to arrange for several of ­these sorts of public announcements, and question and answer sessions, in any one village or set of villages before she felt that most residents broadly had heard about and understood the program and what it had to offer. She would then work hard with village leaders to determine a good time and location for the official elections necessary to establish an ODA and would make several training visits to the communities in question before the elections to ensure that all interested individuals understood the procedures and what would be required of the officers and to work with candidates to prepare their brief speeches for the day of the elections. Any of ­these encounters required Rita and at least a driver’s physical presence. Each visit could, and usually did, take hours of arduous driving to arrive at, and return from, the meeting. Beyond the poor road conditions and im­mense distances that face implementation workers in many developing countries, the GGAP teams working in Bié, Huambo, and especially Cuando Cubango provinces had to coordinate closely with national and international de-­mining interventions to keep track of which roads and tracks ­were suspected of harboring land mines left over from the civil war and which had been cleared and recently checked. Even ­those that had been cleared still posed a risk as, with each rain, mines that had been too deeply buried to be found at the time of a clearing operation could easily surface and regularly did. The British NGO responsible for the Chicala Cholohanga team followed procedures similar to other international and national NGOs working in the Central Highlands. GGAP trucks and ­drivers ­were authorized to drive only on certain roads and paths as they had been cleared or ­were ­under periodic checking by the de-­mining teams. Teams ­were not allowed to travel in the dark, which meant that they could not leave for a trip ­until 6:00 a.m., and they had to be parked again at the office by 6:00 p.m. Staff ­were not to spend the night in villages without prior approval, and this was rarely, if ever, granted. Cars and staff w ­ ere to register their routes with the British NGO’s logistics officer in Huambo, w ­ hether they left from Huambo or Chicala Cholohanga. They ­were to verify by radio the time of their departure, check in with a locational update ­every two hours, and confirm arrival at all planned destinations. Any deviations from the route or schedule had to be reported, and most required approval before being undertaken. Given the daytime driving limitation and the physical size of the municipality, ­these contextual ­factors meant that very few communities could be visited on any par­tic­u­lar day—­slow work indeed for each team’s sole CDC.



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To fi­nally, formally establish an ODA, Rita would work to or­ga­nize some of her colleagues from the GGAP team to accompany her to the elections. ­After all had gathered and GGAP staff had made another series of pre­sen­ta­tions about what an ODA was and what it should do, and what the GGAP was and why it was instigating ­these procedures, the GGAP staff would or­ga­nize the candidates for office, taping a large number on each person’s shirt and directing each candidate to take his or her turn making a short speech, then conducting the election proper. Often elections ­were conducted by show of hands or voice; at other times, this was done by write-in ballot for each position—­but this was only pos­si­ble with many helpers. The establishment of a new ODA was obviously a cause for ­great cele­bration ­after so much organ­izing, explaining, and, often, cajoling. It was also the beginning of a ­great deal of other work—­training the ODA to undertake its own initiatives, maintaining its vibrancy, encouraging it to communicate directly with the local government, and working ­toward micro-­projects, among other ­things. Beyond forming ­these community groups—at which she did excel—­Rita was not confident that she fully understood how the several arms and tasks of the GGAP as a ­whole program ­were meant to articulate together: How w ­ ere community training, municipal administration training, the micro-­projects, the “mainstreaming” of other m ­ atters (e.g., gender and HIV/AIDS, e­ tc.) meant to add up to a “good governance” program? She continued to be intimidated by some of her colleagues, and some inside the organ­ization took advantage of her timorousness to claim certain of her accomplishments as their own. As detailed ­here, the necessary actions of communication and organ­izing that fell before and ­after each meeting, training, interaction forum, or exchange event constituted the bulk of the provincial field staff ’s daily work. Although as face-­ to-­face interactions between development professionals and their intended recipients many of t­hese tasks are development encounters in their own right, they are not discussed as such within the development industry. They are highly social, interpersonal activities, and this is one ele­ment that drives their erasure. This is “deleting the work”; “a series of displacements on the road to formalizing” (Star 1995a, 98), as formal models of work—in a logframe, for instance, or even in a report—­“gloss over” or make invisible certain of its aspects in the ser­vice of simplicity, replicability, and generalizability. For the GGAP’s field staff, however, such displacement of preparation work was not an appropriate trade-­off for the elegance of statements like “capacitating the ODAs,” nor w ­ ere their gains in ­creating relationships with community members t­oward creating and supporting ODAs ever appreciated at the level of the provincial office. Though the practical, face-­to-­face, relational activities of implementation ­were less vis­i­ble as work to the GGAP’s administrators and donors than w ­ ere administrative tasks, and less valued than ­those office-­based activities, ­these ­were the tasks that ­were more ­actual (in Portuguese, a term for practical and real) to the provincial

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fi­ eldworkers than ­were most of the office-­based administrative duties, such as filling out reporting forms or filing meeting minutes, that ­were more clearly acknowledged as work.

“. . . ​a nd Sufficient Support” Another central aspect of the field staff ’s work that went essentially unnoted by administrative staff was the reporting on and negotiation of their work with their colleagues—­both their lateral colleagues and their immediate superiors on the administrative team. As w ­ ill be described h­ ere, a visit from the Luanda-­based M&E officer, Raul, interrupts field-­level implementation and displaces staff members from the Chicala Cholohanga field site to meet with him in Huambo City. Raul and other administrative staff are seen in such visits to be d­ oing impor­tant communicative and managerial work, and they even submit formal “trip reports” to the GGAP’s program director, Osman. The other staff involved in t­ hese same conversations—­the field staff being visited—­are allowed to submit no such documentation to credit their time and effort spent in ­these exchanges. As the GGAP’s first midterm evaluation neared, the Luanda-­based administrative staff became increasingly anxious about its M&E data, and the program director, Osman, made the decision to host a two-­day workshop for the provincial field staff in Huambo City as a type of retraining for the M&E system. Osman had dispatched Raul, the GGAP’s Luanda-­based M&E and communications coordinator, to Huambo roughly two weeks before the scheduled workshop to finalize arrangements. Raul traveled periodically to the provincial field sites to offer assistance on M&E procedures, to retrieve and carry back to Luanda documents and data, and to help keep each field site in some kind of contact with the ­others through his peripatetic travels among them. This par­tic­u­lar trip was therefore of combined purpose: both a regular check-in with the Chicala Cholohanga office on its pro­gress to date and its submission of M&E forms and a preparatory, organ­ izing trip for the coming workshop. As he arrived in the Huambo City office of the British NGO fresh from the first morning flight from Luanda, Gavino, the Chicala Cholohanga field team supervisor, was arriving at the office ­after morning meetings held elsewhere. Raul immediately convened a meeting with Gavino in the upstairs conference room and they ­were joined by Marco, a technical adviser at the British NGO who followed the GGAP closely. In this meeting Raul acted, with his speech, his body language, and his eye contact, as though he was directing events in some supervisory capacity in relation to both Gavino and Marco. This was wholly inappropriate, however. Raul and Marco ­were actually his lateral peers: Marco was formally based out of the Luanda office of the British NGO of the GGAP consortium, just as Raul was based out of the Luanda office of the American NGO. Marco also traveled regularly to the large Huambo City office to advise on all of the British NGO’s programming ­there,



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including the GGAP. He had a good working relationship with the Huambo staff as a type of intermediary worker straddling both administrative and implementation concerns. Gavino, meanwhile, worked full time for the GGAP through the British NGO, as the Chicala Cholohanga team leader. He was reputed to run the Chicala Cholohanga field office firmly and smoothly, and he was well liked and well respected as an older, experienced development worker who had a long-­ standing relationship with the British NGO. Raul was, properly, in a type of support position to Gavino and other Chicala Cholohanga staff members and, again, was only a lateral peer to Marco as both men merely advised and tracked, but did not direct or hold decision-­making power over, implementation work in the field offices. It was evident in this meeting, however, that Raul neither saw himself as a peer nor in merely a supporting position. His actions and questions also revealed that he was unfamiliar with the daily operations of the provincial offices. For this first meeting, Raul had prepared several small speeches about readying for the upcoming workshop. In delivering them, however, he spoke with unjustifiable condescension and in unnecessary detail. Furthermore, he focused on the wrong details, such as what size note­pads to purchase, rather than addressing more substantive concerns. Gavino and Marco, throughout, looked as though they ­were trying to escape the meeting. Both men, uncharacteristically, w ­ ere leaning as far back in their chairs, and as far away from the conference ­table, as they physically could. The three colleagues carefully listed the items that would be needed for the workshop, and, item by item, confirmed ­whether or not the material in question could be found for purchase in Huambo City—­butcher paper for small-­ group exercises, markers, notebooks, and so on. All agreed that it would be best if most of the physical materials for the workshop could be sourced locally in Huambo rather than brought from Luanda. Raul sought to task the Huambo staff with compiling ­these materials prior to the day of the workshop, but Gavino and Marco pointed out that ­there ­were no funds for the workshop extant in the Huambo office; the workshop was a production of the central Luanda office, and Raul should have brought cash with him on this preparatory trip. Marco and Gavino ­were dismayed to find out that he had not brought funds—­what was the purpose of his visit, they wondered ­later, if not to concretely accomplish the preparations for the workshop? Raul determined he would have to bring cash from the Luanda office when he came for the workshop proper, purchasing the necessary items the day before the event. The men spent a considerable amount of time discussing one mystery item that ended up being index cards—­R aul was insistent that the workshop would need to have “small papers” of dif­fer­ent colors and sizes for their activities, and Marco and Gavino sought to reassure him that some kind of sticky note would surely be available in town. They went around several times about what a sticky note was, what ­these small papers w ­ ere that Raul insisted ­were necessary, and why sticky notes would be unacceptable substitutions. It took a surprising amount of time

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and explanation for the group to realize that he was thinking of index cards, which ­were not the kind of item that routinely found its way to Huambo Province. It was surprising that the staff was so certain sticky notes could be found. Knowing that one of the Canadian NGO’s Luanda-­based advisers to the GGAP, Maximino, would be attending meetings in South Africa that week, I suggested that if index cards w ­ ere genuinely essential to the workshop, perhaps he could bring some back from his trip. Raul felt this was untenable and pressed the Huambo office colleagues to make sure they searched for index cards over the next two weeks. At the workshop, index cards never did appear, and sticky notes turned out to be sufficient for their purposes. The three men then turned to the logistics of who would be coming for the workshop, as the GGAP officers from Luanda and the further provincial offices would all need lodging. Raul asserted that Gavino and Marco should immediately begin calling local h­ otels to make reservations for t­ hese attendees, but he was interrupted by their countering that surely most out-­of-­town attendees would be able to stay at the British or Canadian NGOs’ guesthouses—or even a third guest­ house in town, affiliated with an Angolan NGO rather than an international one—­rather than paying the high rates of the city’s private h­ otels. Raul had clearly not thought of ­these guesthouses—­more evidence of his unfamiliarity with ­these NGOs’ provincial operations—­and actually made his colleagues wait while he called Osman on the phone, then and t­ here, to verify w ­ hether the guest­houses ­were appropriate for the purposes of the workshop. Receiving confirmation from Osman that the provincial field officers attending the workshop from the British NGO’s sites could indeed stay at their own organ­ization’s guest­house in Huambo, Raul turned back to his colleagues and still made his obviously rehearsed speech about how they would have to start calling around to the local h­ otels about finding places to stay for the administrative staff from Luanda and the other provincial field sites. In the end, lodging was indeed found for all workshop guests in the vari­ous NGO guest­houses. This first logistical meeting with Raul and t­ hese more se­nior British NGO staff members was, on the one hand, quite typical of regular work in ­these development organ­izations. It was true that meetings such as the workshop they ­were planning, like many of the events and activities of ­these international NGOs, did require certain materials to be purchased beforehand, and it took a certain amount of discussion, organ­ization, and planning to bring about the desired results. It was certainly worthwhile to clarify how many ­people would attend the meeting, where they would stay, where and when it was to be held, and how necessary materials would be obtained. On the other hand, both Gavino and Marco ­were far more practiced at ­these sorts of preparations and did not expect that such ­matters should take very much time to or­ga­nize. They w ­ ere rightfully disappointed that Raul and the Luanda-­based administrators had lacked the foresight to send funds with him on this preparatory trip and questioned the expense and decision of having sent



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him at all, given how ill prepared he was to or­ga­nize the ­matter. The Huambo staff found Raul’s further questions and the purposes he proposed in his meetings on this trip to be disappointingly insubstantial throughout. For instance, ­after an abrupt stop to the discussion around materials for the upcoming workshop, Raul rather bluntly asked his provincial colleagues “if t­ here was any news” about the GGAP and “the context” of Chicala Cholohanga. Gavino correctly took this to be a thinly veiled request for a local po­liti­cal update in the wake of the recent parliamentary elections. He also correctly took it to be presumptive and rather inappropriate for the M&E staff person to be asking about. With this question Raul was acting the part of evaluator or se­nior adviser to the provincial staff, rather than the ju­nior support person that he in fact was. The 2008 parliamentary elections ­were the first elections Angola had successfully held without descending again into civil war, and for several weeks before and ­after they ­were held, Angolans refrained from gathering together in groups—­even church ser­vices ­were canceled in certain areas—so as to avoid any appearance of po­liti­ cal organ­izing. Registered po­liti­cal parties, of course, did hold meetings and rallies, and the GGAP staff in ­every field site ­were at pains not to be mistaken as po­liti­cally affiliated or engaged in electoral politics in any way—­there had been official moratoria on convening community meetings, and certain of the provincial field sites had reason to be particularly cautious about the ­matter. The answer to Raul’s question, therefore, was that both in the lead-up to the elections and in the immediate period ­after them, the field teams and the municipal administration staff had not been ­doing much in the way of convening community meetings or working closely with the ODAs, for very good reason. Raul responded as if on behalf of the administration of the program: “We know ­these ­things in Luanda, we have heard about ­these ­things happening, and we still have certain concerns and certain worries.” In his response, he was claiming a positional superiority that he did not properly hold. He continued, addressing his colleagues as camaradas, or comrades, invoking some of the Marxist-­Leninist language of the MPLA during the early civil war. This term is now rarely used in the Highlands, except in irony, and the situation among ­these three men worsened further as he employed it. In response, Gavino spoke at length about the prob­ lems that he has come across as regards the be­hav­ior of local municipal administration officials, not only in Huambo Province but among other administrations that he comes into contact with through vari­ous of the NGO meetings and conferences he attends. He used the example that, at a recent troca de experiência workshop (an information exchange workshop) with municipal administration staff from several dif­fer­ent rural municipalities, he had learned that certain administration staff members refuse to visit the rural comunas they are meant to serve, and not ­because they disagree that ­doing so is necessary or would be productive. Rather, he asserted pointedly, ­these administration staff members are far too concerned with the protocol of their relative positions and make the decision to

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travel, to visit rural communities, not based on the task itself and what it would accomplish but on ­whether or not it is “appropriate” for their own office, and person, to do so. He asserted that t­ hese local government officials often conclude that someone with a lower office should make visits to the communities and that their own office is too high for that activity. Gavino walked Raul through this and other examples of the presumptions, be­hav­iors, and mindsets that the GGAP was up against in conducting its implementation work both with local communities and with local government offices. He was clearly also speaking to Raul’s own supercilious comportment; both intimating that Raul in this instance was the inferior substitute for a higher-­up’s visit and commenting unfavorably on arrogant be­hav­ior in general. ­Later that after­noon I was standing in the Huambo City office with Gavino and Raul as Rita entered and came over directly to me to say hello and to kiss both my cheeks, as is standard for greetings between w ­ omen or between a ­woman and a man in Angola. As she was turning to Gavino and then Raul to receive kisses and say hello, she tried to make a joke about her decision to greet me first: “In my work, I have my own policy about greeting ­women first, since everywhere ­else men get priority.” As she spoke, her habitual stutter, usually quite mild but with a tendency to worsen to nearly a handicap when she was anxious, belied her ner­ vous­ness about the meeting. It did not prevent the expression of her sharp sense of humor or her personal, po­liti­cal stance, however. Rita had been working with the GGAP in Chicala Cholohanga for only about four months at this point but was already much beloved in the organ­ization and in her communities of ser­vice. Her work with youth was particularly admirable, and she was able to run large workshops and meetings in rural communities, and especially among the youth, with ­little to no evidence of her stutter. Long active in her church, Rita was perhaps the most natu­ral and comfortable fieldworker the GGAP had yet contracted, but she found negotiating relationships with her colleagues more challenging than did most, from directing certain of the d­ rivers on her trips throughout the rural municipality on up to the administrative staff. She had Gavino’s full support in the Chicala Cholohanga and Huambo offices, but at the time of this meeting it was an open secret that Gavino had arranged a new position within the Provincial Administration and was shortly to leave the GGAP (see Peters 2019b). In part ­because he had other tasks to attend to and in part b­ ecause Rita was being encouraged to take on more responsibility and administrative work on behalf of the Chicala Cholohanga office, Gavino excused himself shortly ­after Rita arrived, and Raul and Rita settled into an update and debriefing meeting on the topic of M&E for the Chicala Cholohanga office. Raul’s usually brusque manner took on progressively more aggressive and condescending overtones as his meeting with Rita unfolded. She had come prepared for the meeting with impeccably or­ga­nized arquivos—­notebooks of reports, minutes of meetings, and other administrative rec­ords of the GGAP’s work in Chicala Cholohanga. Raul



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fired questions at her about where certain documents w ­ ere, why they ­were not filled out properly, how certain of them had not arrived by e-­mail in Luanda as they should have, and so on—­all without deigning to examine the physical copies Rita had lugged to the meeting from the Chicala Cholohanga office. Rita, her stutter worsening, valiantly attempted to answer each charge, but Raul consistently interrupted her responses to level new accusations against not only the documents but her own conduct and knowledge of the GGAP. Leaning back in his chair with his eyes nearly closed and a smug half-­smile on his face, at one point Raul asked, “And what micro-­project are you personally in charge of?” Rita could not answer, as the question presumed a structure and distribution of work in the field office that was inaccurate. U ­ nder Gavino’s direction, the Chicala Cholohanga field team considered the micro-­projects a collaborative effort, as did the Andulo and other GGAP field offices. The micro-­projects involved working closely with the ODAs, yes, but they also involved the preparation of formal proj­ect proposals and eventually the transfer of funds from the GGAP to a joint bank account with the local administration. As such, each proposal required the participation and expertise of each field officer. ­There ­were no micro-­projects for which any individual member of the field staff was considered to be “in charge.” Moreover, the team’s discourse emphasized that the proj­ect itself and the micro-­projects in par­tic­u­lar ­were in and of each community that was preparing one; ­there ­were no proprietary proj­ects for the GGAP or any staff member individually. ­After a ­silent moment of what looked like true terror on Rita’s part, she attempted to explain as much to Raul—­that the communities w ­ ere in charge of the micro-­projects, and that each of the field team members had his or her own impor­tant role to play. Raul interrupted this explanation, too, with a new demand that Rita list by name each GGAP field team member in Chicala Cholohanga. He sought to write this list down as she explained each person’s position, but neither of them had extra paper and pen with them apart from the dedicated arquivos Rita had brought. The observing anthropologist obliged with a piece of paper torn from her own notebook but not without reservation for abetting what had turned into more of an interrogation than any kind of collegial meeting. Rita set to recording a list of each of her colleagues in the Chicala Cholohanga, Huambo, and Luanda offices. As they arrived at Marco’s name, Raul interrupted her explanations and demanded to know who Marco was and what his position was. Rita ­couldn’t answer this question with a title and list of duties but responded to say that she knew Marco as a colleague within her NGO. Raul drew several question marks ­after Marco’s name and aggressively circled it, loudly asking her, “Who? Who is he to the GGAP? Who is he to you?” Between the arrogant presumptions of Raul’s questions to the se­nior field staff in the morning and his bullying of the most ju­nior member of the Chicala Cholohanga field office l­ater that same day, Raul’s concerns for the GGAP seemed to

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be more about asserting his own authority within the program than about supporting the work that the field teams w ­ ere tasked with. In his meeting with Rita, Raul intended to demonstrate to her that she understood neither the goals and procedures of the GGAP nor its structures of staff and authority, thereby somehow enhancing his own status. He achieved, however, only a demonstration of his own partial perspectives and his ignorance of the program’s implementation “context” in the Central Highlands. Had Rita’s patience not been leagues deep that day, she might well have asked Raul in turn, “And who are you to me?” All participants of a community of practice, a working group, an organ­ization, or workers pursuing parallel responsibilities, are “partial participants”—­each one overlaps differently, to a dif­fer­ent and contextually dependent extent, with his or her coworkers (Lave 2015; see also Gershon 2015). H ­ ere, Raul was clearly unsettled by the opaque fashion in which his work as the GGAP’s central office monitoring and evaluation coordinator overlapped with the program advisers of the British and Canadian NGOs, including Marco. He then sought to unsettle Rita about t­ hese same relationships, causing further anxiety and confusion about her role and how the program overall was meant to operate. While this meeting was a particularly egregious case, even the most collegial interactions between the GGAP’s administrative and field staff ­were likely to take on aspects of reprimand as administrative staff sought to make clear and compelling the program’s expectations of the field staff.

Inputs and Outputs Like many con­temporary interventions, especially t­ hose funded by large bilateral aid organ­izations, the design and evaluation of the GGAP ­were guided in part by LFA, an approach commonly distilled down to its bureaucratic artifact, “the logframe.” The logframe, like most formalized models of work or “job descriptions,” does not capture “the complicated ­things ­people need to do in order to do their jobs, tasks that are too surprising to be prescribed in advance” (Lave 2015, 222). Moreover, any accurate description of work would have to address “the heterogeneous ­others with whom [the worker] must engage” (222). Lave researched the “communities of practice” through which anyone learns new skills or situated knowledge, recognizing how both learning and ­doing are inherently social and relational accomplishments (e.g., Lave and Wenger 1991). Rita’s regular course of duties as CDC reveals, as described ­earlier, how working with ­others, both beneficiaries and colleagues, was truly central to the job. This internal sociality is dismissed, however, disregarded at all levels of the international development industry—­from rank-­and-­file implementation staff to ­those in the highest echelons of policy making. At its core, LFA and related practices seek to lay bare the causal relationships between what an intervention does in terms of activities and expenditures and



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the effects it intends ­these to have on the social world (Gasper 2000). In an originating explanation of the approach, development con­sul­tants Leon Rosenberg and Lawrence Posner (1979) explain how intervention work and its desired results should be broken down into “four separate and distinct levels of objectives”: the intervention’s inputs, outputs, purpose, and goal. The logframe as an artifact then organizes ­these into a four-­by-­four grid wherein each row, beginning at the bottom and continuing up, contains ­those four levels of objectives and describes how they w ­ ill be tracked and what relationship they hold to one another. Though development prac­ti­tion­ers would not use the term, the logframe as an artifact is meant to be an “immutable mobile,” in Bruno Latour’s famous turn of phrase: a conveyance for information that can transmit its content across dif­fer­ent contexts without losing or changing any content in that transmission (Latour 1987). As Latour himself notes, no mobiles are completely immutable, but their power lies in the authority they convey as formal repre­sen­ta­tions of knowledge and work. To understand what content a logframe is meant to hold and to convey, however, consider the original outline of the artifact. Rosenberg and Posner use a rural livelihoods proj­ect as an exemplar, excerpted ­here in ­table 2.2. Using this ­table as an example and focusing on just the first column of the logframe, inputs (cell 1, as numbered left to right and from bottom to top) are “the resources we [proj­ect man­ag­ers] consume and activities we undertake,” while outputs (cell 5) are “the ­things we, as good man­ag­ers, are committed to produce. Th ­ ese [outputs] must be stated as results.” In the exemplar proj­ect, programmatic inputs include “recruit farmers; develop training facilities and materials; and conduct training.” The outputs then expected are that “farmers are trained.” Their concepts and their phrasing are impor­tant: the “outputs” of farmer training should properly be trained farmers, not, for instance, the materials developed for training purposes nor even the test scores or changed be­hav­iors of trained farmers—­although ­those could be used as indicators (to be discussed ­later) to verify the existence of the “output.” Purposes (cell 9) are then the reasons one is pursuing ­those outputs by way of ­those inputs—in this example, trained farmers should conduct their farming differently such that the program’s purpose, “farm production is increased,” is realized. Fi­nally, the program goal is the highest-­order objective sought by the intervention. H ­ ere, from increased farm production one would hope that “farm income is increased” (Rosenberg and Posner 1979, 5, 10), such that small farmers in the targeted region are better able to support themselves and their families (cell 13). The remaining columns of the four-­by-­four logframe grid then formulaically expand upon each of ­these “levels of objectives” delineated in the first column. Next to the first “narrative summary” column are columns listing what events would objectively indicate the realization of each row’s objective, be it an activity, an output, or a purpose or goal achieved. Th ­ ese columns describe how, for instance, one should seek evidence that farmers had indeed been trained—­the second, “indicators,” column lists how one could tell each objective had come to

-­ 35,000 farmers trained by deadline -­98% of ­those trained use new techniques appropriately 6 -­ 24 man-­months and USD 200,000 required (and spent)

-­ Farmers trained

-­ Recruit farmers -­ Develop training facilities and materials -­ Conduct training 1

5

2

-­Rice yields increase 50% from seasons X to Y -­Rice harvested in season Y of better or equal quality to that from season X 10

-­Small farmer rice production increased in region

9

14

13

Source: Adapted from Rosenberg and Posner 1979, 25 (figure 4).

Inputs

Outputs

Purpose

-­Small farmer income raised by 45% from seasons X to Y

Objectively Identifiable Indicators

-­Small farmer income increased in region

Narrative Summary

Level of Objective

Goal

Simplified Proj­ect Logframe

­­table 2.2.

3

-­ Proj­ect rec­ords -­ Proj­ect man­ag­er reports

7

-­ Proj­ect rec­ords -­Spot check by proj­ect man­ag­er

11

-­Expert review and analy­sis

15

-­ Tax figures

Means of Verification

-­Farmers willing to accept new cultivation methods -­Can recruit locally X number extension agents 4

-­Sufficient rainfall -­Price of seed stable -­ Extension agents supervise application of fertilizer 8

12

-­Price of rice does not fall below X -­No spoilage or waste in the system

-­Farmers protected from unscrupulous merchants -­ Inflation ­doesn’t exceed X% 16

Impor­tant Assumptions



Development’s Inputs and Outputs 57

pass, and the following (third) column, “means of verification,” lists what hard evidence one would gather about that indicator of accomplishment and where such evidence would be sought. The final column then notes what conditions outside the program’s control could affect the realization of its objectives, focusing on ­those conditions that could interfere with the relationship between one set of objectives and ­those above it. This last column is the trickiest to read and relate to the o­ thers: the final right-­hand cell in any row contains t­ hose conditions that could affect the expected relationship between the objectives of its row and ­those of the row above—­these are not the conditions that affect the objectives of its own row. The key to reading (or building) a logframe, then, is that one must begin in the lower left corner, following the logic of each step to the right and reading from the bottom up. As numbered ­here, cell 4 therefore contains ­those ­factors or conditions that are beyond the control of the intervention but could affect w ­ hether or not the objectives in cell 5, in the row above, are realized, even if all went well in the bottommost row. For the example of the agricultural livelihoods program in Rosenberg and Posner’s explication, if farmers are unwilling to accept the new cultivation methods offered to them in their trainings, then the “inputs” of recruiting them, developing training materials, and conducting ­those trainings ­will not result in “trained farmers” (cell 5), even if program staff did their jobs fully. Farmers’ willingness to use new methods is considered outside the control of the program and its man­ag­ers. Likewise, supposing that farmers are in fact successfully trained and begin to use their newly introduced cultivation methods properly, conditions such as insufficient rainfall (cell 8) could prevent even well-­trained, well-­supported farmers from increasing their rice production (cell 9). Cell 12 notes ­factors that could frustrate cell 13’s realization. Last, cell 16 rec­ords the final worries of program designers and evaluators—­here, that all would be well and farm income significantly increased only to have small farmers remain eco­nom­ically stagnant due, for instance, to inflation negating the relative gains of their increased incomes. In this manner, LFA notes and accounts for external ­factors that could adversely affect the realization of a development intervention’s ultimate goals, even if the intervention itself ­were to be carried out perfectly. What LFA does not adequately account for is the work of realizing t­ hose “activities” and securing ­those “resources” or expenditures that count as inputs in its approach. That is, the logframe and the LFA approach overall do not begin at the beginning. LFA neglects to detail both office-­and field-­based implementation tasks and procedures, largely b­ ecause ­these are taken to be the purview of “management” rather than of intervention design and evaluation, which is credited to the realm of “policy.” Consider that person-­time (man-­months in this exemplar) is ­here considered an indicator for the training of farmers, to be verified through proj­ect rec­ords as having been spent or used up.6 But is recruiting farmers, developing training materials, and

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conducting trainings simply a m ­ atter of counting person-­hours? Not all person-­ hours are fungible, nor do they clearly or cleanly cumulate. Not all agents have the same skills or experience to put to use within each hour, and implementation work itself requires dif­fer­ent skills and approaches in each successive stage of work. Dif­ fer­ent hours, that is, must be spent differently depending on how much pro­gress has been made in t­hese “activities” as is clearly seen in Rita’s experiences. LFA wholly overlooks the highly contingent nature of everyday development implementation; this was as true in the GGAP as for the exemplar considered h­ ere. The LFA or versions of it became ubiquitous in the development and humanitarian aid industries in the 1980s and 1990s; USAID championed a version much like Rosenberg and Posner’s original, while the German aid agency GTZ adapted its own very similar approach, called ZOPP a­ fter its German name, Goal-Oriented Project Planning (Wallace 1997; Cracknell and Rednall 1986). In the early 2000s LFA was still widely taught in gradu­ate programs for professionals. ­There ­were slight alterations across what Gasper (2000) described as the first and second generations of ­these approaches, but none attended any further to on-­the-­ground implementation. The strength and purpose of LFA and its ­sister procedures was to direct management thinking outward to the “bigger picture” and the changing context of the intervention, and to formalize planning around the longer chain of causal linkages in interventionist thinking. Such procedures remain heavi­ly donor and con­sul­tant driven, causing critical reviews to note how, in most instances German ZOPP “did not outlive donor funding . . . ​due to poor links to local staff and management approaches” (Gasper 2000, 10, citing Forster 1996). Con­temporary versions continue to focus outward and upward from implementation, as m ­ atters internal to a program are considered “management task[s] not heavi­ly influenced by uncertainty from outside assumptions” (MacArthur 1994, 92; see also Solem 1987).

Invisible Development Work, Invisible Development Workers The GGAP’s implementation staff experienced their daily work not only as sets of technical, logistical, and social tasks targeting their intended beneficiaries that they ­were individually responsible for carry­ing out but, si­mul­ta­neously, as actions to be negotiated within the contexts of their professional relationships. Obviously, their duties as development interventionists w ­ ere conducted in and through relationships with beneficiaries; however, as the episode between Raul and Rita demonstrates, collegial relationships are also a meaningful portion of development’s professional ecosystem. In-­house relationships—­between peers within a field team or between field agents and administrative staff more hierarchically within the implementariat—­were mutually constituted by the relative invisibility of field-­level implementation work to the Luanda-­based administrators (see  also



Development’s Inputs and Outputs 59

Peters 2019a). This invisibility was built into the program from its very beginning, in part through its reliance on LFA as its approach to planning and evaluation, but was then reinforced and replicated through overlapping hierarchies: field staff as beneath administrative staff, provincial staff as beneath Luanda-­based staff, and ultimately ­those more “central” to the development institutions of WestAid and each international NGO as above all ­those more distant, working among community members and local government agents in rural Angolan provinces. Implementation staff in the provinces complained, for instance, that they w ­ ere not provided adequate orientation to their duties of conducting social and pedagogical work among communities and local government officials. Rita and most field agents had never seen any version of the GGAP’s logframe, and an older, Portuguese-­language copy of the original program proposal became coveted contraband at the M&E workshop held just before the GGAP’s midterm review (discussed in the next chapter). Field staff did not receive such materials ­because ­those “formalisms” are directed to other audiences. They did not receive adequate orientation to their tasks b­ ecause their administrative superiors did not have a good grasp of what their work ­really took at the level of the everyday. This means that the lack of orientation to, or explanation of, field-­level work did not come about merely b­ ecause the GGAP’s administrators w ­ ere idiosyncratically bad at their jobs, but b­ ecause they ­were in fact good at their administrative jobs, and so did not see the shadow work of the field agents. Theirs was a dif­fer­ent and necessarily partial perspective that occluded their recognition of the iterative, arduous, daily ­labor of the field staff. This concern about training and orientation, among other concerns about the field staff ’s experience and with implementation of the program in its day-­to-­day existence, remained broadly neglected by Luanda-­based administrators throughout the life of the program, resulting in, for instance, several Angolan municipal administrators noting in the GGAP’s final evaluation that they had found the provincial staff to be of “uneven quality.” Program administrators and donors interpreted such criticisms as resulting from the natu­ral deficiencies of individual staff members rather than from their own, and the program’s, structural failure to understand field work and properly support and train staff (see also Peters 2019b). While in any industry not all staff members w ­ ill excel equally at all tasks even with excellent training and support, such an interpretation h­ ere is the result of the double bind within which implementation staff worked: the actions necessary to bring about the formal encounters that ­were considered “inputs” in the development program’s interventionist method ­were invisible, such that undertaking them actually made field staff seem unproductive to their superiors. Staff members (such as Rita’s pre­de­ces­sor) who reported trainings and the formation of ODAs that had never happened, or that had happened only anemically, appeared as or more productive than did fieldworkers like Rita who made the opposite choice—to neglect paperwork for social work of greater substance.

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Such choices are made not only by field-­level staff in pursuit of their own advancement, of course. Such choice is structured by the complications of the work itself, together in tension with the mandate—­through design, monitoring, evaluating, and institutionally reproducing the program through hiring and training staff—to represent the work. More broadly in science studies such tension is represented as a divide between “formalists” and “empiricists”: formalists erring on the side of technical, elegant, generalized repre­sen­ta­tions of work and empiricists on the side of the par­tic­u­lar, contextual, “real world” situation of intervention and interaction (Star 1995a). Consider the misalignment of Rita’s experience in her job, described e­ arlier, with the formal description of her job in program documents. The CDC position was described in adverts and proposals as being “based in the municipality,” tasked to “work on a day-in and day-­out basis with the targeted communities and ensure that all the activities related to Result 2 of the [GGAP] proposal are implemented.” The w ­ hole text of the description for her position7 takes up just three short pages, with the bulk composed of a bulleted list of six major tasks with several subtasks noted ­under each. The major responsibilities ­were as follows (taken verbatim): 1.

Ensure that all activities planned to achieve [GGAP] objectives are adequately carried out and, especially, t­ hose related to developing the capacities of the community groups. 2. Develop conceptual and strategic integration of dif­fer­ent components of community participation. 3. Develop training curricula on conceptual level and expertise related to community development, community duties into demo­cratic system where the government and community rights are equilibrated and engage easily. 4. Facilitate the strengthening of CBOs [sic] capacity to form networks and linkages between local level planning and municipal level planning via Area (residential or work) Based Committees (ABCs). 5. Develop monitoring and evaluation pro­cess at the municipal level. 6. Promote program cross-­cutting issues on mainstreaming HIV/AIDS, gender and diversity, h­ uman rights and democracy within the capacity building activities as a mechanism to increase program impact. This statement of tasks is puzzling, as none of them encompass the im­mense work the CDCs actually did to contact rural communities, inform them of the program, and or­ga­nize the ODAs—­the CBOs, or community-­based organ­ izations, of the job description. The CDCs all recognized that the ODAs w ­ ere the logistical and ideological basis of the GGAP’s methods on the “citizen” side of the citizen–­state equation, and most of the CDCs took the formation of the ODAs to be their first and most impor­tant order of business. Rita and the other



Development’s Inputs and Outputs 61

CDCs understood they ­were meant to instigate the formation of as many of ­these groups as pos­si­ble in each GGAP municipality, coach them through electing officers and structuring their work, then provide ongoing “capacity building” for them, largely via training in proj­ect design and management. The list of tasks included as the description of this posting, however, already presumes the presence and functioning of the ODAs. None of the tasks listed—­and ­these responsibilities and tasks are more like aspirations than discrete duties—­would be pos­si­ble without the ODAs already pre­sent and operating well in the communities. Even beyond the presumption that the ODAs would already exist, comparing ­these duties to the “activities” or inputs of the GGAP’s logframe does not yield much greater detail as to how someone would go about meeting almost any of ­these responsibilities. The subtasks listed u­ nder any of ­these items, which include for instance “promote community responsiveness, accountability, and transparency” u­ nder the first responsibility, are, likewise, no more helpful. While the provincial field staff ’s work was in fact to create and sustain social relationships with “beneficiaries” (see Mosse 2005), this is not how the work was conceptualized in the GGAP’s formal formulations. The closest that ­either the logframe or the field staff job descriptions come to acknowledging this fact was in their use of the language of capacity building (see the discussion in the introduction). In the program’s bureaucratic outline of the ­imagined causal relationships between inputs, outputs, and programmatic “results” or purposes, what was stated—­what was meant by “capacity building”—­was that knowledge and skills would be transferred from GGAP staff to dif­fer­ent kinds of beneficiaries who would then put that knowledge, and ­those skills, to use. That any such transfer of knowledge must happen within the context of—in fact through the vehicle of—­social relationships went largely unrecognized (see also Goodman 2019). Even more importantly, the im­mense logistical effort required to establish, maintain, and make programmatic use of staff–­beneficiary relationships—­not to mention the knowledge and skills that would have to be gained by staff themselves in the course of d­ oing so—­was also unrecognized and therefore unsupported. Rita’s job description closes with a small paragraph on “working conditions” that states, in its entirety, “The position is based at the office of the local Government or nearest to the municipal office. Must be available to meet communities at appropriate times. Must be able to attend stakeholder meetings at appropriate times.” This closing paragraph, in light of the day-­to-­day experiences of Rita and other staff members in the GGAP’s provincial implementation offices, clearly ­mistakes the nature of their work and where they needed to spend their time in order to bring about the “activities” and the desired outputs of the program. The phrasing “available to meet” and the repetition of “at appropriate times” ­were meant to alert candidates for the position that they may be required to work odd hours—­early mornings, eve­nings, weekends—­depending on when beneficiaries ­were most able to engage with the program. Any such engagements, however,

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necessitated the use of program or NGO vehicles, which was largely prohibited ­after dark, before daybreak, and on weekends. The GGAP’s administrator-­authors clearly i­ magined the field staff’s work to be physically located in the provincial field office building, just as their work was physically located in Luanda’s administrative offices. When administrators i­ magined the field staff actually speaking to beneficiaries, ­these exchanges ­were expected to occur at the relatively infrequent (though very impor­tant) formal engagements of meetings, trainings, workshops, and so on. The authors of this job description obviously did not understand how ­those formal engagements would be brought about—­how community members would be recruited and informed about the events, or how they would participate in organ­izing them. Moreover, the administrative staff that penned this section on “working conditions” clearly gave l­ ittle thought to the daily, physical movement of bodies that is required for working in rural Angolan communities. The disparity between what was expected of the field staff and how they ­were supported to accomplish it arose from the development industry’s emphasis on the policy-­level work of planning and evaluation over the management-­level work meant to encompass implementation. Such emphasis is both produced by, and reinforces, internal social hierarchies that elevate planners and evaluators—­policy makers, broadly—­over implementation agents. Such hierarchies are then reflected in the writing of position descriptions, and the elaboration of approaches like LFA. To be clear, it is not the case that LFA or other technocratic approaches themselves create the power dynamics of the international development industry—­ they are not “actants” in this Latourian sense. Rather, as bureaucratic artifacts, they reflect the extant social dynamics of the field, crystalizing ­these dynamics and shaping the kinds of information and perspectives that are available for prac­ti­tion­ ers and analysts (Hull 2012). LFA, for instance, attends poorly to implementation ­because it was expressly designed as a guide for the development industry’s designers and evaluators, not its fieldworkers. Rosenberg and Posner are themselves explicit that among the core benefits of the approach is its effect “clarifying what a proj­ect man­ag­er should be responsible for accomplishing and why,” thereby making “the proj­ect man­ag­er a primary user of evaluation results” (1979, 2). For t­ hese development con­sul­tants and many o­ thers, the “proj­ect man­ag­er”—in the GGAP this was Osman—is the lowest-­level staff position vis­i­ble in the industry. Anyone beneath the man­ag­er is arguably interchangeable, replaceable, a mere “input” themselves as l­ abor or simply the rank-­and-­file. At the time that the LFA approach was being formulated in international development, policy-­level actors w ­ ere concerned that in-­country agents like proj­ect man­ag­ers ­were unfamiliar with design and evaluation princi­ples—­that they ­were unscientific and even atheoretical in their approach to intervention (Kothari 2005). Proj­ect man­ag­ers ­were—­and still are—­suspected of being more concerned about their own job security than about revealing the under­lying “truth” of the



Development’s Inputs and Outputs 63

successes and failures of development programming. They are suspected of not being able to see the forest for the trees, of focusing on the managerial day-­to-­day rather than the larger causal logics of intervention. Consequently, a primary concern of the LFA approach was that the proj­ect man­ag­er should not be held responsible for outcomes over which she or he could not reasonably be expected to have full control, and the logframe became top-­heavy, focusing on the causal sequelae of intervention that the man­ag­er was presumed to be ignorant of and neglecting the managerial, day-­to-­day aspects of implementation in which the man­ag­er was presumed to be already well versed. In a logframe, a man­ag­er is to be held accountable “to ensure that inputs result in outputs” and to “show cause if he fails” in this task. Inputs are presumed to be the ­matters that man­ag­ers already know about and are perhaps even too steeped in. Should outputs, once properly accomplished by appropriate use of the inputs, not result in the program’s intended purpose being realized, the man­ag­er may not be—is prob­ably not, in fact—at fault b­ ecause of the uncertainty of the development task or the context at hand. The rightmost “impor­tant assumptions” column was the true innovation of the logframe, meant to put proj­ect man­ag­ers at ease that they would not be blamed for d­ oing their jobs. The ease of the implementing agents beneath that supervisory level, however—­those ­doing the recruiting and training of farmers, for instance, in the mocked-up example in t­ able 2.2 or the GGAP’s provincial-­level field staff—is not of concern to program designers and evaluators using LFA. This approach (and the artifact of the logframe) effectively focuses programmatic attention on what is thought to be controllable by noting and effectively excluding certain m ­ atters of “context” (see also Li 2007). Prioritizing “what can be controlled” from a managerial perspective, however, focuses analytical and evaluative attention on the relationship between “inputs” and “outputs”—­how a program gets from cell 1 to cell 5, essentially—­w ithout questioning what lies beneath its inputs. This focus of the approach and of the logframe artifact m ­ istakes the inputs of development work for events that, as Rita’s experience demonstrates, actually happen further on down the line. The GGAP’s formal engagements ­were expressly considered “program inputs” as though they w ­ ere raw ingredients in a r­ ecipe—­the flour, milk, and eggs required for a loaf of bread or a pie, for instance. As with baking, however, the flour, the milk, and the eggs must themselves ­either be produced or sourced from elsewhere and brought to the kitchen. Where GGAP administrators saw the field staff as bakers and consistently asked them to account for their production of pies and loaves, the field staff knew that producing the flour, milk, and eggs w ­ ere preliminary, necessary steps before it would be pos­si­ble to combine them into any ­recipe, making the production of ­whole pies and loaves— or ODA trainings and municipal forums—­rarer events than the administration supposed would be the case.8 The double bind for the field staff was that they ­were expected to produce formal events but ­were untrained, unsupported, and even

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discouraged or sometimes punished for spending their time setting up the conditions for ­those events—­development’s mise en place, so to speak. Considering the logframe—­either Rosenberg and Posner’s example or the GGAP’s ­actual artifact (see appendix)—­the program’s inputs are actually the outputs of the work of field agents in their activities and relationships with beneficiaries. The accomplished objectives of “farmers recruited” or “ODAs’ capacities built” take quite a lot of visiting, talking, deal brokering, conceptual translations, organ­ization of time, materials, and relationships, and so on. “Empower communities” or “recruit farmers” are not s­ imple imperatives or tasks but, rather, complex accomplishments themselves produced from a series of iterative, contingent social interactions. Star and Strauss note that “on the one hand, visibility can mean legitimacy, rescue from obscurity or other aspects of exploitation. On the other, visibility can create reification of work, opportunities for surveillance, or come to increase group communication and pro­cess burdens (2015 [1999], 352, citing Suchman 1995). What would a “real” job description for Rita’s position include? How many further rows on a logframe would be required to account for the field staff ’s work to produce what the GGAP’s designers erroneously thought of as the program’s inputs? Clarifying or enumerating the wide variety of activities the field staff engaged in and the skills and knowledge required—­their articulation work and their tacit knowledge—­might bring them more visibility, influence, and attention in the development industry. One would hope it would win them more support in the way of resources. It is unclear, however, ­whether any such increased attention would be a good t­ hing or ­whether it would end up imposing further restrictions on their activities or a further burden on their time by opening them up to additional “audit” (e.g., Power 1997). Though the GGAP field staff ­were in fact ­eager to have their work better seen, understood, and supported by administrative superiors and beyond, they too neglected to account for the incredible amount of social and relational work among colleagues, internal to the program and the wider development industry, that stood between their current situation and the realization of this desire. It was not only, as many field-­level staff articulated clearly, that the Luanda-­based administrators did not understand what their day-­to-­day implementation of the GGAP r­ eally required of them, it was also that this “dominated fraction of the dominant class” (Bourdieu 2010 [1984]), like their superiors, overlooked the social and relational work they conducted internally with t­ hese same colleagues. In a sense, the GGAP’s field staff were unrecognized “outsiders within” (Collins 1986), with significant critical, reflexive knowledge and insight to offer their profession.

3 • REINFORCING HIER ARCHIES Monitoring and Evaluation

The development implementariat, inclusive of both in-­country administrative and implementation staff, is asked to do an im­mense amount of “interpretive ­labor”: the sensitive, attentive, relational, and imaginative work of “trying to decipher ­others’ motivations and perceptions” and shaping one’s own actions in response (Graeber 2015, 67). The basal task of ground-­level development intervention is, ­after all, to communicate new ideas and practices to beneficiary populations in order to change their thinking and be­hav­ior. This work obviously requires a type of interpretive ­labor, as effective communication can only occur when the audience’s perspectives are understood and taken fully into consideration. New messages must be ­shaped appropriately for the audience if they are to be taken up; this interpretive ­labor is part of what renders person-­to-­person development work the delicate, social, imaginative, and taxing set of duties that it is, as discussed in chapter 2. This chapter focuses on the double burden of interpretive ­labor—­beyond the conduct of their direct-­with-­beneficiaries activities—­that implementation staff are called upon to do as a result of their relative position in the international development industry (see also Peters 2019a). The implementariat must conduct the interpretive work of translation and teaching in its interactions with beneficiaries, but then carries a double burden in that it is explic­itly tasked to carry out interventions as they have been designed by the policy making elite. The implementariat is thus implicitly tasked, also, to understand what is impor­tant to development’s elite and act accordingly. A primary arena for this additional interpretive ­labor is the now-­ubiquitous set of tasks referred to collectively as monitoring and evaluation (M&E), activities through which implementation agents and man­ag­ ers are meant to communicate the pro­gress of their work to their institutional superiors. M&E is often taken to be part of—or even most of—­the international development industry’s mode of knowledge production. Though meant to track interventions and make development workers and institutions “accountable” for their 65

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use of resources and their actions broadly, M&E also contributes to the larger proj­ ect of figuring out “what works” in engineering social change. In the critical development studies lit­er­a­ture, such knowledge production for development is seen as an inherently social and po­liti­cal activity that, well apart from the production of knowledge for accountability or learning, establishes the endeavor’s legitimacy and maintains bound­aries between development agencies and professionals and their targeted “recipients.” Tania Murray Li (2007), for instance, demonstrates how development’s plans and assessments establish conceptual bound­aries around certain kinds of knowledge in order to exclude, though not always successfully, certain social, po­liti­cal, and historical ­factors from institutional consideration ­unless they can be “rendered technical” and thereby made amenable to development intervention. Exclusively technical knowledge then serves to justify development intervention (Mitchell 2002), shields interventions from po­liti­cal and social critique ­(Ferguson 1994), and contributes to an image of success as narrowly defined within technical rather than social or po­liti­cal par­ameters (Mosse 2005). Such critical scholarship on ­these sociopo­liti­cal effects of knowledge production in development situates them almost exclusively at the “development encounter” (Peters 2000) between professional agents or between the industry as a ­whole and its intended beneficiaries. “Boundary work,” in this sense, is essentially conceptual demarcation and organ­ization. In the classic so­cio­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture on boundary work, for instance, it is how “science” is distinguished from other intellectual and practical pursuits and how “scientists” are made distinguishable from other intelligent, capable ­people (Gieryn 1983). Symbolic bound­aries may be necessary for the translation of dif­fer­ent kinds of knowledge and perspective across disparate social worlds—­and perhaps social bound­aries can be crossed only when properly acknowledged—­but they can also protect a group’s autonomy, enhance its prestige, and justify intergroup inequalities (Lamont and Molnár 2002; Star and Griesemer 1989). In international development, the primary boundary produced through knowledge practices such as M&E is that between development professionals and recipients (e.g., Li 2007), but t­ hese practices si­mul­ta­neously mark distinctions between dif­fer­ent categories of development worker, for instance, national versus international staff (Peters 2016; Redfield 2013b) or implementation versus administrative staff, often reinforcing hierarchical inequalities between categories (see also Pigg 1995; 1997 on categories in development thinking). In this internal, hierarchizing effect, the social bound­aries produced through M&E can threaten both its purposes and t­ hose of the larger endeavor of international development by frustrating attempts to communicate information across orga­nizational scales and in driving away competent staff who may not accept subordinate treatment (see Peters 2019b). M&E has now emerged as a hypercredentialized development industry specialization, complete with graduate-­level certificates offered at major universities, and as a set of additional duties in which nearly all development professionals



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must engage during the course of their regular interventionist tasks, above and beyond t­ hose tasks. This chapter examines the GGAP’s M&E system both for the work it was meant to do—­communicate information about the program’s implementation efforts and its effects on Angolan municipal governance—­and for the other, internal “social work,” understood as unequally distributed interpretive ­labor, that it did among the development implementariat. It is a characteristic of structural vio­lence that interpretive l­abor is unequally distributed: ­those with more power do less understanding of ­others’ perspectives, especially of t­ hose beneath them, while t­ hose with less power must do more understanding, particularly of the ideas, values, motivations, and perceptions of ­those who wield power over them. This inequitable distribution of interpretive ­labor is in fact one of the mechanisms by which power differentials are reproduced, as not only are t­ hose with less power tasked with more work but their extra work effectively hides structural inequalities by concealing ­these differences of perspective from ­those in power. Structural vio­lence can therefore “create social situations where kings, politicians, celebrities, or CEOs prance about oblivious to almost every­thing around them while their wives, servants, staff, and handlers spend all their time engaged in the imaginative work of maintaining them in their fantasies” (Graeber 2015, 94). Even the most well-­intentioned can be structurally blinded by their positions in ­these hierarchies of power and attention to ­others’ perspectives. The body of the chapter recounts a series of per­for­mances and exchanges among staff members at an October 2008 workshop held in Huambo City specifically to address the program’s extensive trou­bles with M&E. The history of the GGAP’s M&E system and the disparate ways in which differently positioned staff members interacted with the system demonstrate how bureaucracies function by way of interpretive l­ abor. Bureaucracies, remember, exist as a way to manage relationships that are already unequal, institutionalizing procedures by which certain groups or ­people come to have strikingly ­little influence over the rules to which they are held (Graeber 2015; see also Douglas 1986). To gain an accurate perception of bureaucratic functioning, one must understand that its procedures, rather than causing relational in­equality through institutional flaws or faults, are themselves the result of existing inequalities that must be managed. In the development industry, relationships between expatriate and local, or between designer and implementer, ­were already extant. The bureaucracy of professionalizing institutions merely “manages” them. T ­ oday ­these unequal relationships are managed largely through the central mechanism of surveillance and evaluation of development work—­the “monitoring and evaluation” of certain activities. Tellingly, M&E targets almost entirely the professional work of implementation, not programmatic design, and thus holds implementation agents “accountable” to donors and the elite, rather than the other way around, effectively reducing accountability to nothing more than the surveillance of field staff.1

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Monitoring and Evaluation In the broadest strokes, evaluation in international development is the determination of impact: w ­ hether an intervention has achieved its stated objectives to change something about the recipient society. Monitoring, meanwhile, focuses on the pro­cess of intervention itself to track the “inputs” (see chap. 2) of intervention, such as materials and activities, to verify that the intended protocol is being followed. Indicators for both purposes should be included within a program’s logframe, as also discussed in chapter  2. Done well, development professionals expect that M&E should allow them to determine ­whether an intervention achieved the desired social change and, if not, ­whether the failure was due to an intervention’s flawed design or its faulty implementation. Th ­ ere is no M&E for the production of new and innovative design in development, however, nor for policy making generally. In the best of circumstances, con­temporary M&E should be flexible, reflective, and iterative, promoting course corrections in the ongoing implementation of a program and establishing final conclusions around the effectiveness and even the efficiency of its approach (e.g., Roper, Pettit, and Eade 2003). Increasingly, M&E is referred to not as monitoring and evaluation alone but as “monitoring, evaluation and learning,” or MEL, in order to emphasize its purpose of iterative improvement in the industry. As such, the industry perspective on M&E, or MEL, is wholly instrumental: this is a set of tasks and procedures that should objectively “mea­sure” development work and the effects or outcomes of that work. One must accurately define what is to be mea­sured, however, and “work” in international development is a perspectival construct—­the same development activity looks dif­fer­ent to dif­fer­ent ­people, depending on their structural relationship to it. The GGAP’s M&E system, in the sense of its forms and procedures, had been designed largely by Julie, a young British ­woman who had ended up in Angola almost by accident. Julie had studied politics and philosophy at university, but at the completion of her undergraduate studies she was still unsure about where to direct her professional energies. As she tells the story, she attended a student party ­toward the end of her time at university and overheard another student speaking excitedly about how she was “­going to do ‘make poverty history’ ” for her master’s degree. Upon hearing this, Julie realized that this was her desire also. She contacted the program officials to talk her way into the same course on international development just days before it was to begin. She had already been considering master’s study in international fiscal economy or international peacekeeping but had been unsatisfied by both course descriptions. She knew she was interested in “conflict issues that prevent peace” and was “­really interested in Africa,” though had not yet traveled to the continent. She found herself balking at the fiscal economy program as being too heavy in theory and the peacekeeping program as being too ­limited. The degree program she did enter was international development, and



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Julie found herself visiting Sierra Leone for three weeks as part of the course. She was hosted ­there, alongside many other students, by the American NGO. During this trip, she met a Zimbabwean professional who informed her that she needed more on-­the-­ground experience if she wanted to “get into development.” As a result, Julie applied to an internal advertisement put out by the American NGO for an internship in their Angola office. She reports leaving for Angola just days ­after filing her master’s thesis, and she jokes that she had to look up where it was on a map—­she had mistakenly thought it was in southern Asia but was pleased to discover she was ­going again to Africa. As a newly arrived postgraduate intern in Luanda, Julie was tasked by Osman to aid a short-­term con­sul­tant on the development of the GGAP’s M&E system and the beginnings of its baseline assessments. She took over this work ­after the con­sul­tant’s contract expired, but felt constrained by the informational demands of the donors, her own early distaste of such topics and unfamiliarity with such systems, and the responses and capabilities of the field staff and her central-­office colleagues in Luanda. In explaining the dif­fer­ent forms and indicators in an interview in September 2008, she began by describing this internship experience and how, ­after a few twists and turns, she ended up staying on with the GGAP to help conduct baseline analyses in its targeted municipalities. This work quickly morphed into developing the GGAP’s M&E forms and procedures. Julie explains ­here how she worked to figure out what an M&E system should be like: julie: Yeah, and then [Osman] was saying “you need to design pro­gress monitoring tools,” and I was . . . ​I d­ idn’t know anything about monitoring and evaluation ­because I just came out of university and ­didn’t actually like . . . ​I did proj­ect planning as the module for my master’s, and I ­really ­didn’t like anything to do with M&E and logframes, and I ­didn’t like ­going to the lectures, and I ended up working in that area, but it was OK. It’s in­ter­est­ing. And then [Osman] said, “you need to develop the pro­cess indicators” and I was like, “what the hell is one of ­those” and [he said] “get us the indicators” and I was just ­really confused. I spoke to [expats working in program evaluation in Luanda] and then I also spoke to Global Fund, and somebody ­else. I spoke to another ­couple of ­people about monitoring and evaluation systems, trying to work out . . . ​so I was trying to design some tools and that’s why ­there ­were a few drafts, ­because I ­didn’t know enough about M&E then, but then as my understanding of M&E and the proj­ect grew, and the need to . . . ​ how to effectively capture dif­fer­ent indicators . . . ​then better tools ­were developed . . . ​so it was just like kind of . . . ​OK. For instance, I knew what the indicators ­were, and I knew that we needed to capture it but I w ­ asn’t sure how, and then something . . . ​something would just kind of click in your head, and you’ll say like, “Oh, OK, that’s how you do it.” And then suddenly you just design a tool from out of nowhere, but ­you’ve been thinking about it, and thinking about it, and then you just sit down, and do it based on the more understanding of the proj­ect.

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Julie worked nearly verbatim with the “illustrative indicators” WestAid had included in the GGAP’s original request for applications, discussed extensively in the following chapters. In the program’s M&E manual, prepared at the midterm of the GGAP’s first phase in order to address the confusion and standing prob­ lems of the system, however, several sets of indicators are presented, including WestAid’s proposed indicators and ­others that Julie set out herself as “program-­ specific” points. The first set of such program-­specific indicators is targeted to the three main results desired of the program, and replicates the manner in which the program’s logframe was developed (see chap. 2 and appendix). ­Table 3.1 pre­sents

­­table 3.1.

Indicators Established in the GGAP Monitoring and Evaluation System to Evaluate Each Targeted Result

Result Sought by the GGAP

Indicators to Assess Each Result

1: Municipal planning, bud­geting, and proj­ect implementation routinely follow a pro­cess of broad and inclusive community participation; meet minimum standards for design, implementation, and accountability; and feed effectively into the provincial planning and bud­get pro­cess.

In five municipalities development forums are institutionalized and representing all stakeholders Number of municipal financial reports presented to provincial administrations and the general public Number of municipal plans included in the provincial planning pro­cess Number of tripartite MOUs signed

2: Targeted communities can or­ga­nize themselves effectively to make decisions, feed into local issues, and demonstrate basic skills in participatory planning, management, and evaluation.

Number of communities receiving grants in five municipalities Number of CBOs implemented sustainable proj­ects (including proj­ects protecting the environment) Number of communities involved in the delivery of sustainable basic ser­vices

3: Completed proj­ects demonstrate social inclusion value to the community, including sufficient community support to give evidence of sustainability.

Number of CBOs that implement inclusive and sustainable proj­ects Number of communities that have established support networks for vulnerable ­people in their community Number of ­people that have increased their income Number of organ­izations engaged in sound environmental practices Number of activities that address threats to ecosystem ser­vices

Abbreviations: CBO, community-­based organ­ization; MOUs, memoranda of understanding. Reproduced by permission of the Society for Applied Anthropology from ­Human Organ­ization, volume 75, number 4.



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the indicators for ­these three results as outlined on page 5 of the program’s M&E manual. Note that, while each indicator would at first glance seem to be a straightforward count of something uniquely identifiable and enumerable (e.g., number of communities receiving grants, number of communities involved in the delivery of sustainable basic ser­vices, ­etc.), many of them contain undefined qualifiers. Consider, for example, how one might determine if a community is “involved” in the delivery of sustainable basic ser­vices, or even what might count as a “sustainable” or “basic” ser­v ice. ­These terms ­were nowhere defined for the GGAP, rendering its list of indicators almost unusable. The manual then includes small text boxes for each result, ostensibly explaining how and when each indicator is to be assessed. For Result 2, the manual’s text box reads, verbatim:

Result 2 How: • For all three indicators for Result 2 (communities receiving grants, implementing sustainable [micro-]proj­ects and communities involved in the delivery of basic ser­vices) fill out the [micro-]proj­ect proposal template carefully • Send electronic copy to Luanda and notify ­whether the [micro-]proj­ect was approved • Data ­will then be tabulated for monitoring • Use proj­ect signboards that document [micro-]proj­ect details in the locality When? Whenever a proposed micro-­project is approved Note: ­there should be effective coordination to ensure approved proj­ects are communicated to both Grants Man­ag­er and Monitoring team

The field staff and especially the CDCs ­were particularly confused by this text box, as they received regular instruction to fill out many other M&E forms, well beyond the proposals for the micro-­projects, and w ­ ere surprised to see that none of ­those other forms—­participant lists, community scorecards, minutes of meetings, and so on—­were targeting the indicators set out to mea­sure the program result that they ­were ostensibly responsible for. Moreover, in helping the ODAs to propose micro-­projects and receive approval for them from the municipal government and the GGAP, which provided funding for them, they considered the

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micro-­project proposals essentially the property of the Luanda office once they ­were submitted for pos­si­ble funding. Was it truly their responsibility, in the provincial field offices, to notify the Luanda office that the proj­ect had been approved and the details of the proj­ect should be tabulated by the Luanda-­based monitoring team t­ oward mea­sur­ing ­these indicators? It seemed preposterous to them: the provincial staff submitted ­these forms for proj­ect approval to the Luanda office, but they must then notify the Luanda office if the proj­ects ­were approved by the Luanda office? Notifying the GGAP central office that the local municipality had also approved the proj­ect seemed appropriate, and none objected to this step. But the fact that communication among the administrative staff members in the GGAP’s Luanda office was poor did not, to the field staff, seem to occasion more communicative responsibility on their part. Julie was trying to circumvent that prob­lem, however, by tasking the provincial field staff with conducting communication she had had difficulty accomplishing herself in the central office. In her discussion of ­these indicators in the lengthy September  2008 interview, she explained: julie: Th ­ ere was also in the baseline a definition of . . . ​­there ­were some questions about sustainability and I ­haven’t looked at it for a while even though I wrote it but I think that the proj­ect proposal template asked enough questions for you to see ­whether a proj­ect is ­going to be sustainable or not. And then the monitoring and evaluation of that proj­ect can ensure that it’s ­going according to the way I said it would, which was to be sustainable. So I’ve been asking for the proj­ect proposals from someplace to be sent to me, so I can look at them, get the number of CBOs involved, get the number of communities involved, and see if this is sustainable and every­thing . . . ​but ­there . . . ​nobody has sent me any of them, so [Shameem] is filing them in the cabinet and I’m not receiving them and it’s very frustrating for me, b­ ecause I’ve designed ­these ­things for a reason. I want to take par­tic­u­lar bits of information out of them and when they just get stuck in ­people’s filing cabinets or stuck in the field, it’s just ­really difficult to keep track of ­these t­ hings.

­Here, Julie has designed forms for use in the GGAP that could be used for dual purposes—­proj­ect proposal templates that are helpful to collate information the program’s overall grants man­ag­er, Shameem, might need to approve the dispersal of funds, but also information she can use as monitoring and evaluation data. In ­running into prob­lems with Shameem, who seemed so overwhelmed with his duties that he simply never could remember to alert Julie or Raul that he had approved a new proj­ect and forward them the proposal, Julie sought to task the field staff with communicating this information. The field staff w ­ ere rightly indignant that this was expected to be their task—­Shameem sat in the same physical office as Raul did, and as did Julie when she was in Luanda, while they ­were out in the provinces. The field staff noted, moreover, that the information was not



Reinforcing Hierarchies 73

wholly dual purpose, ­because the approval of a proj­ect or even a series of proj­ ects did not necessarily confirm that, as Result 2 was phrased, “targeted communities can or­ga­nize themselves effectively . . . ​feed into local issues and demonstrate basic skills in participatory planning, management and evaluation.” Notably, in designing the forms and procedures by which such information would be collected, Julie did not consult extensively with members of the field staff but with other expatriates and administrative professionals in the country and headquarters offices of peer organ­izations (see also chap. 5). The GGAP’s monitoring and evaluation “system” was therefore not only inexpertly designed, entrusted largely, though not completely, to a recently graduated expatriate working in her first full-­time position on a topic unfamiliar to her, but designed nearly wholly from the donors’ and administrators’ perspective, rather than that of the field staff—­much less the local community or local municipal government perspective. On the point of having been inexpertly designed, it is difficult to understand the situation as anything except an error or a particularly egregious oversight on the part of the GGAP administration, and particularly Osman. That such an oversight could have been allowed to stand in WestAid’s flagship po­liti­ cal development program, itself consumptive of over USD 17 million in just its first three-­year phase, is also difficult to understand, however, ­unless one considers that the “system,” w ­ hether poorly or well executed, was constructed according to administrative and donor perspectives. Th ­ ere is more happening h­ ere than just Julie’s inexpertness or Osman’s underestimation of the task of developing the program’s M&E procedures. The M&E system in many ways was a vehicle for the GGAP administration to accomplish significant, but unequally distributed, interpretive ­labor, taking seriously the perspectives and desires of the donors and—­perhaps out of necessity, perhaps out of a type of positional privilege—­ neglecting to attend to the perspectives of the field staff and the municipal-­level beneficiaries. Located in the GGAP’s central administrative office in Luanda w ­ ere, again, program director Osman, grants man­ag­er Shameem, and an M&E and communications officer, a role taken up in the program’s first year by Julie and in its second by Raul. Osman and Shameem ­were seasoned expatriates in the “remarkably circumscribed” social world of international development professionals (Rajak and Stirrat 2011, 167; see also Eyben 2011), each having long experience working in developing countries, including in the South Asian country they w ­ ere both originally from. Julie was the young British w ­ oman working in her first full-­time position ­after completing a master’s degree in international development, and Raul was an Angolan in his first international NGO position. Julie advanced quickly out of the GGAP, moving on to serve as the central M&E officer for the British NGO, responsible for addressing all of that organ­ization’s programming. Initially hired as Julie’s assistant, Raul took on her position fully a­ fter she left. Two final Luanda-­based positions—­technical advisers for community development and

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municipal government development, respectively—­were largely vacant in the second year of the GGAP. This central office, staffed by just three to five p­ eople at any time, supervised all five provincial field teams and served as the communications hub for the implementing NGOs’ consortium. This office also communicated with the donors and, in conjunction with them, coordinated with the central Angolan government about the intervention. The administrative staff found their workload quite heavy, even overwhelming—­perhaps ­because they ­were in fact tasked with quite a lot of interpretive ­labor, but all of it directed upwards, ­toward understanding the needs and perspectives of the donors. The demands of report writing and M&E generally occasioned serious complaint from them, and Julie had lobbied strenuously to create what became Raul’s position as her M&E “second.” Shameem, too, lobbied to create an assistant position to aid in his task of managing program funds, even mocking up a vacancy advertisement, but he never won approval. To my knowledge, t­ here was no effort to fill the M&E assistant position Raul vacated when he took over Julie’s first officer post, as all recruitment was focused on filling Luanda’s two open technical adviser positions. ­These Luanda-­based administrative staff members ­were genuinely “translators”: members of that global class of professionals who “connect transnationally circulating discourses and par­tic­u­lar social contexts” (Merry 2006, 39; see also Bierschenk, Chauveau, and Olivier de Sardan 2002; Mosse and Lewis 2006; Watkins and Swidler 2013). Sally Engle Merry points out that the work of “translation takes place within fields of unequal power,” rendering global translators like t­ hese members of the development implementariat “both power­ful and vulnerable . . . ​as knowledge brokers, translators channel the flow of information but they are often distrusted, b­ ecause their ultimate loyalties are ambiguous” (2006, 40). If local community members and municipal government employees saw the GGAP field staff as knowledge brokers or translators, certainly the provincial GGAP staff saw their Luanda-­based administrative supervisors in this sense as well, tasked as they ­were to receive information from the provinces and send it to the donors in a manner that would make them understand provincial-­ level challenges and successes. As w ­ ill be explained in detail h­ ere, the field staff continuously sought more information from ­these central-­office “translators” about what donors ­were interested in, and how they would use the provincial-­ level data being requested of the field teams, stuck as they ­were in between the local communities and government agents and the development apparatus. Beleaguered by their own status between the field agents and the donors, however, Luanda-­based administrative staff could not always answer all of t­hese questions, and w ­ ere tasked themselves with the difficult interpretive l­ abor of trying to see the GGAP through the donors’ eyes and the field staff ’s eyes si­mul­ta­ neously. If it was perhaps impossible to do both, then the dynamics of structural



Reinforcing Hierarchies 75

vio­lence would dictate that it be the donors’ perspectives, rather than the field staff ’s, that would occupy more of the administrative staff ’s attentions.

Instruments and Tools As explained, GGAP implementation teams w ­ ere composed of four to five persons in each of the five intervention provinces, including a municipal government coordinator, a community development coordinator, an infrastructure coordinator, and a grants man­ag­er. ­These teams structured their “good governance” work around the two poles of the local government office2 and the community. The municipal development coordinator in each provincial office focused full time on training local government staff in computer literacy, bud­geting, proj­ect management, and so on as was necessary to improve government capacity, accountability, and transparency (e.g., Grindle 1997). This GGAP staff position was effectively seconded to local government offices as a type of in-­house public administration coach, exemplar, and knowledge resource, working directly alongside government officials in each municipality. At the other pole, a community development coordinator in each provincial team—­such as Rita in Chicala Cholohanga—­focused on forming and training community-­based organ­izations to deliberate local priorities and communicate their resources and needs formally to their municipal government. The staff member in this position spent the bulk of his or her time on the move from community to community, arranging meetings and workshops and keeping abreast of needs through face-­to-­face communications. In most of the implementation sites in 2008–2009, cell phone communications ­were not yet pos­si­ble, and travel was treacherous: roads and bridges ­either did not exist or ­were still being de-­mined postwar, and both NGO and government staff ­were barred from travel at night or overnight in the communities. In ­these geo­graph­i­cally large, rural municipalities, the community development agents had by far the most physically arduous, time-­consuming assignments. Provincial implementation teams also coordinated to help community groups elaborate micro-­projects with funds from the GGAP and other partners. ­These ­were meant to be smaller-­scale interventions, such as a weeklong training for traditional birth attendants or the repair of a school or clinic, that community groups designed and managed in­de­pen­dently but did so with communication to local government. The proj­ects ­were used to build community skills but also made manifest the program’s intentions and utility, and as such they became impor­tant procedural sites for relationship building between GGAP staff and program recipients. As a ­whole team in each field site, fi­nally, the GGAP hosted periodic public meetings for government officials and community representatives to interact directly. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, ­these ­were massive undertakings for the implementation teams, committed as they ­were to helping both sides

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­table 3.2.

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Tasks for the GGAP Implementation Staff, by Reporting Period

Time Period

Information to Be Submitted to Central Office

Monthly

Government scorecards Community scorecards Participant lists from all activities Key monthly accomplishments Event photo­graphs Training reports and minutes from all activities

Quarterly/Trimesterly

Municipal administration questionnaires Verification of how many municipal financial reports ­were sent to provincial government or shared with the public Verification of any municipal development plans being incorporated into provincial or national systems Copies of any memoranda of understanding signed by the administration during the quarter/trimester

During Micro-­Projects

Monitor environmental impacts Conduct baseline of income levels before implementation

Reproduced by permission of the Society for Applied Anthropology from ­Human Organ­ization, volume 75, number 4.

prepare materials for ­these encounters and being responsible for much of the logistics and expense of ­these events. As regards monitoring and evaluation, provincial staff members w ­ ere meant to conduct data collection to t­ hese ends as they went about their regular duties. The program’s formal midpoint and final evaluations w ­ ere tasked to two external teams, but even ­these teams, hired from outside the GGAP, its parent NGOs, and its donors, w ­ ere expected to use data gathered by the proj­ect staff in their analyses. External teams did conduct in­de­pen­dent interviews with certain individuals in the course of their evaluations but did not in­de­pen­dently collect quantitative or longitudinal data. Field agents ­were therefore asked to gather information, ranging from photo­graphs and “interest stories” to beneficiary income and environmental impact data, before, during, and a­ fter their interventionist activities. ­Table 3.2 summarizes the materials that field staff w ­ ere asked to forward to the Luanda office, as explicated in the GGAP’s M&E manual. At month’s end, for instance, each office was to send an accounting of all field activities to Luanda, including minutes from any meetings with beneficiaries, and “training reports” (brief summaries of the messages imparted in any beneficiary interaction). ­These should have been prepared by each staff member who had individually interacted with any beneficiary or beneficiary group during the month, detailed with re­spect to the main goals of the GGAP. No specific format was



Reinforcing Hierarchies 77

r­ecommended, however, and implementation teams ­were very murky on what such missives should look like or substantively contain. Considering especially the activities of the municipal development coordinators who worked alongside local government officials as program beneficiaries, the prospect of such detailed training reports was rather overwhelming. Some staff took the M&E instructions to literally mean that they should write down each exchange they had at work all day in the government offices and objected to the task as practicably impossible. Other agents interpreted the M&E manual as instructing them to include a training report only if they ran a formal workshop with government staff, outside the regular conduct of governmental duties; they submitted no training reports at all some months, despite working with government staff each day in a training capacity. Such disparate interpretations of the M&E manual, dif­fer­ent e-­mail messages sent periodically by Luanda-­based administrators, and even in-­person instruction on what the program wished to receive from the field offices, w ­ ere common. Particularly fraught in ­these procedures ­were the forms, or “instruments” that field staff w ­ ere expected to fill in to generate much of the GGAP’s M&E data. Field agents w ­ ere expected to submit a participant list for each formal activity they held, for instance. This was a form on which beneficiaries themselves ­were expected to fill in requested information and provide a signature as evidence of attendance. Field staff ­were specifically forbidden to fill out participant lists on anyone’s behalf, ­whether during or ­after the event, as a protection against fraudulent reporting. They routinely interrupted formal activities to check on the pro­gress of t­ hese participant lists circulating through any group and frequently had to arrange for some participants to fill lines for o­ thers in cases of confusion or illiteracy. Other data collection instruments, a set of forms called scorecards that w ­ ill be discussed ­later in the chapter, w ­ ere also supposed to be completed through one-­on-­one interviews with beneficiaries. Photo­graphs of meetings, discussions, and other events as they occurred and a summation of key accomplishments each month rounded out this collection of required monthly data. Additionally, a­ fter ­every three-­to four-­month period,3 the field teams ­were responsible for forwarding an additional roster of forms, surveys, and points of verification to the Luanda office. At each turn, the administrative staff in Luanda considered ­these instructions— as to what forms should be submitted when—to be very clear while the provincial field staff largely disagreed. As w ­ ill be explained h­ ere, it was not that the provincial field staff w ­ ere so confused about what forms to fill in, when, but that they objected to the forms themselves—­their content, their egregious errors of grammar and word choice in Portuguese, and their lack of attention to items the field staff felt ­were impor­tant to the program. Raising any of ­these more substantive concerns was almost always taken by administrative staff to be evidence of far more basic and logistical questions than they ever ­were; that is, the administrative staff e­ ither lacked the skill or the interest in conducting the interpretive l­ abor of understanding the field staff ’s concerns.

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Properly, M&E instruments and pro­cesses should function as “boundary objects” in the way Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989, 408) find that data collection artifacts and procedures work to translate dif­fer­ent groups’ interests, expectations, and motivations between them: “In natu­ral history work, boundary objects are produced when sponsors, theorists and amateurs collaborate to produce repre­sen­ta­tions of nature. Among t­ hese objects are specimens, field notes, museums and maps of par­tic­u­lar territories. Their boundary nature is reflected by the fact that they are si­mul­ta­neously concrete and abstract, specific and general, conventionalized and customized. They are often internally heterogeneous.” The participant lists, scorecard surveys, reports, and minutes sought in development’s programmatic M&E should depict society and social change just as field notes, maps, and specimens are used in ecological and natu­ral history research to depict nature. Even concepts such as “accountability” or “demo­cratic participation” should operate as boundary objects that “have dif­fer­ent meanings in dif­fer­ ent social worlds but [as] their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, [they are] a means of translation” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 393). If the artifacts, tasks, and concepts of M&E w ­ ere successful as boundary objects, they would allow enough autonomy to each participating group—­beneficiaries, field staff, administrators, donors, and so on—to engage productively with ­those objects on their own terms while also facilitating communication between ­these groups (Star and Griesemer 1989, 404; see also Green 2010 on participation as a boundary object in development). The experience of the GGAP staff, however, suggests that rather than communicating across group differences, the tasks and artifacts of development M&E reinforced ­those differences. In differentiating between and among development agents and privileging certain perspectives over ­others, however unintentionally, the management of the GGAP, and particularly its approach to tracking and evaluating the program’s work, produced a series of absurdities. As Graeber argues, “bureaucracies . . . ​are [inherently] ways of organ­izing stupidity—of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist ­because of the existence of structural vio­lence” (2015, 81). Among the barriers to M&E procedures functioning properly as boundary objects was perhaps their ubiquity. Participant lists, for example, have come to be expected of nearly e­ very NGO meeting—­even internally—in t­ oday’s “professionalized” organ­izations. ­These forms have become so commonplace that I witnessed even well-­educated members of the administrative staff filling them out incorrectly or partially—­carelessness that, I believe, arises simply from development professionals’ overwork and the ubiquitous familiarity of t­hese forms. Though ­these forms could help conduct impor­tant translation work across the bound­aries of dif­fer­ent groups of development professionals, they are taken for granted in ways that render them almost useless for their purposes.



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In Andulo in December  2008, in a GGAP-­organized workshop bringing together municipal government officials from across the GGAP’s field sites to share their experiences with municipal planning and citizen engagement, I had been seated next to Samuel, then the lead programs director for the American NGO. An Angolan educated in Zambia, Samuel had more than twenty-­five years of experience directing development programs and was fluent in En­glish, Portuguese, and several indigenous languages. As the participant list for this workshop came around to him, he filled in along one row of the form: his name, Samuel Guri, and his orga­nizational affiliation; he checked a box to indicate he was over the age of twenty-­two; and, in the column for gender, where the title of the column indicated that participants should write an H for homem (man) or an M for mulher (­woman), he wrote an M and passed the list to me. Filling in the same information on the row beneath him, I noticed the M and got his attention to ask if I should correct it to H for him. Without so much as glancing at the instructions on the top of the sheet, he firmly told me not to, explaining that M stands for sexo masculino (male) rather than sexo feminino (female). He emphasized the masculine ending -­ino on each term, perhaps thinking that as a nonnative speaker of Portuguese I was confusing the sex of the person being referred to with the gender of the noun sexo, which is masculine. I could not press the issue as the meetings’ events ­were beginning, and so the participant list erroneously marking Samuel as a female participant continued on its path around the room. Participant lists elsewhere in the GGAP and in its parent organ­izations did ask participants to mark “M” or “F” for gender using the format of “masculine sex” versus “feminine sex”; such a format is quite familiar to many of us, including in En­glish. But this par­tic­u­lar form had been developed by the provincial GGAP staff for use in Andulo, where they had found that asking “man or ­woman” was more natu­ral and easier to parse for local community members than was asking “male or female” or “masculine or feminine.” In this rural community, the terms sexo feminino or sexo masculino referred to livestock, not p­ eople. Rather than attending to the specific form and its par­tic­u­lar categories, however, Samuel had presumptively filled it out as he expected it to be. He was even unwilling to see his error when I pointed it out, intimating that ­either the form or my interpretation of it—­rather than his own—­was what was incorrect. I wondered if the central office would catch the error and if they would be allowed to correct it. With a name like Samuel, it is pos­si­ble that data entry staff would realize this participant was prob­ably not a mulher. In using his full name, it was further pos­si­ble that staff in Luanda would be confident they knew the par­tic­u­lar individual. I still think it equally pos­ si­ble, however, that overworked and time-­pressed data entry staff would read the H/M column straight down as they efficiently pro­cessed that form and stacks of ­others like it, not double-­checking each entry for logical correspondences within each row.

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Therefore, even experienced administrative staff members could be the source of bad data, though they may not admit to it or even be aware of it. In this exchange with Samuel, he was relying on his long history with such forms rather than engaging with the particularities of the unique form in order to enter his information. Such an attitude is perhaps only pos­si­ble among the administrative staff as they claim a kind of dominion over international development’s forms, data, and M&E more generally. ­There was a noticeable difference between the administrative and the field staff ’s orientation to bureaucratic artifacts of all kinds and M&E forms in par­tic­u­lar. Consider the GGAP staff’s divergent perspectives on one of their most impor­ tant M&E instruments, the scorecards. Administrators had developed two forms: one for community members and another for municipal officials. Each required a field agent to ask questions about a respondent’s experiences with and perceptions of the local government–­community relationship. By aggregating responses, the GGAP sought to quantify and track improved “good governance.” Administrators expected that provincial field workers would routinely carry copies of each scorecard with them as they conducted regular work, to be administered to a respondent whenever the opportunity arose. Th ­ ere was no targeted sampling strategy nor scheduling for soliciting respondents b­ ecause, as se­nior staff explained to me, any community member’s opinions ­were taken to be as informative as any other’s.4 Administrative staff discussed this as an inclusive, even egalitarian, approach to “taking the temperature” of each community or municipal administration. At the program’s midpoint, though, only a smattering of scorecards had been received from four field sites, and the fifth office had submitted none. Provincial staff w ­ ere decidedly unconvinced that t­ hese scorecards w ­ ere worthwhile. They mocked the scorecards for being written in unintelligible Portuguese and for including questions and response options that e­ ither ­were outside the ken of local community members or w ­ ere frankly offensive. Consider the version targeting community members ­after a municipal or communal forum meeting. One question sought to ask w ­ hether or not the interviewee “felt excluded” from any phase of municipal planning (see ­table 3.3). Provincial staff could not countenance offering ­these answer options as though they could accurately rec­ord community members’ experiences or opinions on civic participation. Field staff particularly objected to asking respected community members to identify, for instance, their own “weak education” as a ­factor in their “exclusion.” A l­ater question (see ­table 3.4) was literally incomprehensible to field staff, who, it is impor­tant to note, ­were expected to provide impromptu translations from Portuguese into Mbundu, Ibinda, Tchokwe, Nganguela, and so on (see also Englund 2006, chaps. 2 and 3; Roth 2019). ­Table 3.4 contains the exact language of another question from the Portuguese document with literal En­glish translation to retain some of the errors and incongruities of the original. I believe the question is meant to ask about interviewees’

­­table 3.3.

Reinforcing Hierarchies 81

Question from the GGAP’s Community “Scorecard” Instrument

Em alguma fase do Pro­cesso de Planeamento Municipal se sentiu excluído?

Do you feel excluded from any phase of the Municipal Planning Pro­cess?

a) Não b) Sim, Porque sou mulher c) Sim, Porque sou jovem d) Sim, porque sou deslocado e) Sim, por causa da linguagem técnica usada f) Sim, Por causa da minha fraca educação g) Sim, por cause de uma posição oficial do governo h) Sim, porque não os sinto tratarem seriamente os assuntos i) Sim, porque outros participantes dominam a agenda j) Sim por causa da minha posição social k) Sim, por alguma outra razão (Descrever)

a) No b) Yes, ­because I am a ­woman c) Yes, ­because I am a youth d) Yes, ­because I am a dislocated person e) Yes, ­because of the technical language used f) Yes, ­because of my weak education g) Yes, ­because of an official position of the government h) Yes, ­because I ­don’t feel the topics are seriously treated i) Yes, ­because other participants dominate the agenda j) Yes, ­because of my social position k) Yes, ­because of some other reason (describe it)

Note: (Left) Verbatim question as it appeared in Portuguese; (right) author’s translation. Reproduced by permission of the Society for Applied Anthropology from ­Human Organ­ization, volume 75, number 4.

experiences with their Administração Municipal (municipal administration: AM for the Portuguese abbreviation and MA for the En­glish). If the En­glish sentences are impenetrable, t­ hose in Portuguese are worse, including as they do fundamental errors of spelling and grammar. While poor grammar, word choice, and spelling errors alone could impede full understanding, this set of questions was additionally, and endlessly, amusing to field staff as it sought comment on the respondent’s relações (relations). A native Portuguese speaker seeking to ask about a commu­ nity’s or an individual’s interactions with local government offices could quite naturally use a number of terms, including vínculos (bonds), ligações (linkages), or conexões (connections) but would never use the term relações as it nearly always strongly intimates sexual relations. This language was likely chosen by expatriate administrators as the closest to the colloquial En­glish use of the term relationships. At the M&E workshop discussed next, during a morning coffee break, several implementation staff members chose to make light of the very frustrating meeting and their M&E assignments—­particularly the blindness of the central administration to the issues the field staff raised. A small group prepared a series of posters that they affixed to the workshop room walls. I have a picture of grinning staff members next to one that reads “O score card deve medir também as relações promíscuas dos sobas!” (lit., The scorecard should mea­sure as well the promiscuous [sexual] relations of the sobas!). Other posters poked fun at the broader context and

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­­table 3.4.

Question from the GGAP Community “Scorecard” Instrument

Sobre as relações com AM (Marque com afirmações aplicável a si) A) Nas minhas relações com AM (Expressada em fórum) tenho recebido algumas directivas e leis. Eu não penso que tenho alguma influência para mudar as politica municipais. B) A minha relacao com AM (Expressada neste Fórum) é uma. As minhas opiniões não exprimem com abertura. Mas eu não estou claro como as minhas opiniões são incorporadas nos plans. C) As minhas relacoes com AM (Espressadas neste Fórum) são visíveis pois consigo rever as minhas ideias nos assuntos públicos. D) As minhas relações com a AM (Espressadas nestes fóruns) são boas, nas tomadas de decisões, as autoridades incorporam as aspirações da comunidade. About relations with the Municipal Administration (MA) (mark which statements apply to you) A) Within my relation with the MA (expressed in forum) I have received some directives and laws. I do not think I have any influence to change municipal policies. B) My relation with the MA (expressed in this forum) is one. My opinions are not expressed with opening. But I am not clear how my opinions are incorporated into plans. C) My relations with the MA (expressed in this forum) are vis­i­ble but I can review my ideas on public ­matters. D) My relations with the MA (expressed in ­these forums) are good, in the taking of decisions, the authorities incorporate the aspirations of the community. Note: (Top) Verbatim as the question appears in Portuguese; (bottom) author’s translation. Reproduced by permission from the Society for Applied Anthropology from ­Human Organ­ization, volume 75, number 4.

challenges of their decentralization work in Angola (“Cabinda: Enviar fotografias dos barris de petróleo aos E.U.A.” [Cabinda offices: Send photos of oil barrels to the USA]) or of the expectations they felt the administrative officers had for the field staff and the community groups with which the field staff worked most closely (“Chitato: Surrar as ODAs p/dar diamantes à Julie!” [Chitato office: Beat the ODAs ­until they give their diamonds to Julie!]). While they chuckled and made jokes about the difficulties of their work, most field agents w ­ ere able to parse the scorecards and other M&E instruments within the context of the GGAP’s intervention methods and did their best to compensate for t­ hese forms’ shortcomings. While seemingly superficial, errors of language such as ­were extant in the scorecards can have a real impact on an intervention and are instructive as to the dynamics of power among members of a program staff. ­These forms particularly embarrassed the municipal development officers of each intervention site, as their interviewees ­were educated government professionals who could accurately diagnose such flaws. Despite receiving suggestions—­the most basic of which was of



Reinforcing Hierarchies 83

course to correct language errors—­GGAP administrators did not substantively revise ­these instruments. Not even Raul, a native speaker of Portuguese, did so when he took over the M&E officer position from Julie. When field staff pressed the administration to “redesign” the forms b­ ecause they ­were “inappropriate” and “too difficult to use,” administrative staff took ­these complaints to be largely about the physical formatting of the forms and responded by restructuring the layout of the questions and answer options on the page—­reorienting the form from portrait layout to landscape, for instance—­rather than considering alterations to the substance or wording of the questions themselves. While some field agents did try earnestly to understand the intent b­ ehind the scorecards, to discuss them with community members and government staff, and to adhere to instructions and submit their best efforts to Luanda, ­others refused to entertain t­hese instruments in any way. Some, I am sure, fabricated a few responses. Basic and even egregious errors ­were, for the most part, generously overlooked and compensated for by provincial staff in their daily work, though this conceptual and practical effort went unrecognized by administrators. Administrators, Angolan and expatriate alike, similarly disregarded more substantive suggestions. For instance, though unsystematically selecting community members to interview was cause for suspicion in many rural communities (compare with James 2012), requests for a transparent systematization went unheeded. Similarly, some field staff worried that conducting ­these interviews blurred their roles from advisory to more evaluative positions in the eyes of some community members and, especially, municipal administration officials, but they received no response from the administration about this reputational and relational concern. ­Because they do not have to conduct this interpretive ­labor in their relatively superior position, administrative staff in Luanda may simply have not seen ­these relationships as impor­tant to the work. They dismissed ­these concerns as irrelevant to the program, privileging the information needed for their own interpretive ­labor over that necessary for the field agents to do theirs.

“Quality” Data From the GGAP’s inception, all staff members w ­ ere concerned with monitoring and evaluating their work well, particularly b­ ecause “good governance” is so difficult to define and mea­sure (Kaufmann and Kraay 2007). During the program’s first years, however, M&E had become frustrating for every­one. Consider the proceedings of the Huambo City workshop held expressly to address M&E prob­ lems just before the external team of con­sul­tants was due to conduct the midterm evaluation of the program’s first phase. Osman opened the workshop by declaring that it should be informal: he expected “discussion and debate” with every­one “speaking from their hearts.” Speaking first “from [his] own heart,” he said,

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osman: Right now, we have lots of prob­lems; the first is that we do not get our data on time . . . ​many times we have complaints [from field staff]—­“we ­don’t have Internet, we d­ on’t have e-­mail, we d­ on’t have this or that”—­and we need to see why. So the first prob­lem is that reports and data do not get submitted on time. The second t­hing is that we do not get quality information. We ­don’t get ­things on time, and we ­don’t get them with good data. This is something I need to achieve. But we need to discuss what you all want to achieve as well.5

As Osman finished t­ hese opening statements, Maximino, an Angolan supervisor from the British NGO’s Luanda office, contributed that it was quite obvious why the M&E system was “not working”: maximino: I need to support the words of our director that ­there is a situation, a clear situation at the level of the consortium but also at the level of the program, that our system of monitoring is not at all effective. We cannot, we are not able to demonstrate, not even to the donors, that we have made any pro­gress. So we have this workshop exactly for this reason: so that t­ hose invited, but especially the [field team supervisors], can accept their final responsibility for the implementation of the system. We have an inertia and a re­sis­tance on the part of the field teams to implement the system and, for instance, the scorecards. In my personal opinion, the scorecard ­isn’t part of the monitoring of the GGAP but rather an implement to collect data a­ fter a forum or a workshop where we can collect the opinions of p­ eople who participated, and it only works if ­people know how to use the information. If you ­don’t know how to use the information, then you ­don’t know how to fill it out so that it can be useful.

As Maximino spoke, murmurs ­rose among ­those assembled, protesting the tenor of the workshop opening, the blame being leveled at the field staff, and especially his characterization of them. Just moments into the two-­day workshop, provincial staff had been accused of ignorance and reprimanded both for their perceived “re­sis­tance” and for the quality and timeliness of their data submission. Legitimate barriers to communication, such as interruptions in Internet and electrical ser­vices, had been dismissed as quite possibly fabricated. Most impor­tant, Osman and Maximino had positioned themselves firmly on the side of administrative staff—as set against field agents. Osman’s language of “I/we” versus “you” and Maximino’s strong intimations that the field staff was not only separated from the administration by lack of knowledge but was also retarding the administration’s—­and therefore the entire program’s—­success symbolically asserted an oppositional boundary between ­these implementariat subgroups. Fi­nally, effective “communication to the donors” about the program’s pro­gress and success is invoked as the most impor­tant purpose for M&E. This is contrary to the increasing industry discourse around M&E as a vehicle for learning, but it



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is wholly consistent with practice in the industry in which M&E exists to feed donors the “evidence” and “information” they deem necessary. Members of the provincial staff ­were quick to protest, as this was not the first time they had been accused of ignorance, or lack of commitment, regarding M&E. Fresh in every­one’s minds in Huambo City that day was the whole-­program staff meeting that had been held in Luanda five months e­ arlier. ­There, the GGAP’s M&E prob­lems had come to a head, and field staff had pressed administrators to or­ga­nize this M&E-­focused workshop as a solution. At the prior Luanda meeting, Pedro, an in­de­pen­dent con­sul­tant hired to facilitate, had opened the retreat by presenting the results of a preparatory survey he had sent out to all GGAP staff members. He had asked them to list the “greatest challenges” facing the first phase of the program as it approached its midpoint, and each and ­every respondent had included some mention of the M&E system among them. Summing up ­these responses, Pedro had separated the concerns of the Luanda office from t­ hose of the provincial field offices, though he had not purposively sampled along this distinction. The grievances themselves fell along an administration–­field divide. Moreover, most respondents had spontaneously identified the source of M&E challenges as wrongdoing or lack in certain sections of the staff: t­ hose in Luanda identified wrongdoing by ­those in the provinces, and vice versa. At the Luanda meeting, Pedro gave an overview of the complaints: administrators charged that data from the field offices ­were incomplete, incorrect, and tardy, while the provincial agents asserted that the expectations of the M&E system ­were unrealistic and adversely affected implementation tasks and that they received insufficient feedback on data reported. A ­ fter delivering t­hese results, Pedro or­ga­nized discussions on ­these charges wherein administrators de­cided that the root of ­these M&E prob­lems was the field staff ’s ignorance of the importance of M&E in the program and in development work more broadly. Raul, the Angolan M&E officer, then delivered a formal pre­sen­ta­tion that he had prepared in advance on this very presumption. He lectured for an hour around just two points, first, that monitoring and evaluation have dif­fer­ent purposes, and second, that both purposes require “quality” of information6 to be the field staff’s primary concern. While worthwhile, t­hese points did not instruct provincial staff on data collection procedures nor provide helpful feedback on specific reports or data submitted to date. Fieldworkers requested examples of submitted forms or reports to be displayed, critiqued, and used as a basis for instruction on how, precisely, to improve their quality. Fi­nally, they requested further training on exactly what purposes the data collected would serve. With ­these discussions from the Luanda meeting on every­one’s minds, several workshop attendees sought to set a dif­fer­ent, more productive tone in Huambo. ­Those assembled anticipated receiving detailed instruction on how to collect and submit “quality” data for M&E and discussion on how it would be used. As Maximino delivered his support for Osman’s statements, then, and protests began to

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arise from the audience of field agents, Alexandre intervened. An Angolan technical adviser who had recently moved from Luanda to supervise the American NGO’s regional field office in the Central Highlands, he was positioned somewhat in between the administration and the provincial field staff. He made t­ hese suggestions: alexandre: Would it be pos­si­ble to say another t­ hing? In relation to all that Maximino has said, I think t­ here is a big prob­lem in that ­there is no clarity (não há clareza) in what we are ­doing. So for me an impor­tant ­thing to do t­ oday would be to make an outline (um mapeamento) of the instruments that make up the M&E system and to make an analy­sis of which are the most impor­tant and a lesson on how you are supposed to use each tool—­how it should be filled out. The question of the logframe (quadro lógico),7 too, would be very good to go over and to explain how each of the tools of the M&E system is linked to the logframe.

As Alexandre ­here represented the field staff, he was presenting re­sis­tance, perhaps—­but not to the fact of M&E’s programmatic importance. Rather, Alexandre was contradicting the presumption that provincial agents should simply do as told, with or without access to the under­lying logics of the M&E instrumentation. Provincial staff evinced genuine interest in learning and understanding more about the details of each tool and what it could do for the program. As Alexandre spoke, ­others nodded vigorously and added interjections in support of his request for explication. Instead of attending to this request, however, Osman and other administrators only reiterated that M&E is impor­tant, leading the group through a series of basic questions.8 Although in this next exercise field agents quickly and succinctly answered Osman’s questions about the meanings of monitoring (“it is for tracking the implementation”) and evaluation (“it is for knowing if objectives w ­ ere achieved,”) he again berated them for not attending seriously enough to M&E. He began to recount instances where he was unable to fulfill requests for evidence of the GGAP’s work, expounding on the onerousness of the administration’s tasks of compiling and analyzing data and writing reports. Picking up a copy of the most recent quarterly report, he gestured with it at the workshop attendees, saying, osman: How many revisions do you think it takes to make this document? How much data is in h­ ere? Do you think we [administrators] make up the numbers in ­here? Is that pos­si­ble? Where do we get t­ hese numbers from? But when we d­ on’t have information from you, we ­can’t make ­these documents. This document, what is it for? The first group to use this document is us—­it’s our document. We have achieved ­these results. I need to say a few ­things about how this is a system. When we went to finalize this document, we had so many prob­lems—­you know how many e-­mails [Raul] had to send. You saw them. “Why do ­these data not link well



Reinforcing Hierarchies 87

together? Why do ­these data not add up? What is correct? Why is so much missing?” But we d­ on’t need to do this. You need to just send good information, and then we would not need to do this. This system has been in place for more than one year, and we should not have this prob­lem. I think, a final word, that you all think that this monitoring work is not a key activity. You think that ­after a [beneficiary] training, ­you’re done, that you d­ on’t need to fill anything out, that you d­ on’t need to document, you ­don’t take any of this seriously.

In ­these exchanges, M&E is a venue in which complaints can be registered, blame can be ascribed, and the administrative staff ’s narrative of the field staff ’s ignorance is restated. Despite receiving prompt, correct answers to questions on the purposes and importance of M&E, administrative staff can, and do, simply assert that provincial staff misunderstand and underestimate it, thereby making real their own “dominance” within the structure of the intervention (MacLachlan, Carr, and McAuliffe 2010). For Osman and other members of the administrative staff, this assertion that the provincial staff misunderstand is also wholly true to their experience—as “­middle figures” (Merry 2006) in development work, the highest rung of the implementariat and therefore the nearest to the elite policy makers—­they ­were more familiar with and ensconced within the culture of evaluation that focused and promoted the very exercise of collecting M&E data. ­After all, “where audit culture reigns . . . ​nothing is real that cannot be quantified, tabulated, or entered into some interface or quarterly report” (Graeber 2015, 41–42). The documentation of the GGAP’s work, as narrowly defined by the bureaucratic and institutional perspective of it had, h­ ere, become more impor­tant than the workers, and the workers’ experiences. ­After the foregoing outburst, Osman calmed and began an exercise to systematically review each M&E “tool.” Attendees w ­ ere visibly invigorated in their anticipation of this long-­awaited in-­depth discussion: osman: Okay, so which are the tools that we have inside our monitoring system? What are our forms? Our first t­ hing, when we have an activity—­trainings or a forum—we have to have a participant list, ­isn’t it?9 This is our first tool. [He writes on the flip chart as though to move on to the next instrument in an enumerated list.] alexandre: Excuse me, but we should detail each of t­ hese tools: What goes into a participant list, why do we do that, what is useful about this information? Why ­don’t we use another form, why this one?

A tide of agreement r­ ose: field agents had many questions about the details of ­these forms and w ­ ere loath to allow Osman to move on without thoroughly discussing this first one, required for ­every staff activity—­even internal meetings. Osman moved as though to list the complete set, however, and even Maximino,

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who largely sympathized with the administration on the perceived laxity of the provincial staff, tried to pull him into more detailed explication. osman: Good, ­we’ll have a discussion like that for e­ very piece of the system. So, the second piece of the system is that we have the monthly report, and then a trimester report . . . maximino: But, Osman, Alexandre’s idea is that for each one we should identify what the importance of it is. So, for example, the participant list . . . ​let us say, what does it show us? We can see the list and we can say, did the [municipal] administrator participate? Did the traditional authorities participate? We can see the diversity of participants coming from the community, and to me this is the value of the participant lists.

Maximino’s comments sparked animated conversation: field agents saw ­great potential for participant lists as rec­ords of stakeholder participation in their activities, but questions remained regarding the par­tic­u­lar format of the sheets and, most importantly, how the information would be used and archived in Luanda and beyond. ­After the workshop, several provincial staff noted privately that the incredible richness of information contained in participant lists was only available to ­those with the local knowledge to interpret them. For example, for the reader to know if “traditional authorities” participated in an event, she often must know them by name. The same is true for religious leaders, po­liti­cal party activists, school teachers, nurses, and ­others, as the format of the GGAP’s attendance sheets at the time was not uniform across the field sites, some requiring only the most basic information: name, zone of residence, sometimes employer or occupation, and sometimes age. In many cases, even identifying participants as female or male required knowledge of the local indigenous language and naming conventions, if not the a­ ctual individuals involved. L ­ ittle of this encoded information was available to the Luanda administrators and even less to foreign donors u­ nless interpreted by ­those familiar with local convention. Provincial field staff clearly saw the potential of such lists, as well as that such potential was not being realized. Osman did not pause to consider w ­ hether ­these points about the participant lists ­were valid, nor did he provide insight on what information about participants, exactly, was useful to administrators or donors, and why. In not responding to ­these points, Osman—as a type of proxy actor for the bureaucratized production of “information” about the program—­renders ­here a type of vio­lence by absence or neglect. It would seem that the purpose of this exercise in the workshop, and perhaps of the workshop as a ­whole, was to impose an expectation of unquestioning obedience on the field staff. The overarching message was that they, as the agents of the program, should simply do as they ­were told, questioning neither their ­orders nor how their actions would be recorded and judged. In the GGAP’s reports, beneficiary participation was in fact represented only by gross “counts” of attendees, with no characterization what­ever of their



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diversity or representativeness. At the workshop, Osman simply assured the field staff that they would have opportunities l­ater to ask questions. By the end of this opening session, Osman had listed the six major forms and reports that the field staff ­were expected to fill out, he had admonished the group as to how ­doing so should not be difficult or complicated, and he had asked them to move on to the next activity of the workshop, which involved making their own lists of the strengths and weaknesses of the M&E system. In this task, members of the field staff suggested that the quarterly reports should be prepared in Portuguese as well as En­glish, that many of the tools ­were redundant, and that ­there was no venue for recording some of the information the field teams felt was highly relevant. By the time the workshop ended the next day, ­there still had been no in-­depth explanation of the individual instruments or of how any of the data collected by field staff ­were received by audiences elsewhere in the sponsoring organ­izations. Neither had t­ here been any promise of substantive changes to the M&E system in response to the field staff ’s concerns, a clear violence-­by-­neglect. ­There had, however, been a “pledge sheet” circulated on the second day of the workshop, on which Osman required members of the field staff pre­sent to sign their names and promise to conduct their M&E data collection in a timely and complete fashion once they returned to their provincial implementation sites. Members of the administrative staff ­were not required to sign any equivalent pledge ­toward their tasks of data analy­sis, making corrections to the M&E system, or circulating finalized reports back to the field sites. This inequitable exchange solidified the hierarchy of who was responsible to whom in the GGAP’s personnel structures: field staff w ­ ere made to commit a written pledge to administrative staff with no expectation of reciprocity. Moreover, the responsibility for improving the M&E system was ­here clearly placed on the shoulders of the field staff rather than the administration. Most of the broader goals of M&E ­were in fact shared between GGAP administrators and field agents, a significant difference between this case and o­ thers that have demonstrated how dif­fer­ent groups of development workers engage in the same activities for dif­fer­ent, even contradictory reasons (Smith 2003) or other­wise hold disparate opinions on their shared activities (Mebrahtu 2003). The GGAP case suggests that staff positioned differently within an intervention do not always have fundamentally dif­fer­ent intentions for their work, though they may have dif­ fer­ent concerns. H ­ ere, administrators emphasized a conceptual coherence, organ­ izing their thoughts on M&E around the major “results” envisioned for the program but failing to follow this thread to its logical completion in the everyday work of field staff. Provincial agents largely or­ga­nized their thinking by the concrete, social activity asked of them, including its timing, location, and interlocutors, rather than organ­izing their thoughts on M&E data collection around the sought-­after results of the program, though they did understand t­ hese. Field staff members w ­ ere more concrete rather than abstract in their thinking but w ­ ere not less sophisticated; they

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­ ere more par­tic­u­lar and practical about how data should be collected and what w the specific utility of each point of information was and for whom.

The “Lopsided Structures” of International Development In the GGAP, as is common across the development industry, members of the field staff, such as Rita and Gavino in Chicala Cholohanga, w ­ ere assigned only data-­collection responsibilities ­toward M&E. More importantly, the field staff had ­little or no influence over what information was sought for monitoring and evaluating the program, nor how they w ­ ere meant to seek it. As a result, at least in the eyes of the field staff, valuable information was not recorded, and, perhaps worse, the techniques they w ­ ere made to use to collect information may have impeded the work of the program. When such concerns ­were repeatedly brought to the GGAP’s administrative staff in Luanda the field staff ­were admonished to simply do as they ­were told; the administrative staff took their concerns as indicative of their ignorance and perhaps of a fundamental opposition to the premises of M&E. Seeing ­these interactions as part of the bureaucracy of the international development industry, they instantiate “this notion of the role of bureaucrats: that . . . ​it is the responsibility of servants to do their masters’ bidding, no m ­ atter what that bidding is” (Graeber 2015, 166). The boundary effects of M&E—­here, reinforcing the conceptual demarcation between administrative and field officers within the development implementariat—­produce two further consequences for international development. First, ­these effects negatively influence the broader ­human resources base of the industry. The GGAP suffered serious staffing challenges that threatened its ability to meet its targets, in part due to frustrations around M&E and the strug­gles for authority and influence waged through its practices (see Peters 2013; 2019b). More salient, t­ hese social effects are concerning ­because they frustrate the production of accurate and actionable knowledge for development. Helpful information about the program’s implementation and its effects in rural Angolan provinces was never incorporated into the GGAP’s formal knowledge base ­because the staff ’s internal hierarchies of power prevented such information from being valued—­the information that was deemed valuable was always determined using the perspectives and presumptions of the more power­ful party. ­These social barriers, between the implementariat as a ­whole and the donor/policy maker class, and within the implementariat between the administrative staff and the field staff, ­were themselves produced and maintained within the very activities intended to make information mobile between staff ranks and offices and, ultimately, accessible to decision makers at all levels. Rather than diagnosing deficiency or idiosyncratic happenstance in the case of the GGAP’s M&E system, the system’s design and prob­lems are a fruitful place



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to examine closely the interactions and experiences of the implementariat. The GGAP’s administrative and field staff members all sought to properly document their work, only to find that they did not all see eye to eye about what to document or how. Most importantly, the staff ’s exchanges around the GGAP’s M&E “system,” its development and deployment, demonstrate how the international development industry relies on a ­great deal of interpretive ­labor, as the field staff was pressed to understand the administrative staff ’s perspectives and approaches to M&E while the administrative staff was not similarly pressed to understand the field staff ’s substantive objections and suggestions for the system. In her analyses of development intervention in Indonesia, Li (2007, 4) has asked “how programs of improvement are s­ haped by political-­economic relations they cannot change; how they are constituted, that is, by what they exclude.” The case of the GGAP demonstrates that certain of development’s social and po­liti­ cal exclusions happen through the very means of knowledge production meant to capture t­ hose insights and render them useful for intervention. ­Others have also noted a hollowness to M&E activities—­such as when the superficial formatting or structure of a report or form is attended to without similar attention to its substantive content. Rather than accuse such vacuous replication as stemming from ignorance or malfeasance, China Scherz (2014, 100) asserts that certain professionals “enthusiastically learn t­hese techniques of self-­monitoring with the aim of marketing themselves for other work in a philanthropic field that requires fluency in the language of audit.” It is not, then, the substantive skills of knowledge production that are sought or offered in such marketing, as Scherz (2014, 107) demonstrates, but often only the apparent form of them. Julie herself maintained that certain of the “indicators” and points of information sought by the M&E system w ­ ere mandated by WestAid and the donors as a class and that she simply “designed” the formatting and layout of the dif­fer­ent instruments through which t­ hose points of information w ­ ere collected. B ­ ecause of her work to develop ­these forms and surveys, however, most every­one considered her the ultimate architect of the system. The perspective of the provincial field staff was that the system—­embodied in the forms Julie developed and the deadlines by which they ­were meant to submit each of them—­was being constantly redesigned in the GGAP’s Luanda office. Furthermore, work that should properly be done in the Luanda offices was increasingly being tasked to the provincial offices, as when it became the field staff ’s effective duty to notify Luanda that the central office had itself approved a micro-­project. ­These irregular but very frequent changes irritated the field staff even while the administrative staff, Julie in par­tic­u­lar, saw them as good faith responses to field staff complaints or as appropriate work-­arounds furthering the objectives of the program. Each of t­ hese subsections of the implementariat was d­ oing dif­fer­ent kinds of translational work—­ the Luanda-­based staff worked hard to take donor imperatives and massage them into something that would match the rest of the GGAP as a unique program, while

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the provincial office staff worked hard to take the program as a development intervention and make it mesh with the local contexts of rural Angolan communities and municipal governments. Each of t­ hese sections of the implementariat was d­ oing significant amounts of interpretive ­labor directed ­toward understanding the next—or higher—­level above them in the industry. Interpretive ­labor is not the only kind of “imaginative ­labor” ­there is, however, and Graeber points to a seeming paradox in his review of Marx’s and ­others’ analyses of hierarchical, bureaucratized divisions of ­labor (2015, 94): “To recall the argument so far: structural inequalities always create what I’ve called ‘lopsided structures of imagination,’ that is, divisions between one class of p­ eople who end up ­doing most of the imaginative ­labor, and ­others who do not. However, the sphere of factory production that Marx concerned himself with is rather unusual in this re­spect. It is one of the few contexts where it is the dominant class who end up d­ oing more imaginative l­abor, not less.” I assert that the sphere of factory production was not, in fact, unusual in its distribution of interpretive l­abor; instead Graeber is ­here identifying a broader class of imaginative work. Not all imagination work has as its goal or concern a deeper understanding of o­ thers’ perspectives—­that specificity is what makes the concept of interpretive ­labor so analytically power­ful. Graeber, and Marx, too, are correct that imaginative ­labor is distributed—­and valued and rewarded—­differently as a larger class of ­human activity than is interpretive l­ abor. In the international development industry, as in the “sphere of factory production that Marx concerned himself with,” it is the upper classes—­the policy making elite—­who are rewarded for ­doing the imaginative l­abor of designing programs and policies, spotting prob­ lems and innovating solutions for them, and broadly envisioning both a changed ­future and the most efficient route to take to it. Elites’ imagination work is rewarded while the implementariat’s wholly similar work—­both to imagine changed ­futures and to understand what o­ thers’ wishes for the ­future might be—is not only unrewarded but hardly recognized. In the following chapters, I analyze the imagination work of the development elite using the history of the GGAP as a focal point. This democ­ratization and decentralization intervention was designed, and its methods and target municipalities chosen, largely by “the dominant class” of development agents, working as advisers and policy makers in WestAid and as the global management class of the international NGOs that came to implement the program. Th ­ ese development professionals are—as are their implementariat colleagues—­engaged in deeply intellectual and creative acts, using an inherently social calculus. They are not, however, tasked with the specifically interpretive l­ abor of understanding how differently positioned ­others see the world differently than they do. Quite to the contrary, ­these development elites are invested in managing their own positions and reputations among their industry and institutional peers.

4 • DESIGNING INTERVENTIONS FOR PEERS, NOT BENEFICIARIES

In this chapter and the following chapter, the sociality of the international development industry is examined at an analytical scale just above that of the implementariat, considering everyday development as it is driven by social dynamics among institutional decision makers using the origin of the GGAP as a focal point. This chapter traces the establishment of the program and the se­lection of its intervention sites; chapter 5 then examines decision making about the program’s methods and goals. Throughout, I argue that development programs such as the GGAP are often products of the development industry’s internal social dynamics more than they are thoughtful responses to genuine need. Recall that the GGAP, in its first phase, was targeted to just five Angolan municipalities1 (see fig. 4.1). The desires of the GGAP’s two corporate donors—­the Oil Com­pany and the Diamond Com­pany—­clearly drove the se­lection of two of ­these original sites.2 In the postwar period, WestAid had encountered difficulty winning adequate funds for its Angolan work from its home government.3 Angola’s diamond-­and oil-­extraction income leads many in the international community to presume it sufficiently wealthy to fund its own initiatives; ­whether the country ­really is so well off, or not, remains an open question (Soares de Oliveira 2015). What is certain is that the vast majority of the population experiences poverty, much of it extreme, and WestAid’s Angola office had entered into partnership with t­ hese two specific firms in order to augment its insufficient bilateral funding. ­These corporate bodies sought to visibly “give back” to local communities in the areas from which they extracted natu­ral resources (see Rajak 2011). The Oil Com­pany therefore wished Cabinda Province to be an intervention site ­because of its presence working in Cabinda’s offshore oil platforms, and the Diamond Com­pany wished the same for Lunda Norte, where its diamond mining operations w ­ ere located. ­These donors followed their own very explicit corporate interests, directed by the geological locations of oil and diamond deposits. But 93

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figure 4.1. ​ Map of Angola drawn by Joe Stoll indicating the five provinces (and their

provincial capitals) and the par­tic­u­lar municipalities in which the GGAP operated in 2008–2009.

what then, of  WestAid’s decision making around the other three provincial sites of  Huambo, Bié, and Cuando Cubango? WestAid’s formal justifications, laid out in documents like its strategic five-­ year plan, employed rhe­toric about Angola’s “fragility,” directing its attentions to certain areas of the country deemed, implicitly, more likely to return to civil war.



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In ­these justifications, such fragility was explained as the result of population densities and dynamics, localized h­ uman rights abuses, and the tumultuous “reintegration” of former combatants into society. Beyond this list of f­ actors—­stated in orga­nizational documents without reference to in­de­pen­dent or secondary research—no information was provided about how WestAid assessed fragility or need in Angola’s dif­fer­ent regions. Instead, I detail ­here how social relationships and dynamics between peer institutions came to stand in for empirical observations of Angolan communities as its own kind of institutional “knowledge.” Directed by donors to intervene where such “knowledge” was greatest, the GGAP ended up being assigned to places in which other organ­izations ­were already implementing similar programs, not b­ ecause need was in­de­pen­dently determined to exist ­there in greater degree than elsewhere, but ­because the donors’ peers ­were working t­ here. ­These determinations, driven by interdonor relations, happened at the provincial scale; the social dynamics of the implementariat then held greater sway in the municipal-­level determination of sites. The implementariat’s influence at the municipal scale was not formally acknowledged by donors or the implementing NGOs but was effected through pragmatic decision making and (in)action rather than explicit negotiation, following institutional logics that contradicted ­those of the donors. The GGAP’s field sites ­were, in the end, determined in the dialectics between the GGAP’s in-­country implementariat; the international elites working in the global offices of the American, British, and Canadian NGOs; and the GGAP’s donors. The levels, patterns, and dynamics of development sociality are genuinely complex in this case. The local offices of the three international NGOs had to negotiate among themselves as a cohort, and each of them with its respective global or international headquarters offices. The donors had to negotiate among themselves as a consortium, and additionally t­ hese two in-­country consortia had to negotiate together to make final decisions about the GGAP. The donors wanted the program to operate in locations that would improve their standings among their own peer institutions, namely other private companies, international aid agencies, and the Angolan state. Particularly for WestAid, this meant largely operating in the same locations as did t­hese peers. The implementing agencies also sought to place the GGAP in locations that would enhance their institutional standing among peers but, for them, that meant operating in dif­fer­ent locations than did their peers. Where WestAid sought to place the intervention in the same sites as peer programs, the GGAP’s implementing NGOs w ­ ere motivated to distance their work from similar proj­ects. The implementing NGOs w ­ ere concerned that carry­ing out the program was not feasible if co-­located with other programs and that, even if it w ­ ere feasible, ­doing so would sabotage their ability to lay sole claim to the results. I use ­these debates and dynamics around the GGAP’s site se­lections to argue that the physical sites of development intervention serve as industry-­specific social or

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symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986), part of the “specific capital” (Bourdieu 1991) held and exchanged by interventionist institutions in patterns that define the industry’s social field. Donors and large international agencies seek to converge in the same places, b­ ecause the physical location of intervention serves, for them, as a threshold reached: an indication of membership among institutional peers. For implementing organ­izations, however, ­there is motivation to use physical location to distinguish themselves from peers—­potential competitors—by in­de­pen­dently claiming impact and success in specific places. In the case of the GGAP, ­these divergent desires for site se­lection ­were made ethnographically vis­i­ble through disagreement about the se­lection of intervention sites, through discrepancies between dif­fer­ent accounts of site se­lection, and in purposeful slow-­downs by the implementariat in order to force change in the donors’ decisions.

Development’s Peerage Critical accounts of the geographies of development intervention—­analyses that ask why h­ ere?—­usually privilege the development “encounter” between agents and intended beneficiaries as causal to site determination. Th ­ ese accounts presume the location of intervention to have been determined e­ ither by the characteristics of the site itself ­because the address of local need was the primary determinant for se­lection, or b­ ecause characteristics of the intervener in combination with ­those of the site together directed the determination—an argument about dyadic “fit” or appropriateness, above all e­ lse.4 Looking further at site se­lection as a function of the dyadic relationship between the intervener and the intervened upon, scholars find that international development interventions are frequently sited where states are weak, reading state weakness or absence as “need” or opportunity for intervention and asserting that, for better or worse, intervention helps strengthen the state in t­ hese places, e­ ither shoring it up, extending it, or positively substituting for it (e.g., Brass 2016; Ferguson 1994). Such “state-­effects” produced by development interventions, nongovernmental organ­izations, or international organ­izations are taken to reinforce the territorial identity, integrity, and power of the state, w ­ hether or not d­ oing so was the express intention of the intervention (Trouillot 2001). Two objections must be raised to this oft-­employed set of “common sense” (Geertz 1983) logics explaining why development interventions appear where and when they do. The first objection is that, too often, the eventual consequences of intervention (the state-­effects) become, via teleology, the explanation as to why programs are sited in their par­tic­u­lar locations. In a dif­fer­ent form, this objection has been previously raised by Li, who argues against reading domination as the ulterior motive of development intervention. She rightly asserts that unintended or collateral effects of development intervention, however clear, predictable, uniform, or ubiquitous, cannot be mistaken for the “true” m ­ otivations



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of intervention, emphatically rejecting the idea “that improvement is merely a tactic to maintain the dominance of par­tic­u­lar classes, or to assert control by the global North over the South” (Li 2007, 8–9). Out of a fundamental re­spect for “trustees [who] have endeavored to secure the welfare of populations and carried out programs that cannot be explained except in t­hese terms” (8–9), Li argues against retroactively ascribing development interventions’ effects as equivalent to their originating motivations. Though I agree with Li’s stance ­toward respecting the stated motivations of interventionists, her assertion does not fully explain her observations; for instance, that interventions happen more often in some deserving places than in ­others. She specifically observed greater interventionist attention paid to one of her Indonesian research sites over the other despite no appreciable difference between them in terms of population welfare. Dif­fer­ent effects or impacts of intervention aside, how should t­ hese disparate treatments of place be understood? The differential treatment of similarly needy places prompts the second objection to the common-­sense rendering of development logics on site se­lection: that the analytical framing of t­ hese decisions takes them as dyadic, driven by the relationship between the intervener and the intervened-­upon rather than recognizing how ­either or both of ­those parties are also enmeshed within lateral relationships that can shape interventionist decision making, including the se­lection of sites. As Jean and John Comaroff have famously shown for the “interventions” of British and Dutch colonialism in South Africa (1991), interventions si­mul­ta­ neously create—­they produce and shape—­both the recipients as subjects and the interveners in the same interaction. Like the colonial powers in the Comaroffs’ historical analy­sis, con­temporary development interventionists are intimately aware of their position among o­ thers who also intervene in similar ways and in similar places. If the Eu­ro­pean states of an ­earlier era competed with one another to establish colonies or overseas territories, the be­hav­ior of con­temporary developed countries to showcase their “aid” to poor and developing countries surely contains echoes of such be­hav­ior. I extend this observation to argue that interventionist relationships produce not only the intervener and the intervened-­upon of each dyad but also the group of interveners as a class—­Li’s “trustees” or the con­temporary peerage of development “nobility”—­and the group of recipients as a class. Critical assessments of development intervention must attend to the lateral relationships inside each group to examine how t­ hese also influence development interventions, including where and how they are conducted. This chapter’s analy­sis of the GGAP’s founding, and particularly its site se­lections, demonstrates how the internal social relations of the international development industry can drive much decision making and contestation in intervention design and implementation. In the following sections, I carefully consider the program’s originating document, the request for applications (RFA) that founded the GGAP Program. The bureaucratic document in general, Matthew

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Hull reminds us, is “the very image of formal orga­nizational practice, the central semiotic technology for the coordination and control of organ­izations and the terrains on which they operate” (2012, 256). Such “coordination and control” also includes stifling creative imagination about the relationships and actions pos­si­ ble inside the organ­ization. I analyze the RFA as part of the larger development industry’s “rites of institution” (Bourdieu 1991 [1982]), instrumental in “acts of social magic” that consecrate both the donor and the implementing agencies as interventionists, setting them apart from ­those who ­will be intervened upon. In explaining rites of institution, Bourdieu expands van Gennep’s (1960) classic analyses of rites of passage as t­ hose social rituals that transport an individual from ju­nior to se­nior hierarchical status, as in the transition from childhood to adulthood, from unmarried to married, from student to gradu­ate, and so on. Bourdieu points out that such rites do far more than transition ­those eligible into higher-­status social roles; they also implicitly distinguish ­those eligible for such advancement from t­ hose who are not—­and perhaps never ­will be—­eligible. Th ­ ese rites, that is, distinguish not just boys from men in ceremonially transitioning from one to the next, but in the same stroke also naturalize and reinforce the more foundational distinction between boys and men as dif­fer­ent from girls and ­women, who ­will never undergo ­those rites. Bourdieu uses academic credentialing as a central example of rites of institution: testing, certification, and ultimately graduation not only consecrate students who have worked hard and passed exams as new gradu­ates and holders of diplomas but implicitly sacralize their status as ­those who had the opportunity to do that work. Such rites of institution, Bourdieu charges, naturalize and make sacred systems of social differentiation, masking what are ­really social and economic inequalities as resulting instead from recognition of individual merit, demonstrated by learning and accomplishment. The international development industry, too, has not only its rites of passage but its rites of institution; competition for funds through the RFA pro­cess is one of them. Consider that the GGAP as a specific intervention within WestAid’s portfolio of programs first existed as the bureaucratic artifact of the RFA, considered in detail in the following. Though nearly all bureaucratic documents hold the capacity “to make t­ hings come into being” (Frohmann 2008, 292), the RFA is a special kind of generative document, expressly announcing donors’ intentions to fund a program, describing donors’ hopes for what should result from the intervention, and soliciting applications from agencies wishing to implement the program on the donors’ behalf. The RFA also implicitly describes and defines what kind of organ­ization is considered eligible to submit applications. ­After an RFA is released—in the GGAP’s case by WestAid working in a ­funding consortium with the Diamond Com­pany and the Oil Com­pany—­ implementation agencies interested in responding usually have just a month or six weeks to submit a detailed proposal describing how they would conduct the program and why they are qualified and stand ready to do so. Th ­ ese proposals



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often run into the hundreds of pages, detailing who the individual personnel are who would manage the program, what physical infrastructure already exists that could be made use of in program implementation, and what personnel or infrastructure would have to be acquired with the donors’ funds. WestAid published the GGAP’s RFA in the first week of January 2006; proposals w ­ ere due five weeks ­later. Such short timelines for t­ hese responses preclude detailed reflection and dictate that much of any submission in response to an RFA issued by a large donor ­will consist of “boilerplate” language or simply be repurposed from ­earlier proposals, contributing to the international development industry’s tendency to “franchise” its policies and practices (Green 2003) and creating significant barriers to entry for new, young, or small organ­izations (Schuller 2007). In that smaller and newer organ­izations are thus, de facto, considered unqualified to respond to the RFA, the pro­cess of selecting implementation agents and distributing funds for development becomes a part of the industry’s reproduction of economic capital, concentrated in certain hands via the circumscribed production and exchange of cultural and social capital. RFA procedures—­the writing of the call, preparation and submission of responses to calls, judging and taking decisions on ­those responses to award the funds to certain implementation agencies and not ­others—­are among the development industry’s rites of institution. ­These rites, in a mirror of the interventions themselves, create and perhaps consecrate institutional social groupings: the development peerage able to offer RFAs and the implementariat, deemed able to appropriately respond to them. This analy­sis of the GGAP’s history, focused on its original RFA and the winning implementing consortium’s response to it, demonstrates that perhaps by the very sharing of this endeavor, trustees and the development institutions they operate generate their own social milieu with standards and procedures of membership that can, and often do, allow the ultimate goal of social improvement to be eclipsed by the nearer goal of being among t­ hose who pursue it.

Interventions Designed for Peers, Not Places ­ ere is a circular, mutual constitution of institutional relationships and interTh ventionist knowledge, as Maia Green points out, that is inherent to the epistemological foundations of the development industry, where “what counts as knowledge . . . ​is [what is] institutionalized within and through specific orga­ nizational forms” (2009, 401). Development knowledge, that is, is an inherently relational system: the knowledge that counts is that which cements the pragmatically focused, action-­oriented relationships between and among institutions. To merit attention in the development industry, knowledge must be “actionable,” and it should preferably suggest actions that agencies and prac­ti­tion­ers can take together (see chap. 5). Green’s argument that development knowledge is

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defined by its social utility among peer, interventionist institutions informs my examination of how such relationality was instantiated in the GGAP. Among the most impor­tant repercussions of development’s knowledge practice is, as happened in the GGAP, that it shapes the geo­graph­i­cal presence of interventions, ultimately determining who—­which communities, which governmental bodies, which individuals—­will come into contact with development intervention and who ­will not as a product of the internal dynamics of the industry rather than of the characteristics of local communities. In t­ hese industry dynamics, local communities are commodified into “intervention sites” and incorporated into the system of capital and exchange defining the social field of international development (Bourdieu 1991). The GGAP’s RFA ran over ninety pages long, divided into six sections. Only thirteen pages (section C, pp. 24–36) w ­ ere specific to the GGAP as an intervention; all of the other sections w ­ ere institutionally mandated as part of any WestAid RFA issued anywhere in the world, addressing the institution’s rules of application, its l­ egal certifications, and its internal bureaucratic procedures. This distribution of space and topic m ­ atter in the RFA indicates just how l­ ittle valued situation-­specific details are in this approach to development planning and intervention design (Li 2007), contributing further to “blueprint” development action and the replication of practices across disparate sites (Green 2003; Roe 1991). This short program-­specific section was broken down into the following parts: I. Summary II. Development Prob­lem III. Existing Programs to Address the Prob­lem IV. [WestAid]’s and Its Partners’ Response V. Program Purpose and Expected Results VI. Program Management VII. Technical Par­ameters VIII. Approach to Design and Implementation IX. Monitoring and Evaluation Considering the RFA through an “ethnography of documents” approach (Harper 1998), and particularly the treatment of the GGAP as an intervention first given shape within its pages, it is significant that sections I and II together took up only one page and contained no references, citations, nor mention of what information this review of the Angolan situation and its “development prob­lem” drew upon. Section I, Summary, in fact outlined the funding partnerships between WestAid and the Oil Com­pany and then WestAid and the Diamond Com­pany, stating that the GGAP was meant to support “a larger, multi-­donor effort to assist the Government of Angola in achieving decentralized planning and bud­geting at the local government level, with broad community participation, while at the same



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time providing basic infrastructure to meet community-­determined needs” (24).5 Such a summary is not a summation of the intervention of the GGAP or its implementation requirements, as implementation organ­izations might expect from an RFA. Instead it is a summation—­intended also as a summoning—of a desired ­future: a ­future wherein Angola enjoys “decentralized planning and bud­geting at the local government level, with broad community participation.” In this summoning summation of a hoped-­for ­future, the bureaucratic artifact of the RFA functions like ­those models of global climate change Anna Tsing has described as attempts, on the part of scientists, to transform policy makers into “future-­oriented global citizens . . . ​by denying pre-­existing interests and identities—­and thus the necessity of negotiation within the collaborations they endorse” (2005, 103). Though a paper (and PDF) document rather than a mathematical model, chart, or graph, the RFA’s “summary” of the GGAP intervention was in this instance a “vehicle of imagination” (Hull 2012, 260) seeking to enroll its audience into the donors’ broad proj­ects to create the ­future as they envisioned it—­one composed of remade relationships among Angolan citizens and government agencies that the donors and implementers could lay claim to having engineered. Section II, Development Prob­ lem, contained four exceedingly brief paragraphs—­less than half the page—to first state that Angola finds itself at the end of a long civil war, facing im­mense need and infrastructural challenges but holding g­ reat potential given its mineral exports and other, as yet underutilized, natu­ral resources. The section then focused on the need for good governance and a better state–­society relationship as necessary steps ­toward sustainable development—­this being the implicit “development prob­lem” indicated in the section’s heading. As opposed to other development interventions that have been the subjects of ethnographic investigation, ­there ­were evidently no formal research studies done in the targeted communities prior to the GGAP’s intervention. Even had ­there been, though, Li (2007) details how such research can be readily overlooked or reframed in interventionist thinking (see also Ferguson 1994; Mitchell 2002). The absence of detailed background information or any reference to it in the GGAP’s RFA is deeply troubling; WestAid’s modus operandi in planning the intervention was, it quickly becomes clear, to follow peer organ­izations—­adopting their actions and decisions—­while stating throughout that information about par­ tic­u­lar sites or how the program should be implemented in them was readily available from ­these institutional peers. ­Here and in subsequent sections, the RFA sought to “deny the necessity of negotiation” (Tsing 2005, 103) by asserting that the way to the ­imagined f­ uture was already agreed upon; implementing agencies merely had to sign on to the plans and intentions of the donors and agree to carry them out as agents to the donor-­principals (Eisenhardt 1989). Section III, Existing Programs to Address the Prob­lem, outlined the two interventions the GGAP would follow: FAS (Fundo de Apoio Social), a Social Fund

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Proj­ect intervention through the World Bank and the Ministry of Planning, and DLG (Decentralization and Local Governance), a local governance and decentralization intervention sponsored by the UNDP and run through the Ministry of Territorial Administration. This section—­more than two full pages, in contrast to the half-­page describing “the development prob­lem”—­described ­these programs as having “achieved effective community-­municipal strengthening models and strong geographic reach” and stated that the GGAP would be coordinated with t­ hese existing interventions that “support the same ends but through dif­fer­ ent strategies,” ­going into some detail about their two approaches and methods.6 The next section contained the first mention of where, specifically, in Angola the GGAP might intervene.7 Titled [WestAid’s] and Its Partners’ Response, it is not clear if the GGAP was positioned “in response” to the development prob­lem ­earlier identified for Angola in its postwar period or if the program was the donor consortium’s response to the actions of its institutional peers in the two reviewed programs, FAS and DLG. The document reads as though the latter was the case: that, as the World Bank had successfully implemented FAS in many areas of Angola and the UNDP had successfully implemented DLG in ­others, WestAid and its corporate partners sought to do the same, to contribute in some equal interventionist mea­sure. To read interinstitutional concern in the RFA is, again, not to dismiss WestAid staffers’ genuine motivation to improve Angolan lives; it is simply to note that t­ here are multiple motivations shaping development interventions at multiple scales and that an institutional prerogative to meet or match peers’ contributions to a shared endeavor may be among them. This section, [WestAid’s] and Its Partners’ Response, again in contrast to the half-­page Development Prob­lem, took up three pages of the RFA, nearly a quarter of the program-­specific section of the document. The section listed where the GGAP should work, noting what the peer programs’ statuses ­were in ­those same locations, before outlining available information about each proposed site. ­These passages are worth considering fully as they reveal, first, that place was considered through the divisional structures of the administrative state—­ municipalities and provinces—­and, second, that knowledge of t­hose places was conceptually intertwined with both institutional peer relationships and the very act of intervention itself. IV. [WestAid’s] and Its Partners’ Response [WestAid] and [the Oil Com­pany] share the objectives of strengthening the capabilities of Government, civil society and the private sector to perform their respective roles more effectively and to interact more productively. Therefore, [WestAid] and [the Oil Com­pany] have de­cided to combine their efforts in the Program described ­here, and have de­cided to support municipal development activities in the four provinces of Bie [sic], Cabinda, Kuando Kubango [sic], and Huambo. [WestAid] has invited other, like-­minded corporate sponsors to join in



Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries 103

the program as well. In response, [the Diamond Com­pany] has joined in a partnership with [WestAid] to support activities in Lunda Norte. Similarly to the FAS and DLG programs, the Partners’ [Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP)] w ­ ill focus both on the “soft” side—­community organ­ ization, local government capacity building, participatory decision-­making, and accountability of government officials to their communities; and on the “hard” side—­funds for small-­scale infrastructure improvements. [The GGAP] w ­ ill operate in one municipality in each of five provinces. While the specific municipalities are yet to be selected, they w ­ ill be in areas already served by FAS or DLG. [GGAP] activities ­will be designed to be fully consistent with and complementary to their programs in t­ hese areas. The ­table below shows the provinces where the [GGAP] plans to operate, and the presence of FAS and DLG in t­ hese areas. The Minister of Territorial Administration has suggested specific municipalities for [GGAP] and t­ hese are listed on the t­ able below. Th ­ ese, however, are suggestions only. Final se­lection of municipalities ­will depend on further discussions with MAT [Ministry of Territorial Administration], the relevant provincial governors, FAS and UNDP representatives and individual assessments by the [GGAP,] as described below. What­ever municipalities are selected, the Ministry of Territorial Affairs [sic] has determined that they, like the DLG municipalities, ­will be pi­lot areas for local fiscal decentralization. The Recipient ­w ill be responsible for community organ­ization, municipal administration development activities (training and technical assistance), facilitation of community-­driven municipal planning and decision-­making on local infrastructure needs, and management of a small grants fund to support the construction of selected local infrastructure. Precisely what activities the [GGAP] engages in ­w ill vary significantly from area to area, depending on ­whether FAS, DLG or o­ thers are working t­ here and how much thus far has been accomplished.

Thus far, in this first half of the RFA subsection on [WestAid’s] and Its Partners’ Response, the document allowed that a final determination would have to be made as to the par­tic­u­lar municipality to be intervened upon within each selected province, ­going on to briefly consider what points of information would be needed to make that determination. Before proceeding to ­those points, it is worthwhile to consider the multiple purposes already achieved at this point in the document. The RFA not only brought the GGAP into existence as an intervention but situated it as a participant in the larger collection of social interventions in t­ hese places, creating and then occupying a position alongside the older interventions of FAS and the DLG. Bureaucratic documents like the RFA play such “coordinating roles” (Hull 2012), ­here establishing the GGAP’s, and therefore WestAid’s, institutional presence in the social landscape of interveners by

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p­ urposively aligning the proposed intervention with t­ hose of the World Bank and the UNDP. In addition to inserting WestAid and the GGAP into the development peerage of ­those intervening in postwar Angola, ­these central sections of the RFA contained several lists, a genre of documentation that the growing anthropological lit­er­a­ture on documents treats as a special case. Lists both “control transfer operations” (Vismann 2008, quoted in Hull 2012) as a class of institutional actions with real material consequences for the movement of funds, objects, and their attendant possibilities for action in the world and, in controlling the direction of t­ hese transfers, again reassemble the social network (Appadurai 1986) of institutional relations among development agencies, personnel, and recipients. This direction and control of transfer—­effected through lists, other documents, and other bureaucratic action—­has an impact on the vertical structures of the international development industry, organ­izing the hierarchy of donor-­implementer-­recipient. ­These documents also si­mul­ta­neously establish the more horizontal relationships among peer institutions, aligning h­ ere the GGAP as a new colleague joining the larger and more established World Bank and UNDP programs already in operation.

Sites Known and Unknown: Seeing Like a Donor In contrast to the broad, all-­encompassing schemes that James Scott describes as “high-­modern” interventions, intended to wholly remake society (Scott 1998), con­ temporary international development interventions are often targeted ­toward smaller goals, though often with similarly grandiose ends in mind as the far-­future consequences of intervention. In the case of the GGAP, the RFA went on ­after describing how the program would follow the methods and approaches of its antecedent peer interventions, FAS and DLG, to discuss certain particulars about where the program should work. As mentioned, this central section of the document’s description of the program now turned to brief explanations of how much preintervention, “assessment” work would need to be conducted by the implementing agencies before beginning the intervention in each site, in earnest. Rather than describing t­ hese places, populations, or municipal offices as potential implementation sites with their own organic characteristics, the RFA as a document noted, instead, what was “known” about them, revealing as it did so the tight intertwining between interventionist action and development knowledge (Green 2009) that dictates intervention itself as a predicate for knowledge about a place or a ­people rather than the reverse. The document did so by opening the possibility of decision making around specific municipal sites and discussing what actions would have to be taken to inform ­those decisions: In order to determine the specific municipalities for [GGAP] intervention and the kinds of intervention to be made (community organ­ization, municipal develop-



Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries 105

ment); the Recipient ­will carry out an initial assessment of each province. This assessment ­will examine a sample municipality (or municipalities) selected in consultation with MAT, FAS, UNDP and the [funding] Partners. A full assessment ­will follow a model created by FAS and w ­ ill cover, among other t­ hings, ­human resource availability at the municipal level, accessibility of area, known actors, the types of investments that already exist, and geographic issues (e.g., land mines, road conditions). In provinces where ­there is as of yet no FAS or DLG presence or where FAS involvement is recent, a full assessment ­will be necessary to determine what municipalities offer the best prospects for successful intervention and what specific activities are needed. Each assessment pro­cess ­will begin with a comprehensive review of other proj­ects and donor activities in the Province, including recent surveys and assessments already underway, to take advantage of existing information, avoid duplication, and mitigate “assessment fatigue” at the local level. Detailed design of program interventions cannot occur u­ ntil assessment of the capabilities, limitations and opportunities in each Province and proposed municipality are complete. In other areas, where FAS and DLG have already had substantial experience, t­ here is a ­great deal of information already available about municipal capabilities, status of community organ­ization, and further needs. Thus, a full assessment ­will not be necessary. In ­these areas, the assessment ­will be done in conjunction with FAS and DLG, with a focus on determining the types of interventions most appropriate for the Partners to complement and enhance the work being done by FAS and DLG.

In another indication of the institutional relationships driving both action and decision making in the international development industry, “full assessment” was described ­here as following the FAS model and covering “­human resource availability at the municipal level, accessibility of area, known actors, the types of investments that already exist, and geographic issues (e.g., land mines, road conditions),” among ­others. ­These ­factors do not fully outline “the situation” of a province but rather the par­ameters impor­tant to external interveners. “Accessibility of area,” for instance, does not indicate access for ordinary Angolans attempting to move around and between local municipalities as a condition of life t­ here preintervention; it signals instead con­ve­nient “accessibility” by and for interventionists themselves (cf. Brass 2012). This section of the RFA’s “program description” closed out with five small paragraphs that outlined for each proposed province the “situation relevant to the FAS, DLG and [GGAP] partnership” and fi­nally a ­table of “assessment needs.” ­These sections listed the municipalities that FAS and DLG had been working in to date or had plans to work in, further linking the GGAP to the peer interventions it aspired to join, this time by linking their presence as indicators of  how much knowledge was available to WestAid, its funding partners, and the eventual GGAP implementing agencies. Consider the entry for Huambo Province—­ where the GGAP was, in the end, implemented in Chicala Cholohanga:

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huambo: FAS has Community Development programs in seven of the 14 municipalities including Tchicala Tchiloanga [sic], and a Municipal Development program in one municipality (Caala). [WestAid] and [the Oil Com­pany] have a joint history in Huambo and many other development organ­izations operate ­there. Huambo ­will be a target province for [WestAid’s] health initiative which, in addition to ser­ vice delivery, w ­ ill focus on building participatory planning and management capacity of municipal health authorities. Th ­ ere is sufficient information available for the Recipient to design interventions ­here with only a ­limited assessment focusing on the appropriate role for the [GGAP] Partners. Given FAS work at the community level, it is likely that [GGAP’s] focus in Huambo w ­ ill be at the municipal level and in making the linkages between the municipal and community level.

Province

Type

Cabinda

L­ imited assessment to recommend appropriate municipality and fit of [GGAP] with FAS and [Oil Com­pany] programs. ­Limited assessment to recommend appropriate municipality and fit of [GGAP] with FAS, [WestAid], and [Oil Com­pany] programs. ­Limited assessment to recommend appropriate municipality and fit of [GGAP] with DLG, [WestAid], and [Oil Com­pany] programs. Full assessment building on existing information. Full assessment.

Huambo

Bie [sic]

Kuando Kubango [sic] Lunda Norte

Thus, within the GGAP’s originating “program description,” t­ here was no substantive information about any province or municipality. Critical perspectives on social improvement schemes like the GGAP would likely note this lack of substantive information as one strategy by which the global class of trustees manufacture a positive outcome for themselves by “looking away when rules are broken, failing to gather or to use information that undermines the linear narrative of the plan, and constructing data to demonstrate unerring ‘success’ ” (Li 2007, 29). Of further interest for this case is the examination of what kinds of information or knowledge is attended to in the place of information that could undermine the logics of the intervention: simply failing to gather or use potentially damaging information is only half of the strategy in this case—­replacing potentially damaging information with helpful and supportive information is the rest. ­Here, the “province-­by-­province situation” was described only as a ­matter of the presence and activities of WestAid’s interventionist peers; their existence in ­these places and their history of work in them is the supportive information that replaces any empirical evidence about ­these places. Rather than describing ­these



Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries 107

provinces, their geographies or industries, the population resident ­there, local experiences of the war and the postwar period, or their par­tic­u­lar governmental strengths and weaknesses, t­ hese paragraphs provided a judgment on the extent of data collection and analy­sis that the proposed program might find necessary to conduct in each place. Most ­were thought to require only “­limited assessment” focusing on the appropriate role for the funding agencies in ­these places. The GGAP program description ­here conflated good governance and other development intervention with the production of knowledge on recipient communities and government structures: anywhere peer interventions had been working w ­ ere by definition known, and known about. ­Those provinces and municipalities yet to be intervened upon, however, w ­ ere thought to require “full-­scale assessment” in order to be known (about). Further, it was not institutional presence of any kind that produced relevant knowledge but development intervention itself. Consider that Lunda Norte—­ where the Diamond Com­pany had engaged in mining activities for many years—­was still listed as requiring “full assessment,” despite that institution’s long presence ­there. To be known (about) as a development site is clearly to have been put in relation to interventionist agents by them, expressly as an object of intervention (Li 2007; Mitchell 2002). It is obviously not the case that, apart from development interventions, nothing was known, or knowable, about ­these places. Nor is it the case that only certain institutions w ­ ere trusted or prestigious enough to be considered knowledgeable. Even the Oil Com­pany and the Diamond Com­ pany ­were not considered to have sufficient knowledge of a place through their extractive work ­there to inform intervention. ­There was no mention even of the Ministry of Territorial Administration, possibly having information on “municipal capabilities” or of academic work or public media being ­v iable sources for information on “community organ­ization” or “further needs.”8 Least of all ­were local municipalities and communities considered as their own sources for information on themselves. Any mention of the local was restricted to the idea that locals might suffer from “assessment fatigue,” as though they would be worn out if asked about themselves overmuch. ­Here, again, is evidence that appropriate information was thought available only through intervention—­professional assessments begin, ­after all, not with the local (considered easily fatigued) but with a review of other proj­ects and donor activities in the area. Knowledge of an area thus comes into being through its subject position as a target of intervention; it is produced through the presence and work of (other) interveners. As in medicine, development diagnoses are implicitly made with regard to the treatments available: diagnoses only count—­are only useful—if they are relevant to the possibilities of intervention. Diagnostic decisions made through the lens of pos­si­ble solutions, as Li points out, is an impor­tant part of “rendering technical” the other­wise unruly social work of intervention (2007, 123–155). Last, note that the knowledge produced

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via intervention was presumed available and transferable to other interveners: WestAid and its corporate partners considered sufficient knowledge to be available in places where other donors and implementers had been working, ­whether or not WestAid had, itself, any of its own history and experience in the place being considered. Thus the nature of development knowledge for planning interventions at the policy maker level would not seem to be entirely internally held, idiosyncratic, or directly experiential. It was not that only ­after working in a place could a donor come to “know” about it. Such knowledge was presumed to be available for effective transfer among like institutions—­donors, implementers, interveners—at least in the view of donors. The remainder of this thirteen-­page section of the RFA—­again, the only portion specific to the GGAP as a program—­was given over to certain details of the program’s timeline and potential bud­get, its desired goals, as discussed in chapter 2’s analy­sis of the GGAP’s logframe (see also the appendix), and to pos­si­ble indicators to mea­sure its impact (part V). Part VI, Program Management, contained just two sentences. The first stated that the program should locate its key personnel in Luanda and station an Angolan staff member to oversee activities in each municipal field site. The second stated that GGAP staff should receive anticorruption and antifraud ethics trainings once per year. Section VII, Technical Par­ameters, took up the largest portion of the RFA’s program description, with four pages on such ­matters as the integration of the program with other interventions and its coordination with FAS and DLG, the program’s timeline, tracking of funds, WestAid’s hopes that further corporate funding would be sought by the selected implementing agencies, and its expectations that they would publicize their work and identify it as supported by WestAid. The final two sections of the program description, section VIII, Approach to Design and Implementation, and section IX, Monitoring and Evaluation, w ­ ere each quite small. Section VIII stated that “the basic approach to community and municipal development in Angola is not a major design issue” and reviews that the GGAP was meant to follow the “successful model used by FAS,” though it allowed that adjustments may be needed in the course of implementation. The final section of the program description stated that the implementing NGOs should “develop a plan” to monitor and evaluate the GGAP and that this plan should include the indicators discussed in section V,9 that the midterm evaluation should be funded by other monies, and that the implementing agencies should submit quarterly technical and financial reports. A more generous reading of the GGAP’s program description in its RFA might allow that h­ ere also lie instructions that could address Li’s concerns about the effects of prior interventions being overlooked and unacknowledged in con­ temporary interventions (2007). If assessments of the local situation begin by accounting for current and previous interventions, then surely their effects must be noted as such? The GGAP’s designers’ review of prior interventions was not,



Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries 109

however, conducted with an eye t­ oward documenting the successes, failures, or local impacts of antecedent interventions. It was meant, instead, to document peer institutions’ own perceptions and experiences, the challenges they experienced in their work, and their opinions as to the capacities and needs of t­ hese provincial and municipal places.

Reputations at Risk When the GGAP’s RFA was announced, the American NGO was very keen to apply. The country director, Jonathan, could make a convincing argument as to the efficiency of awarding the GGAP to his organ­ization and especially to the implementation consortium they maintained with the Canadian and British NGOs. He could point to the infrastructure and working relationships they already had in place in many of the targeted areas, making their application both more competitive and more likely to be worth the amount of time and resources required to respond to the call. Winning the funding would allow him to keep ­these offices, their staff, and the relationships they had cultivated operant for three to five more years. E-­mail correspondence crisscrossing the Atlantic among the Angolan, regional southern African, and U.S. offices of the American NGO reveal that ­there ­were internal tensions Jonathan had to negotiate, however, despite ­these positive ­factors.10 Just ­after the RFA was published, Jonathan, a large Dutch man with a no-­ nonsense but not-­unfriendly demeanor, communicated his intention to submit a proposal to his superiors at international headquarters in the United States. In reply, he received what he took to be a denial of permission to do so. In writing again to the American NGO’s international headquarters offices, ostensibly to ask for more information about the denial, he presented the following reasons as to why the Angola office should be allowed to submit a proposal to the GGAP’s RFA. First, Jonathan anticipated “no other funding opportunities” that aligned with their work in Angola, contending further that the absence of a proposal from them would be noteworthy within the Angolan development community and cause a loss of “comparative advantage” and “credibility” with their local and regional donor offices. With t­ hese points, Jonathan argued that the American NGO could not afford not to send in a proposal for the GGAP opportunity, both b­ ecause ­there ­were so few options for funding in Angola and b­ ecause their reputation would suffer if they w ­ ere seen as forfeiting this competition. Last, he argued that the RFA represented a significant change in focus and interest on the part of the corporate donors and for this reason warranted the NGO’s attention. Would the American NGO r­ eally have lost credibility among its peer institutions in Angola had they declined to send in an application in this singular instance? It is impossible to know for certain, but it is clear that Jonathan was genuinely ­concerned about exactly that pos­si­ble outcome, rightly or wrongly, and this

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concern was highly motivating. The potential for scandal or even mere gossip does, ­after all, often serve to reinforce a set of coherent standards for be­hav­ior in a social grouping (Gluckman 1963); Jonathan ­here was acting as he felt his professional peers expected him to, and would condemn if he did not. In addition to asserting that the American NGO’s local reputation was at stake, Jonathan also argued that it had something of a moral obligation to demonstrably support changes it had advocated for in the broader architecture of international development. The RFA was soliciting proposals, of course, for a good governance program with support from an oil com­pany. This demonstration of new interests on the part of an oil com­pany that had previously been “only interested in agricultural economic development and building schools and clinics,” as Jonathan explained in his e-­mails, must, he argued, be supported by the American NGO. In his opinion, the RFA represented the Oil Com­pany’s having “come a long way,” and the American NGO had a responsibility to respond positively to the call as it had previously applied pressure on the oil industry to increase their corporate social responsibility activities. Thus the country director’s concerns w ­ ere expressly reputational. His concerns ­were not, at the surface, about the Angolan ­people’s clear and compelling need for the work to be done. Jonathan was worried first and foremost about his own organ­ization’s reputation in their country of ser­vice: “local” donors and implementing agencies might lose faith in the American NGO—it would lose its ­credibility—if it w ­ ere seen to be passing up opportunities in its bailiwick. Second to ­these immediate and local concerns ­were ­matters of the broader organ­ ization’s global reputation as able to put pressure on the extractive industry and to be consistent in this advocacy. Jonathan expressed concern that, a­ fter the international NGO and its peers had pressed oil companies and similar private corporations to conduct themselves more ethically and to put more funds ­toward corporate social responsibility, passing up t­ hose funds would be counterproductive and could be interpreted as insincerity. Most importantly, the RFA revolved around governance issues in a country with a worldwide reputation for corruption, particularly regarding governmental ties to the oil industry. In a combinatory set of logics, not taking up the charge of improving governance in a country reputed to need such intervention quite badly struck Jonathan as a dereliction of duty—­and perhaps even as a type of hy­poc­risy in the face of an oil com­pany’s stated commitment to do work ­toward the same goal. While the country director’s vociferous protests indicate that he had heard a decisive “no” from the U.S. headquarters about responding to the RFA, it came out in subsequent exchanges that the denial had been one of timing and delay rather than a ­wholesale rejection of the opportunity. The international headquarters was indeed concerned that WestAid was working with monies11 from oil and diamond corporations and wished to vet the donor consortium more ­thoroughly. L ­ ater e-­mails in the exchange share the information that the due-­



Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries 111

diligence vetting pro­cess had already been u­ nder way for deciding w ­ hether working with the par­tic­u­lar oil com­pany sponsoring the RFA would be acceptable to the American organ­ization and ­under what circumstances. Although the pro­cess inside the international NGO may be opaque to ­those outside it ( James 2012)—­and involve personnel at all levels, across regional offices and types of technical expertise—­designing an intervention such as the GGAP, finding funding for the implementation of it, and maintaining offices and staff across t­hese sorts of programmatic interventions are complicated pro­cesses, to say the least. In this instance, ­there ­were questions of ethics, scarcity, knowledge and expertise, reputation, and true need for social change all being worked out u­ nder the pressures of deadline and across several time zones. The ethical concerns ­were, if not overcome, at least negotiated within the implementing organ­izations, and their consortium was, in the end, allowed to put forth a proposal. At the time, at least one other international NGO was very interested in responding to the RFA but was prevented from d­ oing so by the standards of its international headquarters office, which had resolved not to accept oil com­pany money.12 Even responding to the RFA, then, was not entirely straightforward as m ­ atters of coordination among the implementing consortium members had to be sorted out, and the group had to then negotiate with the donors—­ themselves a group, in the case of the GGAP—on programmatic ­matters. At the American NGO’s U.S. headquarters offices, as at other levels of the development profession, such debates privileged the organ­ization’s international, institutional reputation. Leaders felt that accepting money from oil companies—­reputed environmental polluters and h­uman rights abusers—­ might taint their image to such an extent that it would overpower any benefits they would gain, and impart, by working in Angola on a democ­ratization initiative. Jonathan was not dismissive of t­ hese concerns, but his worry for the American NGO’s reputation among peers in Angola overrode them; he favored working with oil com­pany money, particularly on a demo­cratization/decentralization proj­ect. It is unknowable w ­ hether or not sending a proposal to the GGAP’s RFA would—as Jonathan feared—be interpreted among local institutional peers in one way or another or—as the American NGO’s global elite feared—­whether it would be interpreted among global institutional peers in one way or another. What is certain is that perceived reputational risk drove ­these debates and decisions within the organ­ization. ­These ele­ments of the GGAP’s history are clearly driven by institutional reputation and orga­nizational concerns about how implementers and donors—­both in country and internationally—­will be regarded by their peers given one decision or another about their work; though much of this decision making is also undertaken in the interests of what each decision maker believes to be “for the  greater good.” The American NGO’s headquarters officers must have had ­genuine concern about ­doing more harm than good in the world through their

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receipt of development funds from an extractive industry. Jonathan’s concerns about the American NGO’s reputation among in-­country institutional colleagues w ­ ere, similarly, targeted ­toward maintaining his organ­ization’s ability to do its work. In this vein, Li’s analy­sis of international development interventions in Indonesia is again instructive as she acknowledges, and dismisses, interveners’ desires for gain or profit as the sole motivation for their actions (2007, 134). Li is correct to point out that institutional and individual gain—­particularly monetary gain—­cannot be presumed to be the under­lying motivation for interveners. But ­there are other types of “gain” that may motivate interventionist action. ­There is undeniable social profit that accrues to interveners in terms of achieving the moral high ground (e.g., Redfield 2013b; Scherz 2014); donors and implementers alike compete to be pre­sent and active in the aid arena not only out of a genuine “­will to improve” o­ thers’ existences but to be among t­ hose who intervene successfully (e.g., Schuller 2012).

Absence and In­equality in Development Intervention Only one municipality remained constant between t­ hose suggested in WestAid’s original RFA and ­those sites in which the GGAP was eventually implemented: Chicala Cholohanga, of Huambo Province (spelled Tchicala Tchiloanga in the RFA). The other four implementation sites w ­ ere adjusted within each province, some several times. To explain this discrepancy between the GGAP as envisioned and as actually implemented, the analy­sis must move down a step from the donors and how their reputational concerns drive their attention t­oward provinces where their peers have been working. In contrast to the donor-­level milieu, implementers’ social concerns drive them away from where their peers work. Moreover, although knowledge is still gained via intervention and experience, implementers who are in the room (or, more often for field staff, ­under the tree) when development work is being done feel most comfortable making use of the knowledge they have produced themselves via intervention and interaction. They do not share donors’ ideas that knowledge of a place is easily transferred from another organ­ization. This means that, particularly a­fter having invested in local relationships and infrastructures, implementing agencies often wish to stay put in their work sites and do not necessarily welcome new interventionists into their established sites. Consider Osman’s recollections of the founding of the GGAP. Osman participated in putting together the winning bid for the GGAP (discussed further in chap. 5). In his retelling of the story, as applicants preparing to respond to the RFA, he and his colleagues across the consortium of implementing NGOs had known only which provinces ­were selected for the program, not which municipalities



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­ ere chosen in ­those provinces, and this had created a sense of real opportunity w alongside the obvious uncertainties. According to Osman, he never did know of any par­tic­u­lar rationale ­behind the original proposal for municipal sites, and the consortium was awarded the funding before being fully informed about where they ­were expected to work: osman: Right, [WestAid] had communicated with FAS, MAT, and UNDP about their program[s], and they collected their views and MAT has given the provinces where this program could work, the provinces where this could be set. But the municipalities ­were not exactly set, you know, so we know which provinces, but then when the program was funded we said, what are the municipalities? And we thought the municipalities would be the capital municipalities b­ ecause this program needs certain infrastructure as a base and a certain structure in place b­ ecause you cannot start from scratch. So, we expected t­ hese ­things, but MAT completely misunderstood this program and they thought in such a way that t­ here are some good municipalities and some bad municipalities [that] should be combined.

This “combination” or “variation” story was told to me several times by dif­fer­ ent ­people. Many—­though ­here Osman specifies MAT—­thought that to “test” the GGAP’s methods and figure out what it needs to be successful, it should be conducted in sites with dif­fer­ent characteristics, such that each site’s pro­gress could be compared to that of o­ thers to figure out how rural, how urban, how big, how small, how distant, and so on, a site could be and still be successful with GGAP methods. No one claimed to be the originator of that opinion; it was simply part of GGAP lore. But for all this talk of experimentalism, t­ here ­were never any “control” sites selected in which before and a­ fter data would be gathered, without intervention, for comparison to the pre-­and postintervention states of the GGAP’s implementation sites. This omission in an “experimental” design renders that explanation for the se­lection of the field sites very suspect; if it was r­ eally discussed at all, it was not considered very seriously. ­There was, instead, a series of negotiated contingencies wherein the donors, as discussed, first directed the program to certain provinces but then had to accept subprovincial adjustments as disagreements about ­these municipal-­level sites arose among officials from MAT, the provincial governors’ offices, the municipal administrators’ offices, and the implementing NGOs. Thus multiscalar po­liti­cal and pragmatic interests dictated the final geography of the GGAP’s development intervention, as Osman continues to explain: osman: So [for example], what they did for Bié, they selected first Camacupa, which is where UNDP is already implementing their decentralization program. So, we [the GGAP’s implementing consortium of NGOs] said: Camacupa is

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already occupied by UNDP, why should we go t­ here, why ­don’t we take Andulo where we have good presence and all ­these ­things? So we had some discussions and the Bié provincial governor accepted it and we fi­nally got Andulo.

Osman ­here sums up what must have been weeks’ worth of negotiations, alliances made, and deals cut to situate the GGAP in specific Angolan communities—­ all of it downstream from the donor consortium’s internally negotiated se­lection of provincial sites. But note again the competing logics about when and why interventions should (or in this case, should not) overlap in the same site. Where the RFA reads as though having the UNDP’s DLG intervention in the same site is a good ­thing for the GGAP, providing start-up knowledge and therefore the potential to make interventionist contributions without a lot of preparatory legwork, ­here Osman asserts that the municipality is “already occupied.” He means quite literally that ­there is no room for another intervention to do similar work in that same site. If donors are seeking to maintain standing among their peers by contributing to a shared endeavor and “combining forces,” so to say, implementers need to stake out more individualized territories in which to pursue their work and demonstrate their successes and accomplishments (cf., Schuller 2012, 114–127).13 Though the GGAP implementation administrators accepted Bié Province as an assigned site, they ­were surprised to find that MAT had not selected Kuito, the provincial capital. As Osman explains, they w ­ ere then dismayed that Camacupa, the long-­standing field site of the UNDP’s DLG program, was chosen. While t­ here may have been room among the rural communities of Camacupa for the GGAP to form more committees and award more small grants for infrastructure proj­ ects and training programs, ­there was only so much room for advisers and técnicos in the municipal government offices, a key part of the GGAP’s methodology as understood by the implementation staff. In response, the NGOs drew on a long history of work in Bié Province generally and a good relationship with the provincial governor to negotiate a municipal substitution. The assertion that Camacupa was inappropriate opened up a space for the NGOs to make use of their existing social and physical infrastructures in Andulo. All three of the GGAP’s implementing NGOs had some programmatic history in one or both of the Central Highlands provinces of Bié and Huambo as providers of humanitarian relief programs during the civil war. The American NGO, for instance, had had an enormous de-­mining program based in Kuito for much of the 1990s, in addition to its work in food relief, medical ser­vices, and as an or­ga­ nizer of camps for internally displaced persons. The British NGO, working predominantly in Huambo Province, had a similarly wide variety of programming, and in fact their Huambo City office at the time of the GGAP was larger and supported more personnel than did even their Luanda office. During the worst parts of the war, in the 1980s and 1990s, t­ hese and other international NGOs had entered Angola to provide emergency relief to war-­affected populations, by necessity



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establishing offices as well as relationships with local communities and, eventually, members of municipal, provincial, and national levels of government. A ­ fter the end of the war, ­these structures then ­shaped the next generation of interventions in the postwar period, becoming the NGOs’ impetus to argue for continuation of intervention in ­these par­tic­u­lar sites over the cultivation of new sites. It is in this manner perhaps that one of Li’s Indonesian research sites received serial interventions while the other did not—­the pragmatics of intervention led organ­izations to stick to known and established sites rather than to seek new ones. Though their interventionist goals had changed at the close of the war—­and with them perhaps also the most appropriate sites in which to work—­these NGOs felt, if not constrained by their histories in certain areas of Angola, then at least strongly incentivized to make full use of them. This is why the GGAP lobbied, as Osman describes, not just to drop the Camacupa assignment but to replace it specifically with Andulo, where the American NGO already maintained offices and had good relationships as a result of their war-­time relief efforts, rather than in some other municipality where none of the implementing organ­izations had ever worked. This is not to say that the GGAP’s implementing organ­izations insisted on working only in familiar sites, however. The program established two wholly new sites in its first phase and dramatically expanded the previously anemic presence of the Canadian NGO in yet a third. Th ­ ese sites w ­ ere also the subject of much negotiation, though, as Osman again explains: osman: Then MAT gave us [the province of] Cuando Cubango and we [sought to] put it in Menongue [the provincial capital] and they put us in Cuito Cuanavale. We said Cuito Cuanavale is the end of the world, you ­don’t have certain prerequisite structures t­ here to have success of the program. But MAT says no, you have to take some good ones and some bad ones.

Osman does not allude to the w ­ hole story ­here but I was told several times by field staff stationed in Cuando Cubango that the program was moved out of Menongue by the provincial governor in a series of contentious exchanges between the governor’s office and MAT, ­because the governor worried that the program would bring to light his own corrupt use of government infrastructure and funds in the province. As a central part of the GGAP’s program design is to place NGO staff within the municipal government structure as advisers, trainers, and event facilitators, they would indeed have been sure to notice any irregularities. Osman became aware of ­these issues with the governor of Cuando Cubango l­ater in the year, but h­ ere, speaking before t­ hose revelations w ­ ere made, he addresses similar concerns for Cabinda Province: osman: And then at the same time they [MAT] offered for Cabinda, Buco-­Zau, which is ­under conflict, and [the Canadian NGO] completely refused to go to

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Buco-­Zau. So, we are saying, should we fight against both Cuito Cuanavale and Buco-­Zau, or should we take one and fight for the other one? So we accepted Cuito Cuanavale and we said, Buco-­Zau; we cannot work. We then got the second opinion, they said okay, you have to go to Belize. But Belize is even worse! So then they d­ idn’t change anything, they said Belize is the final, and [the Canadian NGO] worked with the provincial governor’s office in Cabinda and it took months and months and months ­after months to get the supporting letter, but fi­nally MAT said that if the governor changed the municipality [to Cabinda City] then they have no prob­lem.

­ ere Osman is clear that even though dif­fer­ent organ­izations ­were responsiH ble for dif­fer­ent field sites, each site was also of concern relative to the larger GGAP program and was balanced against the other four within the consortium as a ­whole. GGAP implementation administrators, at least in this telling, did not feel they could challenge too many of the municipal site assignments received from the donors and central government and so had to prioritize and strategize which among them ­were truly unworkable. The respective organ­izations then had to come to agreement about one of them taking on a potentially more difficult field site [­here, the American NGO took on Cuito Cuanavale] and suffering the lessened results expected of such a difficult assignment in order to give the ­others a chance at having more success in somewhat less difficult places and hopefully increasing the program-­as-­a-­whole’s overall success. Osman framed the story of the site change in Cabinda Province as one in which the NGOs actively lobbied for the support of the provincial governor in a strug­ gle against the national MAT office, as they had successfully done in Bié Province. This is to a point true, but the Canadian NGO also, si­mul­ta­neously and quite simply, stalled their implementation work in the province, not setting up an office in their assigned municipality for nearly a year. WestAid was well aware of this “foot-­dragging,” but could not effectively force the GGAP implementation consortium or the Canadian NGO in par­tic­u­lar to move faster.14 While this sort of “passive” re­sis­tance to development intervention is normally ascribed to the recipients or intended beneficiaries of programming, ­here it clearly also exists among the tactics of development professionals themselves when faced with difficult circumstances internal to the industry. Implementation agencies hold a closer-­to-­the-­ground perspective that may privilege pragmatic and instrumental concerns, or the “exigencies of organ­izations” and proj­ects, as David Mosse (2005, 103) glosses the day-­to-­day material and relational needs of implementation work. Such pragmatics are one reason that the GGAP, tasked with placing staff within the ­limited confines of municipal government offices, saw the “partner” organ­izations of FAS or DLG as competitors more than as collaborators. In contrast to WestAid, the GGAP’s implementing NGOs considered working in the same places that the World Bank or the UNDP had



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already expended effort not only inefficient but impractical and even infeasible. Implementation agencies also sought, perhaps more than anything, to capitalize on their own previous work, particularly that of establishing themselves in their field sites, and found this another reason to lobby not only for changed sites but for certain sites to take the place of t­ hose first suggested. Fi­nally, and most importantly, implementation agency concerns ­were also reputational, albeit with a dif­ fer­ent bent than the donors’ reputational concerns. The program directors and country directors of the American, British, and Canadian NGOs that made up the GGAP implementation consortium insisted that it would be impossible to demonstrate the program’s in­de­pen­dent impact if it ­were to be sited in places where similar interventions w ­ ere also working. In such conjoined sites, they feared, any pro­gress or positive impact could be legitimately claimed by other interventions, harming or, at the least, frustrating their own efforts to maintain their orga­nizational reputations. A critical analy­sis of the GGAP’s knowledge base and the intervention’s justificatory logics grounds this chapter’s focus on how and why the GGAP came to intervene in its specific Angolan field sites; chapter 5 similarly focuses on how and why the intervention a­ dopted its par­tic­u­lar goals and methods. Throughout this history of the GGAP’s founding, social relationships among development institutions and between individual professionals ­were both the immediate context for development decision making and, si­mul­ta­neously, the instrumental means by which such work was instantiated. In this analy­sis, international development should be seen as a social field, which, as Pierre Bourdieu (1991, 6) pointed out for the scientific field, “is a separate world, apart, where a most specific social logic is at work, affirming itself more and more to the degree that symbolic relations of power impose themselves that are irreducible to t­ hose that are current in the po­liti­ cal field as well as to ­those instituted in the ­legal or theological field.” For international development, as discussed, while “the po­liti­cal field” of interactions among states in international relations or interactions within a state between the citizenry and government agencies perhaps provides impetus or resources for development intervention, the dynamics of how interventions are designed and where they are implemented are not irreducible to ­these external, contextual relationships and dynamics. As detailed ­here, the internal dynamics of the industry—­how institutions see one another, how they worry about being seen by one another, how membership among a peerage is determined and maintained—­also follow their own cultural logics and priorities. In the social field of development, as in that of science, politics, or theology, substantive work is conducted in the same motions by which “newcomers” are selected and “producers” compete. The bureaucratic artifact of the RFA issued by donors reflects one such moment: the arrival of a donor onto the interventionist scene in a country, ­either on a new topic or in new places, and the instan-

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tiation of that donor’s—or donor consortium’s—­presence through the physical ­implementation of its plans by implementing agencies who are, if they are to be competitive, not at all new to ­these places or topics. Such se­lection and competition, in fact, constitute one mechanism by which substantive development work is s­ haped, directed, and ultimately produced. Interventionist thinking and action in the development industry cannot be separated from the internal social and po­liti­cal dynamics of the interventionists, themselves. In what is perhaps a paradox, development sites that make the government of a par­tic­u­lar developing country more locally pre­sent and power­ful often si­mul­ta­ neously enhance the power and presence of the donor state or organ­ization on the global stage (e.g., Escobar 1988; Mitchell 1991). This impact is rarely taken up as an analytical insight concerning relationships among power­ful states, however. It is usually taken up only as an insight about the relationship between a rich country or donor organ­ization and a poor country—­between donor and ­recipient—in the same manner that par­tic­u­lar development programs are examined as dyads of intervener and intervened-­upon, rather than as si­mul­ta­neously ­factors in relationships among interveners. A focus on unique dyads of intervener and intervened-­ upon neglects to consider the simultaneous influence of the encounters, desires, and needs of the development industry as a social field composed not only of such dyads but also of networks of lateral relationships among interveners. Decisions to intervene, and where and how, are made within this social milieu of interveners, donors, and implementers as they act and interact among themselves. ­These dynamics are perhaps analogous to ­those of academia, where curricular decisions are made both in response to an assessment of what students need and si­mul­ta­neously in response to what institutional peers and competitors offer. Development interventions in poor countries, sponsored and directed by power­ful states or international organ­izations effectively directed by power­ful states, matured most during the Cold War and are still as much a part of the “arms race” between power­ful countries as ­were their nuclear programs (Alden, Large, and Soares de Oliveira 2008; Brautigam 2010). Seeing international development intervention as an expression of the sociopo­liti­cal aims and desires of interventionists, therefore, must account for the interveners’ desired relationships to other interveners, where interventions themselves serve as currency, or perhaps game pieces, to be collected and compared. Explaining similar dynamics, though without finding par­tic­u­lar evidence of competition, Liisa Malkki finds individual International Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers make use of and are motivated by “professional solidarities” (Malkki 2015, 200) with one another and with colleagues volunteering through peer institutions. The work of development intervention, ­whether as an individual or an institution, can ­here be seen as performative, or claims-­making: the interveners are socially identifiable as a result of their intervention work. Th ­ ese social effects on



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interventionists’ identities and their standings among their peers may come to drive decisions about when and where, and perhaps even how, to intervene. The bifurcation of the industry between donors and implementers is, similarly, driven by social and relational dynamics. Where the under­lying logics of principal-­agent theory (see chap. 2) hold that principals direct agents to do work, it is si­mul­ta­ neously true that principals hold their status only as long as they have agents to direct. Donors therefore need implementers, not just to do the work, but to solidify their own status as directors of that work (see also Swidler and Watkins 2017). Seeing the development industry as a ­whole, globally “dominant class,” Bourdieu’s critical analy­sis of dif­fer­ent forms of capital, capital accumulation, and exchange (1986), suggests that donor–­implementer relationships should also be seen as a set or series of exchanges between “members of dif­fer­ent fractions of the dominant class” in which members hold dif­fer­ent kinds of capital. He writes that “a general science of the economy of practices . . . ​must endeavor to grasp capital and profit in all their forms and to establish the laws whereby the dif­fer­ent types of capital (or power, which amounts to the same t­ hing) change into one another” (Bourdieu 1986, 242–243). Implementation organ­izations and agents, in the development industry, have the local contacts and physical presence that donors and policy makers seek to co-­opt, both for instrumental (development) purposes and ­toward their own reputational ends. The sites of development intervention therefore become pieces of specific capital that members of development’s peerage seek to hold, though at a distance, via their relationships with implementation organ­izations.

5 • PARTNERSHIP AND THE DEVELOPMENT PR A XISC APE

This chapter continues to examine the origins of the GGAP, focusing on how it came to adopt its interventionist goals and methods. In par­tic­u­lar, I examine competing explanations about how the program arrived at its focus on the formation of new community groups called ODAs in each of its targeted municipalities. I compare dif­fer­ent accounts of the program’s origination and its adoption of the ODA methodology from Osman, the program’s national director; Helena, its first municipal development technical adviser; Sebastian, director of a precursor intervention, the Good Governance in Luanda (GGL) program; and Sofia, director of a peer intervention, the World Bank’s FAS. ­These differently inflected accounts demonstrate that development’s interventionist methods are sometimes selected more for their utility in cementing the working relationships among professionals than for their promise of beneficiary impact.1 Development work on the ground—as it occurs between field staff and beneficiaries—­makes use of only so many methods and materials. Like teaching and researching within a university, t­ here are certain methods and materials that, for good or for ill, have been the foundation of the enterprise for a very long time. In the university, ­these include the lecture, the textbook, and the semester-­ long seminar course. ­W hether teaching anthropology or zoology, lectures and textbooks are the forms in which knowledge has been and w ­ ill continue to be packaged and delivered to the next academic generation; the semester or the quarter is the timeline within which professors and students are expected to accomplish some meaningful transfer of knowledge or skill in any discipline and for any professional training purposes. In development work, the equivalent are interventions in the form of “proj­ects,” organ­izing recipients into groups for proj­ect purposes, and conducting workshops and trainings as discrete events. Each of ­these activities is a “sticky” method in development, repurposed for almost any development goal, from health and nutrition education to credit schemes and microfinance. Th ­ ese vehicles for development content carry with them their own strengths and weaknesses but are as often overlooked as ­methods 120



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as courses, lectures, or semesters are overlooked in debates about how students should be taught at universities. In the GGAP, the formation of ODAs and the convening of public forums ­were lauded as innovatory, though they w ­ ere not. ­These methods ­were, instead, activities that ­were ­adopted and borrowed from other programs and other places, their movements traceable and analyzable as evidence of the development profession’s interior contours. To consider the movement or flow of dif­fer­ ent methodologies through the development industry, focusing on how ODAs came to be a staple of the GGAP’s approach, I offer the concept of the development praxiscape.2 Following Arjun Appadurai (1996; 1990, 6–7), by praxiscape I mean the patterns by which dif­fer­ent practices—­not theories but be­hav­iors, often uncoupled from their justificatory logics—­come to be taken up in dif­fer­ ent development interventions across space and time and how ­these adoptions or replications are seen by members of the development implementariat. The near-­ubiquitous adoption of “audit culture” practices is one example of how be­hav­iors may travel throughout and between globally dispersed professional populations and industries ( James 2012; Power 1997; Shore 2008); the GGAP’s adoption of community-­based organ­izations is another. As with Appadurai’s original formulation of the ethnoscape, the mediascape, and so on, I see the praxiscape as “subject to its own constraints and incentives (some po­liti­cal, some informational and some techno-­environmental), at the same time as [it] acts as a constraint and a pa­ram­e­ter for movements in the ­others” (1990, 8). Development’s praxiscape encompasses every­thing from the activities in which development workers directly engage beneficiaries—­meetings, elections, workshops, lectures, questionnaires, and so on—to the managerial practices through which they keep their organ­izations ­running and their ­careers unfolding. Development agents such as Osman, Helena, Sebastian, and Sofia, working in their own best interests and t­ hose of their organ­izations, determine what methods they ­will use in negotiation among themselves, and often the “winning” methods are ­those that are most agreeable to the interveners—­especially ­those that they can work on together—­rather than ­those with the most promise for positive impact on beneficiaries. Working together, that is, may be just as much a development goal to be realized as are any other stated purposes in both policy making and intervention design. The GGAP’s decisions to form community groups and hold public forums as central activities w ­ ere settled on more for pragmatic reasons than for their theoretical promise to achieve the proj­ect’s stated goals. They ­were quite simply activities to which dif­fer­ent professionals and organ­izations could agree and jointly deploy. ­Here, I argue, is much of the value of interventionist methods as tools, practices, or even ideas: rather than being selected or created as best able to meet beneficiaries’ needs, they instead come about as points of agreement within the development industry—­venues for practical engagement that allow organ­izations

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and professionals to work together. In the case of the GGAP, further, the ODAs allowed ­these development interventionists to reshape local social organ­ization into forms more recognizable to them; forms they found easier to engage with.

Founding Partnerships The GGAP’s interventionist methods are briefly mentioned in its originating proposals and formal evaluations but are only anemically described or justified in ­these documents. All of ­these documents are emphatic, however, about the role of partnership in the program: partnership itself would seem to be the primary method through which the GGAP officially sought to provoke change in Angolan local governance. Beyond the partnerships between WestAid and the Oil Com­pany and WestAid and the Diamond Com­pany as its original funding consortium, the GGAP was meant to work “in partnership with” similar programs being implemented by the UNDP and the World Bank. It was meant to work “in partnership with” the Angolan government across its many levels and divisions, and, of course, the ­grand purpose of the program was to induce local government and Angolan communities and citizens to work “in partnership with” each other. This insistence on partnership as a central ele­ment of the GGAP’s management and methodology demands a close analy­sis of what partnership meant to the program’s vari­ous constituents, considering dif­fer­ent agents’ descriptions of the intervention and its history in developing its approach to democ­ratization work in postwar Angola presented ­later in the chapter. What did partnership look like to the GGAP’s found­ers and its earliest staff members? Why did they believe partnership was necessary for this work? Was partnership for them a structure? A goal? A method? The emphasis on partnership and the main, practical focus of the field staff on forming and training ODAs reinforced one another in the daily work of the GGAP. Miguel Pickard (2010, 135) has explic­itly explored the emic meanings of partnership among Mexican NGO activists. Among his in­for­mants, it meant “a special relationship between equal participants . . . ​who enjoy a distinctive bond of trust, a shared analy­sis of existing conditions in society, and thus in general a common orientation of what needs to be done to construct a more just, equitable, and demo­cratic world.” If such a definition is also true for development professionals working in Angola, the further question Pickard’s analy­sis raises is how such special relationships are formed: Is it that organ­izations or professionals of similar opinion come to work together, or is it rather that t­ hose who find themselves working together come to share “a common orientation”? The case of partnership in the GGAP suggests the latter—­that by virtue of proximity and out of a type of social necessity, professionals and organ­izations that had to work together found some agreement about how to do so. Moreover, in the ODAs, they created



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new social organ­izations that ­were easier to engage in partnership than w ­ ere any already extant social units in ­these rural Angolan communities. Osman’s recounting of the history of the GGAP is impor­tant for a full understanding of the program and its social dynamics; he was its director during its entire lifetime and played an impor­tant role in its founding and implementation. As its longtime director, I expected Osman’s elaboration of the GGAP’s history to be quite detailed and was surprised when his account was, frankly, confusing— an amalgamation of prior interventions, trips shared with other expatriates, and an odd series of “realizations” about Angolan development in the postwar period. I situate his accounting alongside ­others’ histories of the GGAP to illustrate both the discrepancies of the program’s history as it appeared to differently situated professionals and to demonstrate how, despite ­these discrepancies, interpersonal relationships among development professionals ­were consistently central in it, no ­matter the source. In Osman’s version of the GGAP’s origin story, he emphasized how insights and ideas about Angolan postwar development traveled through expatriates’ social relationships with one another. In his telling, he and other expats first recognized, and then capitalized on, a prior intervention’s innovation: the idea of developing ODAs and establishing public forum meetings for them to engage with local government agents. In sharp contrast to how this history is depicted by ­others ­later in the chapter, Osman emphasized the role of foreigners and nearly erased Angolans from the founding story of the GGAP. In direct response to my asking him how the GGAP came about, Osman began his history by characterizing the Angolan civil war as having “no ideology” and extended this lack of vision to the Angolan state and professional development community: osman: So, this is an in­ter­est­ing question. The peace in Angola came in a l­ ittle bit of a sudden way. It was not a very systematic pro­cess of a peace deal that was signed. One nice day, Savimbi was killed, and peace was ­there. And that war was never being an ideological war b­ ecause the war was between two power mongers. So, when one died, the other got the victory easily. So, ­there was no ideology ­here to fight for.

Osman thus grounded his origin story of the GGAP firmly within con­temporary Angolan history, but with the state effectively dismissed as having “no ideology.” It was never clear to me why Osman held this opinion of the Angolan war, its ending, or the larger government, but throughout the time I knew him, Osman was more concretely oriented to international news and events and to the expatriate development and business community in Angola than to the history and con­ temporary events of Angola itself. To my knowledge, he did not read Angolan newspapers or attend to national tele­vi­sion or radio news, on occasion revealing himself to be startlingly unaware of national current events.

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During an NGO workshop on “emergency preparedness” ­later that year, for instance, Osman and I w ­ ere assigned to the same small working group to draft a portion of the American NGO’s contingency plans in the case of vio­lence around the then-­upcoming September 2008 parliamentary elections. As part of our group’s deliberations, Osman presented a heated and lengthy monologue on how the Angolan government should be actively rooting out and collecting all the leftover small arms from the wars as election day neared. He appeared entirely unaware that the government had been energetically d­ oing exactly that for several months with a massive public outreach campaign of billboards, newspaper, radio, and tele­ vi­sion ads encouraging anyone and every­one to surrender arms at police stations and other public offices, and granting amnesty to anyone who did so, no questions asked. Through what­ever combination of personal background and experience, Osman was eminently able to overlook the actions and decisions of Angolan institutions and professionals. In his narrative constructions of the events that led to the GGAP, he summed up the long Angolan civil war and characterized the postwar period as controlled by the greed and avarice of a po­liti­cal elite. While his analy­sis was highly incomplete, it did open a moral space for intervention by external actors with a more benevolent ideology or, perhaps, any “ideology” whatsoever. He continued on to explain how it had been that Angola’s expatriate development community came to the GGAP’s specific methods and goals, by recounting a series of initiatives in which he had participated a­ fter his arrival in Angola, roughly two and a half years ­after the “nice day” that Savimbi was shot. Osman explained that when he had arrived in Angola, the American NGO had been participating as a member of a large consortium3 of international NGOs that together implemented an emergency food relief program. Questions had arisen about this consortium’s reliance on sobas, village-­level “traditional authorities,” to determine who should be eligible for assistance in each community. osman: So ­these traditional leaders, we are [at that time] trusting them to give us the list of the beneficiaries who can get the assistance, and ultimately that list is serving po­liti­cal purposes to some extent and to another extent is serving the po­liti­ cal supremacy of the traditional leaders. So we found that in 80–90 ­percent of the cases, we ­were not reaching to the real ­people [targeted for food aid].

The consortium had engaged in a programmatic self-­study that, together with their research into the scholarly and gray lit­er­a­tures on the ­matter, led them to conclude that their reliance on local “traditional authorities” had l­imited their ability to distribute food aid to t­ hose who needed it most and had perhaps made them complicit in replicating local social inequalities. The consortium as a w ­ hole became very interested in alternative methodologies for interacting with ­recipient



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communities—­ones in which they did not depend so heavi­ly on existing, possibly inequitable, social structures for program implementation. In ­these findings, Osman found more fodder for his disregard of Angolan authorities, and the role of international experts became increasingly prominent in his telling of the GGAP’s history. In a second research proj­ect, he continued, he had worked with a foreign think tank to survey humanitarian and development programming in Angola. Their overarching concern was how international NGOs could negotiate the difficult “transition” from the conduct of war­time relief work to postwar development initiatives. The survey team determined ­there was only one international program then ­running in Angola that could properly be considered a development intervention: the GGL program. The GGL had, seemingly, pioneered a new beneficiary-­engagement technique wherein staff or­ga­nized local community groups to stand in­de­pen­dent of existing social structures—­apart from the sobas, the po­liti­cal parties, the churches, and so on. Individual members of ­these groups surely overlapped with ­these other authority structures, but the new groups (ODAs) w ­ ere exactly that in the GGL’s targeted communities—­new configurations of individuals engaged and empowered to speak on behalf of w ­ hole communities. Osman included the GGL as a central part of the GGAP’s origin story, intimating that the GGL staff was unable to fully recognize their accomplishment in pioneering the ODAs and their engagement in public forums. Concurrently with ­these international NGO efforts to determine their new, postwar strategies, a new WestAid country director arrived. At this point, Osman was serving as interim country director for the American NGO and so sought to establish good connections with the incoming WestAid director. He recalled inviting her to visit the American NGO’s field sites: osman: She came, to Andulo, and we had an overnight in Andulo and we talked to some of the members, we talked to our staff, we talked to some community members, we talked about what are the demands [of postwar Angolan development]. And she ­really got the idea that as a ­matter of fact Angola ­doesn’t need heavi­ly driven rehabilitation programs, what it needs, it needs overall awareness of the communities about their demands and pushing ­those demands to civil society and to government in a way that they feel obligated. So creating the dialogue and creating the demo­cratic space is more urgent. And I stayed with her and reinforced some of ­these ­things and then the reference was given from the [GGL] program.

Notably, Osman did not take the new WestAid director to the GGL’s periurban intervention sites directly in order to convince her of the merits of that program’s approach. He took her instead to the American NGO’s long-­standing sites of relief programming in the center of the country and t­ here “gave the reference” to the GGL program as a promising model to follow in ­those rural sites. Osman credited this orchestrated field visit with effectively determining her opinions and

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ideas on how postwar development in Angola should be pursued during her tenure at WestAid. Osman’s recounting of the GGAP’s history is, throughout, structured within the social relationships of expatriate aid professionals working at the sudden close of the Angolan civil war. He situates institutional-­level decisions within and among the personalities and personal friendships of aid elites, as informed by their experiences and observations (see also Eyben 2011; Rajak and Stirrat 2011). To come around to the GGAP as a specific intervention, however, Osman had to account for the collaboration that came to exist between WestAid and its extractive industry partners, the Oil Com­pany and the Diamond Com­pany. In his retelling, ­these collaborations culminated in the strategic plan that WestAid ­adopted in the postwar period. Rather than laying out a plan first, and only then securing funding for it, the development of the strategic plan itself involved potential funding partners in response to their interests. As Mosse has argued using a programmatic case study in India, “proj­ect design is the art . . . ​of bringing together diverse, even incompatible interests—of national governments, implementing agencies, collaborating NGOs, research institutions, or donor advisers of dif­fer­ent hues” (Mosse 2004, 648). As Osman explained, crediting the leadership of the new WestAid director, a similar amalgamation of other­w ise incompatible institutions was brought together in the GGAP: osman: And then [she] did an excellent job in terms of developing [WestAid’s] own strategic plan for the next five years. . . . ​They brought some con­sul­tants from [abroad] . . . ​some of their top-­notch con­sul­tants to come and work with the [WestAid] local mission as well as their partners, all the civil society and all the NGOs and the private sector—­BFA Bank and Banco Sol and [corporate industries]—to make an inclusive discussion and dialogue in ­Hotel Alvalade, and where organ­izations like [the American NGO] and all the International NGOs w ­ hether they are partners of [WestAid] or not but they have long experience of working in Angola; they had a long discussion and reported feedback. And based on ­those discussions and feedback [WestAid] came up with a new strategic plan, [a] strategic five-­year plan.

WestAid’s affiliation with oil companies, diamond companies, and other private industrial organ­izations and banks was contentious. For instance, in late 2005, WestAid had just issued an RFA that was very attractive to a religiously affiliated international NGO. I witnessed the country administrators of that organ­ization in a frenzy to confirm ­whether or not oil money was being used for the proposed programming, as their international headquarters offices had denied them permission to participate in calls sponsored by the petroleum industry due to conservationist and ­human rights concerns. For several days, almost no other work



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was addressed as t­ hese NGO administrators went back and forth between WestAid and their own international headquarters offices, cajoling and pleading ­either for the funder to state that oil money was not being used for that par­tic­u­lar program or for their own organ­ization to find a way to relax its boycott. In the end, neither was pos­si­ble, so that NGO did not submit a proposal. A ­ fter witnessing the stress of ­these tense negotiations firsthand, I was sensitive to such issues being of concern to other organ­izations, and asked Osman about this directly. For his part, though, Osman took an ends-­justify-­the-­means approach to the ­matter, valuing the work done with such monies more highly than the ills produced by t­ hose making the money in the first place: osman: This [soliciting corporate funds] was a major step, b­ ecause [WestAid] knows that they ­don’t have enough money to go around and implement all their strategic choices, so they wanted other players to come in and work together. Which is absolutely very visionary work and I think [the new director] had a vision and she pursued it and I think she did a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful job. rebecca: Was it controversial at all? osman: I ­don’t think it was controversial, but one of the key, fascinating points about this relationship that [she] forged was that the corporate [industries,] like [the Oil Com­pany] or [the Diamond Com­pany], they are the p­ eople who are less interested in good governance; they are less interested in ­human rights, they are less interested in pushing t­hese demo­cratic princi­ples ­because their maximum effort is how they can maximize their profit level. Bringing them on board and getting [their] involvement in a program like [the GGAP] is unbelievable. It’s huge. It’s a paradigm shift, to me. And given the fact that the government itself is very suspicious about issues like transparency and good governance issues [. . . ] getting [the Oil Com­pany] involved in supporting t­hose issues is very surprising.

In his accounting of “how the GGAP came about,” Osman thus lauded a “visionary” and charismatic expatriate, the new WestAid director, for putting together all the stakeholders of Angolan development. For Osman, t­hose ­were WestAid and other international donors, international NGOs, banks, and oil and diamond companies. Angolan NGOs ­were almost certainly pre­sent in ­these conversations, but Osman does not name them in his narrative, nor does he cite the presence and influence of individual Angolans working on behalf of the state, private entities, NGOs, or other­wise. In his account of WestAid’s plotting a five-­ year strategic plan and setting out to fund the GGAP as an intervention, he emphasizes instead his own behind-­the-­scenes orchestration of the WestAid director’s visit to Andulo and the work of expatriates to investigate local best practices, value them appropriately, and deliberate development priorities among themselves. Osman, who directed the GGAP from its first day to its last,

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considered its history to be a story of the foreign aid community coming together in agreement about its development priorities and interventionist tactics in postwar Angola.

The Development “We” No doubt Osman had laudable intentions in organ­izing, for instance, the new WestAid director’s visit to Andulo and in participating in ­these relationships. ­These events and actions furthered his organ­ization’s goals and WestAid’s, his own c­ areer, and perhaps even broader Angolan objectives as well. But ­these visits, conversations, and relationships only became real as they w ­ ere instantiated in formal agreements and interventions. Osman’s structuring of this history demonstrates how the GGAP as a program, an intervention, is explicable through stories of who met whom, and when, and what they discussed, and what decisions they made together. I make the correlate observation: t­ hese collegial relationships are themselves identifiable and “real” only as they culminate in interventions and institutional agreements. The formal interventions that can have real impact, or not, on Angolan society are in the first mea­sure designed and implemented to concretize the social and professional bonds between development professionals. In Osman’s perspective, ­those development professionals w ­ ere almost exclusively expatriates with privileged capacity to diagnose Angolan deficiencies and recognize the promise of new interventionist practices. But, as Appadurai and o­ thers have pointed out, practices and ideas themselves, perhaps as “­things” that can be transferred from one person or group to another, have their own “social lives” and even biographies (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). What Osman and his colleagues identified as “new” and even “local” innovation in interventionist practice—­the use of ODAs and public forums—­had in fact come from somewhere ­else. It had not been in­ven­ted originally in Kilamba Kiaxi, the periurban municipality bordering Luanda proper where the GGL had been implemented, as Helena’s and Sebastian’s versions of events demonstrate in the discussion that follows. The practices of forming new community groups and conducting public forum events w ­ ere adapted from civic organ­izing initiatives elsewhere, making vis­i­ble some of the contours of the global development praxiscape and how practices move along the routes defined by personal relationships. A tall, broad, reserved Angolan ­woman whose ­children ­were already grown, Helena had departed as the GGAP’s central municipal development adviser just ­after its first year, to take up very similar work in the American NGO’s Huíla Province office, in southern Angola (see Peters 2013 for more on Helena’s departure). Her departure from the GGAP was a serious setback for the intervention, and although a colleague temporarily covered her duties, that substitution in turn left a very impor­tant position unfilled for several months. Where Osman had told a



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tale of expatriates recognizing the GGL as a model for postwar development programming, Helena’s version of GGAP history made reference to a dif­fer­ent community of interventionists. During a brief visit of hers back to Luanda, Helena and I spoke in the courtyard of the American organ­ization’s offices. Courtyards such as this one, sometimes called a quintal in Portuguese, are common in urban and periurban Luanda. The American NGO’s was large, having been expanded by walling in a street corner so as to connect in one large courtyard three smallish buildings to h­ ouse its offices and storage sheds. ­There was a thin stand of mango trees, ­under which a smattering of plastic chairs and ­tables served as impromptu meeting spaces as well as a waiting room for visitors if it was not raining. We spoke at one of ­these plastic ­tables ­under the trees, while at another ­table near us a finances meeting was being held in En­glish between the American NGO’s Filipina comptroller and an Angolan staff member from a provincial office. Two other Angolan men, one a regular security guard for the premises and another visiting from one of the NGO’s many community implementation sites, sat in plastic chairs at a respectful distance from Helena and me but with their attention nevertheless clearly directed t­ oward us. Such conversations and meetings with obvious but unobtrusive onlookers ­were everyday affairs at all of the NGOs in which I spent time during 2008–2009; I must have become as unaware of them as the regular staff seemed to be. I asked Helena,4 as I had Osman, to tell me “the history of the GGAP,” and she responded by rooting the program methodologically in the GGL as its precursor: helena: We implemented [the GGL] program and had successes. The intention, the purpose, of this program was to reduce poverty, and we thought that the models we had made in Kilamba Kiaxi should expand to all of the municipalities in Angola. Of course, as you know, as a nongovernmental organ­ization, we would never have the capacity or the funding to do this in ­every municipality.

­ ere, Helena’s understanding of the eventual goals of governance interventions H is significantly dif­fer­ent than ­those found in the proj­ect’s documents or in use by donor offices and even GGAP administrators. Her orientation is dif­fer­ent even from the explication I ­later received about the GGL from its former director, Sebastian (discussion follows). Helena’s idea h­ ere was that development programming even in a good governance proj­ect was meant “to reduce poverty.” While that may be one of the ultimate or under­lying ideas ­behind much development work, it was not an expressly stated goal of the GGAP nor was poverty reduction among the donors’ or implementing NGOs’ stated missions at that time. Poverty reduction had been at the foundations of the GGL program, however, and so carried through in Helena’s logic as she drew a clear lineage between the urban GGL program and the provincially targeted GGAP as a type of “scaling up” of

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the older program. This notion of scale-up was common among the field staff—­ many of them understood their task to be the reproduction of the GGL’s methods in Luanda to the far-­flung Angolan provinces—­perhaps ­because of Helena’s influence during her time as a central adviser in the GGAP. Osman did not understand the GGAP to be a ­wholesale scaling up of the GGL, of course; he thought that certain of the GGL’s methods had been selectively ­adopted in the design of a new program, a difference in interpretation that painted the GGAP as an innovative and expert accomplishment, rather than merely a replication of previous interventions. Beyond the goals of the GGAP and its relationship to the GGL, Helena also couched her explanations of the GGAP’s beginnings differently with re­spect to its partnerships—­the set of professional relationships among the international NGOs, the donors, and the state. Helena set out an implicit contrast between international NGOs and the state with her remark that an NGO would “never” be able to address e­ very municipality with its programming, regardless of its success. In the postsocialist context of Angola, this comment should not be read as an argument for increased funding and expansion of NGO operations or as criticism of them as inefficient or the like. Instead, with this comment Helena was implicating the state, since the state in Angola is presumed omnipotent, having the capacity and therefore the responsibility to reach “­every municipality.” ­Helena h­ ere made the question of Angolan government connections and the relationships between the intervention staff and the government staff quite central to her narrative, ­going on to explain that it was the GGL team—­not donor representatives—­ that had “designed” another proj­ect to “replicate” what the GGL had been ­doing in Luanda. While the GGL stood out in many narratives as having pioneered the community and municipal-­level public forums method and the formation of ODAs that became key aspects of the GGAP in its rural intervention sites, the GGL had not always been a successful program nor had it begun with ­these methods. In fact, it was the GGL’s reinvention through adoption of t­ hese methods that was critical to the GGAP’s origination. I was able to ask in further depth about ­these changes in the GGL when Sebastian, the white South African whom Helena and many ­others credited with that program’s eventual success, visited the south of Angola briefly in 2008.5 He had returned to South Africa from Angola in 2005 to take a se­nior government position ­there in urban planning, ­after having worked with the GGL for roughly four years in Luanda. Former GGL staff members—­ including Helena—­described Sebastian in glowing terms as a genius and visionary who could simplify the complex and diagnose the under­lying cause of any prob­lem and, moreover, who brimmed with infectious energy and verve. In contrast to this description, I found his early demeanor in a large, integrated development planning workshop quite gruff. His responses during conversation among colleagues ­were dismissive of what ­others had suggested and of questions posed



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to him, and he seemed to grunt his answers as often as he spoke them. As the workshop6 continued, though, his interactions with participants revealed more of the Sebastian his older colleagues remembered so fondly. He took seriously what participants said, he privileged the answers and ideas of Angolan staff members in making his own contributions, he credited them for their work, and he evinced genuine passion for the most mundane details of, for instance, municipal refuse collection. In speaking formally about his work with the GGL, Sebastian explained that successful development work requires passionate commitment from development workers and most especially from the local implementation staff. He emphasized that ­there must be institutional “space” given over for that passion and commitment to be cultivated: room both for the extended time required to achieve real social change and see its effects and for individual professionals to exercise their unique talents and take up the ongoing responsibilities of such work. In Sebastian’s assessment, this institutional space had not been available within the GGL prior to his arrival and prior to other leadership changes within the American organ­ization’s country office in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As Sebastian arrived in Angola in 2001, the GGL was, in his words, “a disaster” and required salvage. The program had attempted to improve local livelihoods by encouraging entrepreneurship through a set of credit schemes in its targeted periurban communities, using the increasingly popu­lar microloans model. But no one was paying back the loans. The program had also constructed new public ­water pumps (chafarizes) in ­these same periurban areas, but ­these had never been connected to the municipal ser­vices and so stood dry. With a “collapsed” credit program, dry chafarizes, and other failures besides, the GGL’s donor was threatening to pull its funding. Sebastian had been sent by specific mandate of the American NGO’s international headquarters to address ­these issues and safeguard the American NGO’s broader relationship with the GGL donor, NorthAid. In speaking about this history in 2008, I asked Sebastian, somewhat seriously, if he had replaced the GGL staff when he arrived. He rejected this idea immediately and described his approach as a patient, long-­term, recursive “redirection” of the existing staff. In his assessment, many of the GGL’s failures before his arrival ­were due not to lax or unmotivated staff but to a lack of strong, supportive leadership and of specifically development industry experience in the GGL program’s administration. His approach was to encourage an extensive pro­cess of reflection, discussion, and consultation among the staff, through which he and they came to question the very foundations of the intervention. They began to challenge ­whether ser­v ice provision—­credit, utilities, and so on—­was actually the best approach to development work in periurban Luanda. This period of reflection, as it turns out, coincided with significant contextual change—as Jonas Savimbi was killed very soon ­after Sebastian’s arrival in Angola, the civil war ended in an abrupt fashion.7 GGL staff members ­were suddenly faced with very dif­fer­ent

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conditions for their work: they ­were no longer war­time interventionists; rather, they now ­were reconstructionists in the new postwar world. In leading a consultative and reflective pro­cess among his proj­ect staff—­all of them Angolan—in this time of stochastic historical change, Sebastian came to understand that other contemporaneous interventions had met essentially the same fates as had the GGL’s proj­ects. He cited the government’s constant activities of constructing poorly engineered roads and bridges in communities where ­these new structures would then wash out with seasonal rains almost as quickly as they had been built. He cited a peer intervention wherein the government had made investments in small businesses in the same communities but had s­ topped short of expanding their access to the energy grid, summing up their failure with “Small business without electricity is pretty useless.” He narrated how each of t­ hese observations had been incorporated into the ongoing deliberations of his staff: sebastian: So, ­there was a w ­ hole general picture for us, and the question was, if all ­these proj­ects take off, does it add up to development? And I think the conclusion was that it’s not g­ oing to add up to anything. And the question then was, well, what approach do we take?

The local Angolan staff of the American organ­ization in this era, with Sebastian’s encouragement, surveyed their work and ­others’ and determined that even if ­these interventions ­were successful in their stated ends (functioning credit ser­ vices, w ­ ater, roads, and so on), they still would not cumulate to “development” in the sense that the staff most desired. According to Sebastian, the team organically came around to making “governance” and the local management of civic resources their new interventionist goals. In considering Sebastian’s recounting of the GGL his use of the first-­person plural—­“we,” “us”—is notable. Osman also recounted the events preceding the GGAP—­researching what interventionist course to take in postwar Angola—as collegial activity, but Osman’s “we” referenced an exclusive, expatriate community of international aid workers and foreign con­sul­tants. ­Here, Sebastian’s “we” refers to the smaller, overwhelmingly Angolan implementation staff of the GGL as it faced the immediate postwar situation and empirically diagnosed its own faults and desires. It is substantively the same group as is referenced in Helena’s “we,” in her accounting of the GGAP. This group too needed methods that it could agree on and that it could implement together, especially in the face of imminent, programmatic failure. As the GGL staff began to look at governance and civic management as interventionist arenas, Sebastian introduced the methodological idea of organ­izing public municipal forums, in part from his prior experience in South Africa. This idea coincided nicely with a shift in staff focus away from direct ser­vice provision and t­oward rewriting the relationship between the government and the ­people in the postwar period. The GGL began to or­ga­nize public forums in the



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periurban municipalities of Luanda; in preparation for t­ hese forums, they or­ga­ nized and trained small community groups—­ODAs—to voice local opinions at the larger events. It was this set of methods that took off, gelling the GGL team, salvaging their program’s reputation, and getting them noticed in Angola’s development circles. Sebastian emphasized that while he had introduced the idea of organ­izing municipal public forums, it was the Angolan staff that came together to actually accomplish the work. The idea seems to have been exactly what they needed—­a method on which they could all agree and one that put the field staff out in front of beneficiaries, as it was the Angolan staff visibly forming ODAs and organ­izing forums. Through their work during this period, local communities began to perceive that “the American NGO” was in fact Angolan operated and that the forums ­were conceived and carried out by Angolans. Despite t­ hese Angolan staff members being in the employ of an American organ­ization, using NorthAid funds, working ­under the guidance and suggestion of a South African, ­there became vital public acknowl­edgment that the ideas promoted ­were, in their deployment, Angolan. Considering my notion of the development praxiscape, the practice of convening municipal forums and forming ODAs can be seen ­here to have hopped from the South African to the Angolan context via Sebastian’s work across the two. But the contours of movement of such ideas and practices do not explain why they move—­only perhaps how they move, or simply that they move. In the case of the GGL and then the GGAP, the practices of forming new local community groups and organ­izing public forum meetings did not have to be taken up by the Angolan staff in the GGL nor, l­ater, in the GGAP by the expatriate designers of the program. ­These practices ­were not imposed nor decreed, and indeed ­there are likely many other suggestions made by Sebastian in the GGL or by ­others in the GGAP that ­were not taken up by the staff of ­these programs. ­These par­tic­u­lar practices, though, w ­ ere something that could be agreed upon and enacted—­possibly by each dif­fer­ent party or even each dif­fer­ent person for divergent reasons. As phi­los­o­pher Kwame Anthony Appiah points out for ­matters of a conceptually larger scale, “our po­liti­cal coexistence, as subjects or citizens, depends on being able to agree about practices while disagreeing about their justification” (2006, 70). With or without disagreement, Appiah’s point is that practices—­more than princi­ples—­are something that p­ eople can agree on, can work with one another on and through, and in engaging with one another through practices, social relationships happen and are maintained. While the local interpretations of ­these interventionist practices, from South Africa to Angola and in each local place therein are likely quite dif­fer­ent, they w ­ ere taken up in each time and place ­because ­people—­here the GGL and then the GGAP staff, administration, and (it would seem) local beneficiaries—­could all agree to enact them together.

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“Battling” ­toward Governance Sebastian located the GGL’s change of methods, goals, and trajectory—­from a failing set of service-­provision proj­ects to a successful local governance and civic-­ participation initiative—­within the broader con­temporary history of Angola but also within the changing institutional history of the American organ­ization in this same period. He, like Osman, reported that, with the final end of the civil war, the goals of the Angolan offices of the American and other international NGOs shifted. Rather than conducting only humanitarian work, ­these organ­ izations and the American NGO in par­tic­u­lar wanted to be known for their work ­toward greater social change and development. In Sebastian’s retelling, he emphasized the institutional milieu—­not only the broader po­liti­cal economic context—of that time period: sebastian: Well, you know what? [The American NGO] was battling. rebecca: OK. sebastian: It was battling ­because it wanted to be known as an organ­ization that was something more than just emergency. Yet it had no sense of how one does development that d­ oesn’t simply fill the gap that the government should be playing. And what [the American NGO] has been d­ oing for so long . . . ​it basically lets governments off the hook. If your government ­doesn’t provide ­water, then we ­will provide ­water. Well, then why should government provide if someone ­else is supplying ­water? And I think it was quite common . . . ​I mean, [the NGO] changed. I mean, [the NGO] was looking at issues around governance and how they could be more effective in countries, so that you ­don’t have a situation where [the American NGO] is in a country for thirty years, and none of the social indicators have changed. rebecca: Uh-­huh. sebastian: And you say, well what have you actually contributed in ­those thirty years, you know? You have to ask the hard questions about what the role of the NGO is in poverty. And I think [the American NGO] was quite clear that they wanted to get involved more. The question is, what is governance? How do you actually get into governance? How do you actually engage with government? They battled with it. And I think one of the prob­lems has been is that . . . ​it’s always been on the basis of something called “best practice.” And somehow, you are the experts in best practice, and we must lobby government to understand the best practices. I think what happened in Angola . . . ​­here I was . . . ​this was ­really . . . ​and I’m not quite sure how it happened honestly. Of course, this was still [the American NGO]. But somehow, this [the GGL’s successful series of ODAs and forums] was seen as a local development forum with its own roots.

Sebastian emphasized at several points both the individual merits of par­tic­u­ lar staff members as key to the success of this new pursuit of good governance



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within the American organ­ization’s programming and the institutional structures that allowed them to flourish—­themselves products of the changing times. He compared his experience working in Luanda for roughly four years with the GGL to his prior experience in Bangladesh, where he found the local staff “just opportunists.” He explained his sense that in Bangladesh the international NGO offices are among the best and most lucrative places to work, and so p­ eople seek t­ hese positions out without necessarily having any par­tic­u­lar drive to do development work as its own meaningful pursuit. This is in severe contrast to the Angolan situation in which international NGOs are not terribly attractive workplaces for professionals. He emphasized most the passions of three key Angolan staff members—­Helena, Samuel, and Isaac—­praising their capabilities, of course, but even more so their dedication to social change and development in Angola. He chastised me at one point for failing to understand the profundity of his points concerning their dedication: sebastian: I mean, Samuel and ­these guys . . . ​I mean, I ­don’t think you realize just how easy it is for them to leave. . . . ​I ­don’t think you understand how easy it is to walk across to the patronage. rebecca: Yeah? sebastian: I mean, it’s not like they have to do anything to move across. . . . ​It’s just ­there. rebecca: So, how do you keep them? How do you keep your . . . ? sebastian: Well, that’s what ­you’ve got. Y ­ ou’ve got a group of p­ eople. This is what they do. This is their course. This is their . . . rebecca: Mhm. sebastian: And they see that through [the American organ­ization], ­they’ve got access to resources they can [use to] . . . ​sway the par­tic­u­lar . . . ​what­ever strug­ gle it is. But [the Canadian NGO] ­hasn’t kept its staff in the same way, for example.

In addition to comparing his experience with the staff members of the GGL to his experiences in Bangladesh, Sebastian ­here (and elsewhere) compared the GGL program and the American NGO more generally to ­others working in Angola in the immediate postwar period. He characterized most of the aid and development organ­izations working in Angola at that time as “so completely expatriate driven” and contrasted them with the GGL program, which he claimed had a strikingly dif­fer­ent approach to staff engagement and development. H ­ ere, we had been discussing some of the difficulties the GGAP was facing in certain of its provincial implementation sites, and he expressed frustration at the idea that the GGAP would be “rolling out” the same methods in each field site without first g­ oing through this long, iterative, deeply local pro­cess of reflection and deliberation on what methods might be most

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fi­ tting for an area. He attributed this misguided formatting at vari­ous times in our discussion to the GGAP’s being a donor-­driven program and to its being headed by not just an expat but in par­tic­u­lar by Osman, an expat who had come to the program ­after a ­career in emergency relief work rather than in development. Sebastian made sense of the GGAP’s difficulties—­particularly around M&E and staffing—as resulting from a lack of staff empowerment and of institutional space and backing for the field staff to employ their talents in the pursuit of programmatic goals. He attributed this lack of institutional space, when pressed, to Osman’s leadership and particularly to the professional experiences Osman could draw upon to inform his leadership approach. sebastian: One reason why Kilamba Kiaxi [the GGL implementation site] worked, I imagine, is that ­there was a local office [of the American NGO] being based in Kilamba Kiaxi, worked in Kilamba Kiaxi . . . ​knew who they ­were, and working through ­people from Kilamba Kiaxi we set up Kilamba Kiaxi ODAs. I would imagine that if a group from outside just arrived and said, “Guys, put some ODAs together,” they ­would’ve looked and said, “Well, who are you?” So, I suspect that’s half the prob­lem. I mean, did they [in the GGAP] . . . ​did they spend enough time establishing their creditability in the area and then on the basis of that identify a few champions? To work with ­those champions? To empower ­those champions? Lead ­those champions out? I suspect not.

Sebastian’s assertions ­here complement the argument of chapter 2, but where the GGAP administration lacked awareness of and appreciation for the social intricacies of field implementation, Sebastian ­here argues both that the field staff be given the time and support they need to do their work and that real development work must identify and support local community members to take leadership ­toward social change. rebecca: How do you empower somebody? How do you empower a champion, say? sebastian: Well, you ­can’t empower anybody. Let’s face it. I mean, you ­can’t just take anyone off the street and empower them in this way. But someone like Samuel has been empowered. I mean someone like Samuel was an administrator. He’s not gone anywhere. I mean, ­we’ve got ­people we identified. We spent hours and hours and hours and hours just discussing, working, getting an understanding of exactly what the w ­ hole ­thing was about. Instead of when they fail, we fire them, we kick them out, we write rough warning letters. . . . ​Empowering, empowering, its partly self-­confidence, but giving them the tools they need to assume a certain position . . . ​both the conceptual tools, the po­liti­cal space they need, the orga­ nizational back-up, and you empower them to do the work.



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In this exchange, Sebastian spoke not of Osman as a person but, rather, as the set of professional experiences, competencies, and presumptions that prior work had given him: sebastian: I ­don’t think he’s ever seen an urban strug­gle or ever seen an urban planning crisis or ever. . . . ​He’s been through . . . ​his ­whole life has been around food and ­running emergencies. It’s a fundamentally dif­fer­ent ideology and mechanisms, methodologies. ­They’re dif­fer­ent ­things. I ­don’t want to get too personal about it. rebecca: No, no, no. It’s an in­ter­est­ing institutional prob­lem, ­isn’t it? [The American NGO] is trying to make this transition between emergency work to development work and they have p­ eople who did emergency work around . . . ​and ­they’re putting them in development programs, and it’s not the same work. sebastian: It’s also, in all due re­spect . . . ​emergency work, the power relations are so clearly defined. ­Those that have the resources have the power. rebecca: OK. sebastian: In development work, you initially set up the resources, but then you cede the power. rebecca: How do you mean that? sebastian: Emergencies are about taking control of a situation. You actually manage the situation. You move in t­ here, you put in place systems. You take hard decisions, and you take control. Development work is the exact opposite. Development work . . . ​you ­can’t just move in. You strategically find the space where you might be able to operate. It’s two dif­fer­ent frameworks for thinking.

In pinpointing the discrepancies between the GGL’s (eventual) success and the GGAP’s difficulties at its midpoint, Sebastian emphasized not only the field staff ’s commitment and their roles in their communities of ser­vice but also the immediate institutional context within which they worked. In the GGL u­ nder Sebastian’s leadership, field staff members ­were “empowered” and had room to put forth their own ideas and make decisions about the use of programmatic resources and more. Meanwhile, in hearing news from his former colleagues, Sebastian understood the GGAP to be run in a more standardized format: u­ nder a model wherein field and technical staff did not make decisions but w ­ ere expected to do as they ­were told by their supervisors. Sebastian made several comments about the whys and wherefores of staff leaving international NGO–­implemented development programs. He had spoken of the nature of power hierarchies inside implementation programs and of the necessity that field staff have the “institutional space” to capitalize on their talents and passion for the work. In addition to Helena’s departure from the GGAP—­a severe blow to the intervention—­Sebastian was able to cite several good staff members who had left other programs and other international organ­izations during his time

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working with the GGL in 2001–2004, and I had begun keeping track of GGAP staff departures since hearing Helena’s story at the beginning of my fieldwork (see Peters 2019b). Additionally, Sebastian confirmed that the American organ­ization had not, ­until the very end of his time ­there, included Angolans in their se­nior management team meetings and decision-­making pro­cesses. All of this had been beginning to change u­ nder a new country director when Sebastian left for his position in South Africa, and in 2008–2009, Angolans ­were the majority members of the country office’s se­nior management team. Considering Helena’s departure from the program in light of Sebastian’s comments suggests that Angolan staff members in the era of the GGL and the GGAP ­were seeking good governance and participation in governance not only as a development goal with re­spect to Angolan communities and local government but also with an eye to their internal, professional communities as well. This resonance of larger po­liti­cal concerns within the professional space of the interventionist organ­ization demonstrates how the sociality of the development enterprise cannot itself be divorced from its larger stated purposes. Moreover, the question of the development “we” must be asked with greater urgency as interventions and orga­nizational trajectories are so thoroughly s­ haped—­and even certain practices ­adopted—as a ­matter of who, with what experience and background, is in the room to make the impor­tant decisions of program design and implementation.

Partners or Proprietors? In thinking critically about how the GGAP’s methods ­were de­cided upon in relation to previous programming, several further ele­ments of Sebastian’s narrative are key. In his perspective, Angolan GGL staff members had, via a pro­cess of reflection and iterative discussion, arrived at the conclusion that Angolan development required mechanisms for local communities to hold the government accountable in the provision of ser­vices, rather than development interventions providing ser­vices themselves. GGL staff members had come to governance as an interventionist goal b­ ecause ser­vice provision did not seem to be sufficient to address local prob­lems, and perhaps as they w ­ ere themselves seeking greater voice and influence in the governance of their own organ­izations. The idea to pursue governance interventions thus ­rose in the GGL both ­because of its previous failures to achieve social change in its communities of ser­vice and ­because of the institutional “space” in which the staff was allowed to put forth their own observations and programmatic ideas. According to Sebastian, turning the GGL around had been a pro­cess driven by local Angolan staff members who w ­ ere passionate about their work and came to diagnose the local state–­citizenry relationship as deficient and among the under­lying ­causes of poverty and material need. What Sebastian described in his history of the GGL’s turnaround from near failure to model success is perhaps a pro­cess of development practice through



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partnership among colleagues. He insisted that ­there was reflection, analy­sis, and brainstorming among the GGL staff that led them to focus on the citizen–­ state relationship. If he is right, what he described is the same kind of intellectual work—­observation, analy­sis, deliberative decision making—­with which policy makers are normally credited. By contrast, it was h­ ere a field staff team, rather than a group of policy makers or “con­sul­tants,” that was emboldened and supported in its ideational endeavors by sensitive leadership. Sebastian was likely wrong when he suggested that the GGAP’s difficulties might be due to Osman’s expatriateness: Sebastian was, ­after all, himself an expat in Angola, and it would seem he did the job of leading an intervention program quite well. He was likely right, however, to consider Osman’s prior history in humanitarian relief work and its rigidly hierarchical structures of decision making and implementation as pos­si­ble ­factors affecting GGAP’s difficulties. Osman, like many international development and relief professionals, operated with firmly held ideas about the division of ­labor in the industry: field staff are to do as they are told; they do not come up with ideas, as this is the province of supervisors, administrators, and “experts.” The GGAP’s origination as recalled by Osman and Helena, and supplemented by Sebastian’s explication of the GGL as its immediate precursor, are incongruent with the official version of the program’s beginnings. The GGAP’s RFA, as  detailed in the previous chapter, does not mention the GGL as a previous iteration, nor, upon a close reading, does it detail the day-­to-­day implementation activities the donors expected of the GGAP. ­There is no mention of what “community development” or “municipal development” would ­really look like in everyday work, but recall that the GGAP’s RFA stated that “the basic approach to community and municipal development in Angola is not a major design issue, since the [funding] Partners desire to apply the successful model used by FAS. The Recipient [implementing agency or consortium] should add ele­ments it believes would enhance program effectiveness, or, as implementation proceeds, make alterations to respond to specific situations that arise. The framework developed ­under FAS, however, is the foundation for activity, in order to promote a consistent national approach to community and municipal development and to avoid proliferation of alternative models” (p. 38). Recall, too, that FAS, a Social Development Fund, was a program supported by World Bank funding, ­housed inside the Angolan government’s Ministry of Planning, though it was managed autonomously. Operating since 1994, the program was in its third phase and gearing up to roll out its fourth phase while the GGAP was being designed and implemented. In a brief recounting8 that parallels many of the ele­ments of Osman’s narrative but highlights her own connections to WestAid, FAS’s then director, Sofia, explained that, not only was the GGAP meant to be modeled a­ fter her organ­ization’s intervention, but that this was in fact a condition she had imposed a­ fter being approached by WestAid to

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advise on the program. She expressed anger that the GGAP as she understood it to be implemented was not following the day-­to-­day methods of FAS: rebecca: So let’s move over to the Lunda Norte example . . . sofia: No, Lunda Norte—­let me go a ­little bit further back . . . ​it’s like [WestAid] and when [WestAid’s director] was a Director. She . . . ​we became friends and she visited us and was impressed with our second component [FAS II]. And she asked ­whether we could get a group of con­sul­tants that could use our materials to put together this [GGAP] t­ hing. We only agreed on the basis that the ­consortium—or whoever was ­going to win the public bid—­was ­going to use our methodology. We ­were proven wrong. They are not using our methodology. They are just ­doing what it is that they want. .  . . rebecca: What changed? sofia: No, what changed is ­because she left, and also ­because I think that [the Canadian NGO and the American NGO] and every­thing . . . ​they are too in­de­ pen­dent to be told to do ­things. I think that they just wanted . . . ​I participated in the evaluation of the proposals [in response to the GGAP’s RFA] and none of the proposals ­were good. None of the proposals ­were actually adequate. The proposal that the consortium provided was better than the ­others only on the basis that they ­were already ­here. So it kind of made sense to actually give the contract to a group that ­were [sic] already in Angola. rebecca: Right, they d ­ idn’t have to set up, ­didn’t have to go through the ­whole . . . sofia: Exactly, you d ­ on’t have to go through . . . ​and also, they had the experience in Andulo for [the American NGO] the experience in Cabinda for [the Canadian NGO], ­etc. But for me, it became very clear that they also had their own agenda to provide salaries to their staff, and to stay in Angola, and they w ­ ere not . . . ​so I mean, this is a sad story. I mean, for me, I ­don’t want to partner with anybody again. As long as I ­will be ­here . . . ​FAS IV ­will not have partners, ­because partnership in Angola is very difficult to set up, ­because this is what happened, you know?

For Sofia, then directing an intervention that employed nearly ninety p­ eople across Angola’s eigh­teen provinces and commanding roughly USD 120 million between the contributions of the World Bank and the Angolan government for this purpose, “partnership” with the GGAP consortium had become impossible ­because the methods of intervention ­were in contention. For her, “partnership” had failed, as she believed the two interventions’ methods diverged. Sofia mentioned briefly other logistical difficulties in maintaining partnerships—­the normal prob­lems of maintaining good communication, scheduling meetings, transit through Luanda’s heavy traffic, and so on—­but she placed the real blame for what she perceived as a failed partnership on the implementing NGOs’ methodological “in­de­pen­dence.” Far from the RFA’s confident statement that “the basic



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approach to community and municipal development in Angola is not a major design issue,” the partnership that WestAid and its funding partners sought between FAS, DLG, and the GGAP had disintegrated b­ ecause, according to Sofia, the GGAP implementation organ­izations ­were “just ­doing what it is that they want.” Reflecting on the same period of time, Sebastian could express an equal mea­ sure of disappointment and anger as his former GGL colleagues felt they ­were being asked to impose standardized practices on local communities. They would have preferred, Sebastian intimated, to engage in reflection in each unique field site, identifying and supporting local “champions” in the pursuit of locally led initiatives. As Sofia considered the standardization of practices across dif­fer­ent interventions to be a type of conditionality she could, and did, impose on her sharing of materials and methods with WestAid, her approach is less as a partner in the sense Pickard (2010) recorded in his study of Mexican NGO activists and more as a holder of proprietary rights over implementation methods. But proprietor or not, the discrepancies between t­hese dif­fer­ent versions of the GGAP’s origination story and its status at its midpoint certainly contradict any simplified sense of the program’s beginnings and the decisions that led to its final form and function.

Partnership as Development Praxis Development observers and analysts often presume that intervention programs begin at a funder’s RFA. Th ­ ese calls do form the first public, formal signs of programmatic life and give the strong impression that funding agencies—­more so than implementing agencies—­have discretion over the methods, personnel, and location of the interventions they support. The GGAP would also seem to have such a history, but as I have shown through the foregoing, differently inflected recountings of the program’s origination, an RFA is not the first moment of a program’s life. Nor are funding agencies, or any single institution at all perhaps, in such clear control over interventionist decision making. While WestAid’s RFA for the GGAP—­its solicitation of applications from organ­izations wishing to implement the program—­was the first public document to announce the program, this document was itself the culmination of a series of events, activities, and relationships. In this way, RFAs are perhaps like a birth certificate: si­mul­ta­neously the beginning of bureaucratic personhood and the culmination of the wholly unique pro­cesses of conception, gestation, and parturition—­each with its own inherent and constitutive relationships, activities, events, and history. In another similarity to a birth certificate, the GGAP’s RFA was also wholly ­silent on what the program would r­ eally be like as it grew and matured. Its name and documented parentage provided no substantive detail as to its personality, its day-­to-­day comportment and activities. The RFA emphasized “partnership” in

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the program as both method and goal, but did not specify the GGAP’s central beneficiary-­contact activities of forming ODAs, training municipal government staff, or conducting public forums for community members, ODAs, and local government officials to engage with one another (see also Peters 2019a). ­These activities ­were not, as the RFA had noted, the successful approach of peer interventions like FAS and the DLG, and, as noted e­ arlier, FAS’s director was angry that the GGAP was not using her program’s methodology. The GGAP’s central methods came to be determined not by donor direction but through the adoption of familiar methods by field staff who had been employed in the GGL or directed by ­those who had worked in this pre­de­ces­sor program. While the methods’ familiarity surely made them attractive to GGAP staff, they ­were in the end ­adopted ­because they could be agreed upon together and therefore ­were instrumental for solidifying the working relationships among staff, between organ­ izations, and between the GGAP staff and their beneficiary groups. A method’s usefulness in strengthening collegial relationships in the development industry—­its palatability and attractiveness to dif­fer­ent policy makers and program implementers—­clearly does not disqualify it from also being useful to effect real social change, but the two characteristics may operate more in­de­pen­ dently from one another in development intervention than we would generally like to think. Perhaps methods are agreed upon by professionals working together ­because of their potential to effect change: ostensibly that would be the industry’s preferred pattern for decision making, but t­ here are also clear cases in which enthusiastically agreed upon methods reveal themselves to be in­effec­tive, and such outcomes bear examination. In such cases, smart, well-­intentioned ­people may simply have been wrong to choose the methods they did, of course, but if methods are also chosen for social, internal-­to-­the-­industry reasons as well, then ­these reasons taking pre­ce­dence could also explain development failures as well as point to solutions. One clear consequence of development planners’ and implementers’ se­lection of interventionist methods to support their own professional and orga­nizational relationships, rather than to further the aims of social change in recipient communities, is that perhaps the best methods for development as true social transformation ­w ill not be selected nor developed. Moreover, ­those methods that provoke agreement and partnership at one level of the industry—­among donors, for instance—­may not be the same methods upon which implementation agents can agree and work together. Interventionists at their respective positions in the industry may replicate what they already know, as Sebastian effectively did in introducing the practice of supporting public forums to the GGL field staff or as Osman likely did when he insisted that certain tasks be conducted in each field site ­whether or not field staff considered them appropriate. They may, alternatively, select methods and goals that allow them to establish or maintain relationships with funders or peer institutions, as Osman accomplished in his conversations



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and travel with the incoming WestAid director. Should methods that are arrived at by such means have real development impact, then t­ hese adoption practices would be unobjectionable. But this is not always the case, and development decisions may well be made to establish or maintain professional relationships rather than to effect real social change. Positivist approaches to program design and evaluation such as Logical Framework Analy­sis are meant to avert such practices, but, as discussed in chapter 2, t­ hese structures for decision making often do not “see” all the way down to ­actual implementation practice. What is neglected ­here is acknowl­edgment of the social characteristics, goals, and practices of professional development work in and among professionals themselves, at each level of the development industry. The GGAP, and especially its specific interventionist methods, ­were determined by the interpersonal relationships of development professionals as they ­were acting si­mul­ta­neously on behalf of their organ­izations, in their own ­career interests, and ­toward what each believed would be for the greater good of Angola. Comparing the dif­fer­ent and even discrepant histories that Osman, Helena, Sebastian, and Sofia tell of the GGAP’s beginnings demonstrates how t­ hese relationships produced the program: professionals created the program and selected its methods so as to concretize their relationships with one another. Recognizing this mutuality is critical for a deep understanding of the development industry and for its ongoing efforts to achieve social change. If ever development interventions must change their methods to pursue dif­fer­ent goals or in response to new or changing contexts, then the industry’s constitutive relationships and their instantiation through intervention may also have to change in order to facilitate the adoption of new methods.

CONCLUSION Development without Borders

Many analyses of international development take “the development encounter” as a de facto framing and even an analytical entry point. This rendering of the industry’s structures and activities implies a divide between two sides, presumed usually to be the global North versus the global South. A simultaneous and overlapping industry dichotomy is then taken to be professionals versus beneficiaries, as though all professionals are Northern and all Southerners, beneficiaries. Any analy­sis focused on “encounter” runs this risk, of making each side seem more separate from the other, and each more homogeneous, than they ­really are (Nader 2015; see also Ortner 1999). Certainly many development institutions see themselves as wholly outside of, and often above, the social world in which they intervene (see Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Gupta and Ferguson 1997) despite the fact that upwards of 90 ­percent of their employees are “national staff.” Such institutional self-­imagery, at odds with the demographics of the profession, leaves national and in-­country staff in an ambiguous category. Many analyses of development institutions share the industry’s emic perspective on itself rather than setting t­ hese categories and presumptions out for critical evaluation (e.g., Harrison 2013). I proceeded from a dif­fer­ent vantage point, asking about the work that makes up development intervention first, and then examining who goes about ­doing it. A first fundamental finding of my approach was that development professionals predominantly “encounter” each other in the course of their work, rather than the clients or beneficiaries who are supposedly on the other side of their industry’s basal divide. Examining development workers’ daily practices and experiences as they work to change society, I argued that they must first navigate the deeply social structures and practices of their own industry and its institutions before they can achieve the broadly social impacts they desire. International development seen as the purposeful pursuit of social change is a good place “to study the rich mix of ­people and ­things brought to bear on complex problem-­solving questions, but also . . . ​to understand more about member144

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ship in communities” (Star 2015, 155), as a wide variety of ­people and ­things are brought into a community of prac­ti­tion­ers by virtue of working t­ oward development’s many proj­ects. In professional development practice, however, the term community almost always refers to recipient populations as they are resident in a par­tic­u­lar area (Pigg 1992). It is rarely conjured with re­spect to the development industry itself. Instead, the “international community” is often invoked as the ultimately responsible party for interventions, taken to include development institutions and professionals as part of an expansive conceptualization. Broadly, the idea of the international community refers to the power­ful nations, institutions, and actors of modern global affairs: wealthy governments and their diplomatic, economic, and military corps; formalized international organ­izations such as the World Bank and the United Nations; and individual experts and international NGOs as they are engaged with government agencies and intergovernmental organ­izations. In this usage, the “international community” is not simply all the countries or transnational organ­izations of the world, but specifically ­those with ­great influence, acting broadly together. This idea of the international community has been ably critiqued. Though real, this amorphous entity “is a dynamic, complicated, overlapping, un­co­or­di­nated, and conflicting bundle of si­mul­ta­neously converging and diverging p­ eople, proj­ ects, interests, agendas, and practices” (Hromadžić 2015, 19, citing Coles 2007 and Moore 2013), such that even using the term imparts a unity and cohesion that is not real. Used uncritically, the term is also effectively essentialist, as though being or coming from the richest, most power­ful countries in the world, or working for them through some institutional structure, is the most defining characteristic of the group, its members, or its goals and practices. Considering development from this perspective—­one that sees “the international community” rather uncritically, or as a coherent whole—­puts one in the com­pany of the policy sciences, where “principals” take decisions and creatively, intellectually develop policy prescriptions for their “agents” to carry out through practical action. If one takes a dif­fer­ent analytical departure point, examining the international development industry for the work that it undertakes, a dif­fer­ent set of actors comes to the fore, with a dif­fer­ent set of relationships than is often presumed in “principal-­agent” thinking. The community of p­ eople engaged in development work includes some who clearly act on behalf of the international community and do attempt to develop policy prescriptions but, if defined instead by its interventionist work, the development industry is seen to be composed largely of development’s intended recipients and local programmatic fieldworkers whose actions are directed by demand and possibility rather than by policy prescription (Beck 2017; Mosse 2005). Proceeding from the concrete tasks undertaken to further development ideals rather than from the perceived structures of the international order, I followed more closely Jean-­Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s definition of the “developmentalist

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configuration” as my community of interest—­that “essentially cosmopolitan world of experts, bureaucrats, NGO personnel, researchers, technicians, proj­ect chiefs and field agents, who make a living, so to speak, out of developing other ­people” (2005, 25, emphasis added). I have ­here conceptualized development’s “proj­ect chiefs and field agents” as the development implementariat, worthy of close examination on its own merit as well as for its impact on society. My focus on the implementation staff of the GGAP necessarily excluded many other development actors, for instance ­those working in national, local, or grassroots organ­izations (see, e.g., Yarrow 2011). In that even ­these smaller-­scale organ­izations often become enmeshed in the hierarchical structures of the international development industry through contracting with international NGOs and donor agencies to conduct donor-­driven programming (Schuller 2012), however, my arguments about the structural inequalities of the industry at large still apply. An analy­sis of the implementariat is, first, an agent-­centered description of development work on the ground as opposed to an institutionally oriented analy­ sis of the industry discourse through its policies and plans (see also Beck 2016; Long 1992, 2001). Examining the implementariat illuminates how p­ eople occupy and negotiate their institutional positions with one another in the context of development institutions rather than examining institutions as themselves actors and inadvertently occluding their internal heterogeneity, exalting their “corporate personhood” (Kirsch 2014), or adopting their institutional concerns as analytical concerns (Douglas 1986). It is an inherently social approach, situating individuals within the complex ­whole of the development endeavor to highlight its internal fissures and fractals. ­Those who are “making a living, so to speak,” as development agents are individuals engaged in development intervention as a profession or as formal, remunerated work, rather than ­those serving as volunteers, as “recipients,” or ­those simply more peripheral to the daily work of the endeavor. Volunteers and recipients are clearly the largest portion of the development implementariat if the definition of that class is strictly concerned with t­ hose who do development work. The body of ethnographic lit­er­a­ture examining the roles and experiences of development’s “volunteers,” “community liaisons,” and similar is among the most exciting new areas in the anthropology of development (e.g., Brown and Green 2015; Maes 2012; 2016b; Phillips 2013; Prince and Brown 2016). This case study, focusing on the GGAP’s formally employed development agents, complements this new research and highlights how similar many of the roles and tasks are between development’s bottommost professional tier and the “community workers” and beneficiaries they interact with most directly. Development insiders might consider their most foundational border to be that between professionals and “beneficiaries” or “volunteers.” This is not the difference between ­those who earn remuneration for their work and ­those who do not, as already discussed; it is instead the difference between t­ hose who do

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the work “for ­others” and ­those who are themselves meant to benefit from it. Development agents in this rubric work to develop other ­people, automatically disqualifying community workers and beneficiaries from occupying positions in the implementariat despite their day-­to-­day actions being appreciably similar to professional implementation agents’ activities. Not only does this conceptualization deny community members who conduct the bulk of development implementation activities any recognition for their work (see also Phillips 2013), it also reduces the professional status of local hires. When operating with the conception that “international development” is conducted by “the international community” as a m ­ atter of foreign affairs, nearly all national staff, by virtue of their citizenship in a targeted country, come to be seen as indirect beneficiaries rather than as engaged development professionals. This is not how national staff members see themselves. In our first interview together, for instance, Helena raised two points in­de­pen­ dently, strongly emphasizing them despite the fact—or perhaps b­ ecause of the fact—­that our other topics of discussion did not suggest them in any way. The first was to state that Angolans do not trust (desconfiazem) programs led by foreigners, but that when they see an Angolan in charge of an intervention, they trust (confiazem) in the program. She explained that this distrust was rooted in suspicion and confusion about motive: Why, Angolans won­der, are ­those foreigners ­here, ­doing ­these ­things? ­There are evidently no satisfying answers to this question that would lead Angolans to trust a foreigner-­led intervention, and Helena highlighted the importance of Angolan staff and Angolan leadership to the success of any program. Her second point was to make clear the motivations of the Angolan staff, especially ­those, like her, who work in administrative and technical expert positions. She claimed that Angolans working in development interventions do it out of “o amor do povo”—­because of their love for the Angolan ­people. She explained that she and ­others with her experience and skill set could easily leave development work and might be particularly motivated to do so in the Angolan context as, t­ here, international NGOs at that time could not offer the larger salaries that private industry could, nor the stability that the state could (see Peters 2019b). National staff members did not leave development for other opportunities, she said, ­because of their passion and commitment to the endeavor. Was Helena part of the developmentalist configuration if her motivations ­were to benefit the Angolan ­people and she was herself Angolan? Is she part of the international community when she works in Angola, or only if she departs to become an expatriate staff member elsewhere? The determination of who stands to benefit from one’s work seems a spurious point on which to draw such conceptual demarcations—­don’t we all stand to benefit from anyone’s, and certainly from every­one’s, improved social conditions—­from their development? Common conceptions of what international development work is, who does it, and who stands to benefit from it most, demonstrate the industry’s contiguity

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with other globalizing pro­cesses in which in­equality works “through the per­sis­ tence of older racial o­ rders or­ga­nized through socially entrenched divisions of ­labor in which a global working class remains segmented along complexly racialized, gendered, ethnicized, and nationalized lines” (Thomas and Clarke 2013, 310). That the development implementariat—­the least supported, least understood, least valued class—­should be so heavi­ly populated by citizens of developing countries, most of them not white, suggests an uncomfortable alignment of dif­fer­ent hierarchies: in the industry at large dif­fer­ent races and nationalities have been erroneously correlated with differential capacity and ­these presumptions have in turn been reinforced by the inequitable visibility and value of dif­fer­ent work tasks. Conventional critical analyses of international development have not adequately interrogated the industry’s internal borders and inequalities: between international and national staff; between t­ hose seen to be working to improve other p­ eople versus t­ hose seen as working for their own p­ eople; between development “professionals” and development “workers.” Th ­ ese distinctions are among the many social, internal aspects of development work that agents must—­and do—­navigate as they go about their duties. ­These internal divisions are both produced by and demand a significant amount of invisible, shadow work (Illich 1981; Star 1991; Star and Strauss 1999), much of it the sort of work that David Graeber terms “interpretive ­labor” (2012; 2015). A second foundational finding from my case study was that the work of development is similarly social at each of the industry’s levels and is often inwardly focused. The internal borders and bound­ aries of the industry shape both ­whether this work is recognized and rewarded, and how much of it is tasked to any par­tic­u­lar worker or class in the industry.

Shadow Work Out of the Shadows In comparing how the GGAP’s dif­fer­ent staff members understood the program and their jobs to the ways their work was described, tracked, and evaluated in institutional narratives, I uncovered a set of unrecorded tasks and events. Th ­ ese existed for implementation staff in the provincial field offices, for administrative staff in the Luanda office, and even among professionals working for the donor institutions. Many of t­hese tasks and events fall into the category of “shadow work” that Ivan Illich defines as the tasks that are “assumed as routine . . . ​[whose] unpaid per­for­mance is the condition for wages to be paid” (1981, 100). Such actions are wholly required, but they are largely unrecognized and only indirectly acknowledged and rewarded, if at all. The shadow or invisible work of international development, as in other large endeavors or organ­izations, is essential to the industry’s more vis­i­ble tasks, duties, and accomplishments (Star 1991; Star and Strauss 1999). Why some work is vis­i­ble and other work is invisible is related to already existing social inequalities in a circular and mutually constitutive fashion: ­people are effectively assigned invisible work ­because of their low

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social status, but, si­mul­ta­neously, ­these ­people hold low social status ­because their work is invisible (Daniels 1987; Star and Strauss 1999). In the social milieu of the international development industry, the lowest status work is implementation work, most particularly the im­mense logistical and social ­labor required to or­ga­nize and conduct face-­to-­face interactions with beneficiaries—­the very backbone of any development intervention. This work remains, on the w ­ hole, assigned to “locals”—­national staff members, to date, but increasingly community volunteers—­reproducing and reinforcing global patterns of racial and national in­equality within the very industry meant to redress them. Like the “reproductive ­labor” (Daniels 1987; Waring 1999) performed by the broader society’s unrecognized workers—­often ­women—to both gen­er­a­tion­ally produce new workers and ready them for work on a daily basis through feeding and other caretaking, t­ hese tasks are also absolutely work: they are complex, difficult, and challenging; often one would rather not have to do them; and they are done, largely, not b­ ecause ­doing them is intrinsically pleas­ur­able or fulfilling but ­because they simply must be done. Where t­ hese tasks diverge from t­ hose that are formally recognized and rewarded as “work” is in simply, and exactly, that definitional recognition. Thus organ­izing an event while employed as a campaign man­ ag­er is clearly work, respected and remunerated, but carry­ing out the same task in the role of wife, m ­ other, or bride is not. Convening a committee of executives and ­running a board meeting is seen, socially, as more prestigious—­and certainly as work—­than is organ­izing local neighbors into a consciousness-­raising committee, book club, or ODA, which might be characterized instead as civic participation, volunteerism, or merely “socializing” in the sense of leisure. Similarly, activities necessary for or in support of “work,” such as the commute of the executive officer, is supported with a com­pany car and perhaps even a driver (who is then also “working”), while the workaday commute of the technician or support staff member—or the driver himself—is not. Part of the difference, that is, in w ­ hether tasks are recognized as work or seen as worthy of institutional support is the existing social status of the person engaged in the task, in addition to ­whether or not the task itself is commonly categorized as a “work” activity. In the international development industry, many of the daily actions taken by development agents are work activities that are deeply social and relational: the work of communicating to o­ thers, of enlisting ­others into one’s own proj­ects or perspectives, and of contributing to ­others’ proj­ects and priorities. The social and relational work of communication and enlistment is, for the most part, recognized and valued within the industry, but far more easily for t­ hose in the upper echelons, as when Osman invited the incoming WestAid director to visit the American NGO’s field sites in the Central Highlands, or when that new mission director or­ga­nized a series of meetings and workshops for Luanda-­based development professionals to contribute to WestAid’s reor­ga­nized mission for the postwar period. Such events and gatherings, including the lunches and dinners

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and other more obviously “social,” as in leisure-­time, activities among development elites (e.g., Eyben 2011; Rajak and Stirrat 2011), are commonly recognized as valuable even if they are not directly remunerated or directed by the industry. Elites are rarely asked to account for exactly how many luncheons, dinners, and tennis games they held with peers, but ­were nevertheless more likely to be seen as engaged in valuable work when conducting activities that led to good relationships with one another. Even the higher stratum of the implementariat—­the Luanda-­based administrative staff in the case of the GGAP, but particularly its expatriate members—­was indirectly encouraged to engage in this kind of social and reputational work with donor representatives and lateral peers in similar organ­izations. Social and relational work is thus not inherently invisible. It is highly valued and vis­i­ble, if not formalized, among the elite as they establish individual and, by reciprocal proxy, institutional reputations through “networking” and being “a player” in the local, regional, or international development scenes. The development industry does recognize and even support social and relational work among its ranks, but unequally. Among the implementation staff in the provincial offices, much of their social and relational work with beneficiaries was in princi­ple supported but, in practice, made invisible in the descriptions of their duties and particularly in the monitoring and evaluation of their work, as described in chapters 2 and 3. The most invisible work of the provincial office field staff was, troublingly, also the largest portion of their days—­the logistical work of arranging for their social work to begin—­truly, the “condition for wages to be paid.” The program was based on a series of formalized, face-­to-­face encounters between field agents and beneficiaries as though ­these ­were the original “inputs” of the program (see again chap. 2). Only successful encounters, therefore, and not any of the work to bring them about, w ­ ere formally “vis­i­ble” to the program. The necessary work of communicating logistical information and of moving bodies (their own and ­others’) and materials from place to place in rural, postwar Angola was not recorded, nor was it effectively supported. The multiple attempts required to produce a successful meeting—or the inevitable, numerous attempts that may end up failing to produce successful meetings—­were not vis­i­ble to the formal program or its sponsoring institutions. In this manner the real, everyday logistical and orga­nizational work of the GGAP’s field agents was both invisible to the program and not valued as work. Only its sometimes-­results—­the successful meetings with beneficiaries that resulted in vis­i­ble pro­gress ­toward founding an ODA or producing some other “community participation” or “governmental transparency” good—­were valued as the program’s “work-­in-­progress.” Perhaps an obvious remedy to the prob­lem of invisible and undervalued “shadow work” in international development is to take it out of the shadows—to make the field agents’ logistical and social work vis­i­ble and rewardable through formal mea­sures. It may not be wholly negative, however, that certain activities

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are made, or remain, invisible in a model of work and revealing or valuing “hidden” actions could have negative consequences (Star and Strauss 1999, citing Suchman 1995). Rendering such work more vis­i­ble—­especially in bureaucratically legible ways—­might inadvertently reinforce in­equality as this work becomes something e­ lse for “principals” to track rather than for members of the implementariat to engage in ­under their own creative impetus. The in­equality of some development professionals’ work being recognized and supported in the industry, while other professionals’ work is not, is also seen in the recognition and importance granted to its interior social tasks—­the communicative, relational, and enlistment work that happens among and between colleagues. Field agents’ time was certainly taken up in the iterative, ongoing establishment and maintenance of social relationships with beneficiaries of dif­ fer­ent kinds (local government officials and community members) but, perhaps more importantly, with colleagues. At this lowest tier of the industry, field agents’ colleagues ­were other field agents like themselves, or superiors of dif­fer­ent kinds—­either technical experts in “advisory” positions or more direct man­ag­ ers and supervisors. ­These internal interactions ­were, similarly to the broad social and relational work of development intervention more directly, much less likely to be recognized, recorded, and rewarded for the lower-­tier workers than for the upper-­tier workers. Administrators visiting the provincial field offices from Luanda, for instance, submitted “trip reports” recording their impressions and suggestions about each field office, implicitly marking that time spent with colleagues as valuable work. Field offices ­were given no equivalent space to rec­ord how their days and hours had been taken up by such visits. ­These supervisory or “support” visits from administrative staff to the provincial staff in the offices also occasioned other, disproportionate demands, as noted in chapter 3, when field staff ­were made to sign a “contract” to send in their monitoring and evaluation data more promptly while Luanda-­based staff signed no equivalent vow to communicate to the provincial offices in an improved fashion. That such communicative, enlistment, and relational work is not evenly distributed among colleagues, but is instead lopsided, reflects the dynamic of one par­tic­u­lar kind of social and imaginative work. This is the specifically interpretive ­labor required to understand ­others’ perspectives, particularly ­those situated differently on a social hierarchy. David Graeber charges that unequally distributed interpretive ­labor both reflects and reinforces “lopsided structures of the imagination” (2015, 72). What is lopsided about them is that ­those with less power are more motivated—­and better able—to imagine the perspectives and interpretations of t­ hose with more power, and not the other way around. At all levels of the development hierarchy, very much in keeping with Graeber’s observations about bureaucratic structures more broadly, professionals worked hard to understand what ­those above them regarded as impor­tant and to operate within ­those par­ ameters. Thus donors and elites sought to conduct themselves and make decisions

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according to what they perceived to be their institutions’—­their home governments or corporations—­values and interests. The implementing organ­izations and the topmost tier of the implementariat held very solid understandings of what donors thought impor­tant. The field staff then shouldered a double burden of interpretive ­labor: much of their work with beneficiaries included interpretive ­labor necessary to communicate effectively and mobilize interlocutors into the goals and proj­ects of the program, and the field staff engaged in significant interpretive l­ abor directed up their professional hierarchy as they worked to understand what motivated man­ag­ers, administrators, and donors. In conducting not only the im­mense logistical and orga­nizational work to bring about ­those meetings and events in which they could then engage in the social, relational, and deeply “interpretive ­labor” of development intervention, the field staff of the GGAP w ­ ere engaged in the same kind of imaginative, deductive, and intellectual work of creative understanding and innovation for which more elite members of the industry routinely receive exclusive credit. In the broader policy sciences, where much of professionalized international development indirectly draws its perspectives and frameworks, however, the work of implementation agents is seldom considered to be the intellectual or creative equivalent of policy makers’ decision-­making work. At best, implementation agents are seen as exercising discretion, which, though often acknowledged to come from long experience and to be part of the art and skill of d­ oing their work rather than something that can be imparted through formal or technical training, is not considered as prestigious or valuable as is the more intellectual-­seeming work of taking big-­ picture decisions and in creating the “utopia of rules” (Graeber 2015) that many development policies are. Discretion, even in its most respectful rendering, is the informed se­lection of a choice from among options that are received, not made. To be a chooser rather than a creator is a l­ imited framework for action, indicative of the homogenizing distortions of the con­temporary era (Appadurai 1996, 42). Shadow work—­particularly interpretive ­labor and other relational work—is more than mere discretion, no m ­ atter how respected it may be as the product of long or varied experience. Discretion is in fact the same kind of decision making—­ intellectual, creative, deductive—­that policy makers do, though the “street-­level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010 [1980]) who supposedly exercise discretion as a major portion of their duties do not receive the same acknowl­edgment as do policy makers for what is equally innovative and challenging work. That the decision making of field agents is not conceived of as equivalent to the decision-­making work of policy makers is both the product of structural vio­lence and (re)produced by structural vio­lence. In development, this is the standing discrimination and hierarchical social distinctions of the industry (based on t­ hose racial, national, e­ tc., biases of the wider world) and the resulting maldistribution of interpretive l­ abor. Implementation staff do the hard work of understanding the perspectives and priorities of administrators and policy makers and so are far more likely to re­spect

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and value the work they do. The reverse basically holds as well: policy makers and administrators are not charged with the interpretive l­abor of understanding the experiences and priorities of implementation agents, and therefore do not accurately see and re­spect their work for its creativity and intellectualism. Such hierarchies of task and interpretation have not been in­ven­ted in the international development industry, but are shared by other bureaucratic forms (Heyman 2004). Fully understanding the internal inequalities of the international development industry requires looking into its deepening institutionalization and bureaucratization and the “common sense” that comes with ­these cultural forms and practices, particularly in the genre of thinking that conceptually organizes responsibility and capacity: principal-­agent thinking.

Expanding Principal-­Agent Thinking In a recent chapter commenting on a wealth of exciting new ethnographic analyses of meetings, Helen Schwartzman suggests that meetings are very much like mirrors in that we have been led to interact with them as though they are not t­ here; as though they accurately, and merely, reflect the world as it r­ eally is despite their clear potential “to deflect, multiply, transform, and distort images, rendering some ­things vis­i­ble and ­others invisible” (2017, 159). That is, as it directs our attention to its reflected images rather than to its work of reflection, one of the ­things that a mirror makes invisible is itself and its work, and we easily overlook its presence as a mediating object with inherent characteristics. Where mirrors reflect, meetings help create or even constitute the social order, and Schwartzman sees likeness in that, like mirrors, “the meeting frame itself contributes to the disappearance pro­cess by directing us to look at the topic of the meeting, but not the meeting itself” (2017, 167). She reviews how part of the effect of meetings as a cultural form of social practice is to divert attention away from their characteristics as a cultural form, leading us to focus on the results of a meeting without attending to how the meeting form itself helped shape them (Schwartzman 1989; see also Sandler and Thedvall 2017). International development is deeply s­ haped by the cultural form of the meeting (e.g., Brown and Green 2017) and many other bureaucratized practices but perhaps most importantly, Schwartzman’s observations ­here extend to the conceptual infrastructure of bureaucratized social intervention, and particularly the “principal-­agent” thinking that informs it. Like both mirrors and meetings, the conceptual apparatus of principal-­agent thinking, as discussed in chapter 1, recedes into the background of development critique; taken for granted, if it is ever noted at all, as an accurate formulation of how decision making and action are or­ga­nized in international development work and in bureaucratic practice generally. Like mirrors and meetings, principal-­ agent thinking directs our attention and dis­appears itself from notice. As this ­ethnographically grounded examination of the GGAP has demonstrated,

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principal-­agent thinking diverts analytical attention away from two points: first, the lateral relationships that help make up the development industry and, second, the nature of the social and relational work conducted by development agents at all levels. The relationships inside the development endeavor that principal-­agent thinking occludes include ­those among similarly situated colleagues; between hierarchical levels of professionals differently situated within the implementariat; and among and between organ­izations. Principal-­agent thinking directs attention away from ­these and ­toward the vertical, hierarchical arrangement of donor-­ implementer-­recipient as individualized units: it is not called “principals-­among-­ peers-­directing-­agents-­among-­peers theory,” ­after all. This focus on the dyad of principal-­agent as though in­de­pen­dent of each partner’s sociality or the unit’s sociality among other dyads mirrors the larger development studies focus on “the development encounter,” encouraging several presumptions that simply do not hold ­under ethnographic examination. The previous chapter, for instance, detailed how the GGAP’s interventionist methods—­particularly the program’s emphasis on pursuing “partnership” and its foundational approach of forming new social units in the ODAs and training them in proj­ect management—­was not a set of methodological choices devised by donors in response to the specifically identified need to pursue decentralization in chosen municipalities. The GGAP’s methods w ­ ere instead a­ dopted in a series of ad hoc adaptations informed by the work history and relationships of individual agents—­from Sebastian to Helena to Alexandre and beyond—­across several iterations of interventionist programming. Many of the program’s on-­the-­ground activities, from forming and training the ODAs to holding public forum meetings, ­were never detailed in the original program description but w ­ ere instantiated in daily work ­because staff already knew how, from prior experience. More importantly, t­ hese ­were activities in which differently situated actors could work together, demonstrating and concretizing their connections to one another (Green 2010). The se­lection of interventionist methods in the GGAP and perhaps in any intervention can thus be seen as an instance of the larger development industry’s praxiscape: the landscape of pos­si­ble practices as they circulate globally among international development institutions (see also Appadurai 1996). Or, seen other­ wise, the GGAP’s methods w ­ ere not just t­hose that ­were familiar to its staff members as they entered the program from other interventions, but w ­ ere highly similar to peer organ­izations’ methods elsewhere in Angola: an example perhaps of global mimicry or development franchising (e.g., see Green 2003). In ­either case, the GGAP’s methods w ­ ere not selected purposefully from a universe of all pos­si­ble methods nor ­were they developed uniquely to address the par­tic­u­lar needs and histories of the program’s Angolan sites. They ­were instead ele­ments of the interveners’ lateral relationships, and opportunities to demonstrate and concretize ­those relationships. The rich interplay of circulating, shared methods,

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their duplication and their retrofitted application to what­ever new development prob­lem is identified is concealed in a principal-­agent framework focusing attention on the dyadic, vertical relationship between t­ hese two parties as though they are engaged only with one another. To see more fully what lies b­ ehind—­and around—­development intervention, this conceptualization of industry relationships must be expanded to include collaboration and competition among lateral peers, and the movement of individual professionals throughout and among institutions. The conceptual architecture of principal-­agent thinking directs attention in yet another manner: such thinking suggests that the most impor­tant organ­izing princi­ple in a system is the divide between a principal and its agent, and therefore that the principal–­agent relationship is what determines the be­hav­ior of each with regard to the other. My ethnography of the GGAP reveals that in the daily practice of development work, however, and at both implementation and policy/ design levels, it was relationships among principals that in large part directed their be­hav­ior ­toward agents. Moreover, it was relationships and history between agents and beneficiaries, and even among agents as competitors for principals, that directed agents’ be­hav­ior, also. Chapter 4 detailed how the GGAP came to work in the specific sites of intervention that it did: the donors, or principals, on the ­whole wished to work where their peer institutions w ­ ere working. Entering into the same intervention sites—­whether at the municipal or provincial levels mattered somewhat less to the donors—­served also as a type of entrance into the social peerage of interveners in post-­war Angola. Working in the same physical sites as did similar interventions was objectionable for agents, however, ­under a similarly power­ful but differently directed reputational pressure. For agents, demonstrating in­de­pen­dent success in an intervention site was arguably more impor­ tant than was merely working in a site. To further the chances of success but also as its own sort of “pull ­factor,” the GGAP’s implementation organ­izations—­the American NGO, the British NGO, and the Canadian NGO—­thus sought to work in the municipalities in which they ­were already ­running other, dif­fer­ent interventions and certainly not to enter into sites where peer organ­izations ­were implementing programs. Rather than simply targeting places or prob­lems where need seemed greatest, or even where the most pos­si­ble good might be achieved, the sociality of the development industry itself influenced where development work happened in this case, and how it was pursued. Principal-­agent thinking would narrate the GGAP in the following manner: the GGAP’s donors—­WestAid, the Oil Com­pany, and at the outset the Diamond Com­pany—­worked together to formulate the intervention according to the in-­ house expertise WestAid is supposed to hold on development topics, vetting potential implementation agencies and directing the selected agencies to carry out the program in the chosen sites. This framework—­like meetings or mirrors—­ invites attention to the agency of the principals and to their intervention as

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responsive to the chosen sites. The natu­ral questions that would arise are ­whether or not the principals ­were right—­whether the intervention “worked,” and if not, ­whether it was ­because the program was a poor idea or ­whether the agents’ implementation was poorly directed. At base, principal-­agent theory and principal-­ agent thinking more broadly institutionalizes principals’ perspectives of ­these relationships and actions, diverting attention away from implementers’ perspectives and certainly from client-­or recipient-­perspectives. Questions about how the principals determined what sites to target, what methods ­were appropriate, and especially how their actions related to their peers, are not suggested by this framework. The questions that local communities or implementation agencies might have about proposed interventions—­and the critiques they certainly have about development NGO actions and advocacy (Hodžić 2017)—­simply have no place in this thinking—­a reflection again of the lopsided distribution of interpretive l­ abor. The conceptualization of principal-­ directs-­agent itself directs our expectations and interpretations, among them that principals have a mono­poly on intellectual and creative work while agents merely do as they are told with no innovation or deduction required. Schwartzman, in thinking about meetings as a social practice, emphasizes how bureaucratic meetings accomplish a misdirection, “suggesting that it is what goes on within the event (the meeting topic) that is impor­tant and not the event of the meeting itself ” (2017, 174, citing Abram 2017). Her interrogation of the effects of meetings themselves—­rather than presuming their topics to be the central ele­ ments causing effect—­extends to con­temporary thinking in development studies about other managerial and interventionist practices and perhaps even to the act of intervention itself. I suggest t­ hese insights extend even into the conceptual practice of demarcating dif­fer­ent development actors and organ­izing them into ­these i­ magined relationships with one another; what Louis Althusser termed “misrecognition” (Althusser 1971). Misrecognition, or the patterned, misdirected ignorance of one’s real position in social organ­ization, is both required and produced in the “reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them” (Althusser 1971, 124). As has already been noted by David Mosse (2005; 2004), donor agencies as the supposed principals of the international development industry essentially misrecognize their relationship to other portions of the industry, considering themselves to originate and direct development practice when in fact their continuous (re)writing of development policy is driven by the concerns of the peerage and functions only to impart po­liti­cally meaningful narratives to what­ever on-­the-­ground practices are in­de­pen­dently occurring. In this misrecognition, development donors and members of “the international community” naturalize their role as “principals” directing development intervention by asserting an intellectual primacy over other tiers of interventionists. In refusing to see the work of the implementariat as the intellectual, c­ reatively

Conclusion 157

deductive work that it is and insisting that only their work is innovative thought-­ work, donors and members of the development peerage justify their power. Without this, as Helena and other Angolans would assert, the intervention of foreigners into o­ thers’ lives and socie­ties is quite suspect. ­Others may well agree. In her address to the 2014 Interpretive Policy Analy­sis conference, for instance, Tania Murray Li explains that in the absence of a mutual po­liti­cal relationship with t­ hose they aim to help or to govern, “development agencies . . . ​foreground expertise, for if not for superior knowledge or technology, why are transnational agencies intervening at all?” (2016, 84). This justification of superior expertise—of more valuable knowledge, skill, and intellectual ­labor—is the crux of principal-­agent thinking and its application to international development work. This framework misdirects analytical attention away from both the sociality of the system itself and the similarity of ­human action and innovation at all of its hierarchical levels. Integral to maintaining the framework is, of course, the distorted distribution of interpretive l­ abor: the development peerage is prevented from seeing both the genuine nature of the implementation work it supposedly directs and the fact that it does not actually direct it at all, but merely narrates it or at best appropriates it for internal reputational and po­liti­cal purposes. To maintain this structural in­equality within the international development industry, ­those with the power to define what work is valuable, and to define even what counts as development work, must avoid ­doing the interpretive ­labor of understanding what the implementariat does. Rectifying both the internal inequalities of the development industry and strengthening its capacity to carry out its ostensible mission of addressing the social inequalities of the wider world w ­ ill necessitate not just redistributing power and privilege among the industry’s hierarchical levels but, most importantly, capacitating elites to conduct the interpretive l­abor of understanding the perspectives and priorities of the implementariat and moving to genuinely support that majority of the global development workforce in meeting their goals.

Tomorrow’s Development Development professionals must prioritize changing the inequities of their own industry; d­ oing so is both instrumental to their larger goals and an inherently worthy remediation of ongoing injustice. Understanding more about how work in the industry is distributed and rewarded ­will be key to any internal revisions of its structure. As Peter Redfield has written about the structural inequalities of both international aid and global health science, “knowing what and how we unknow in ethnographic detail seems a promising start” to reimagining t­ hese endeavors (2013a, 37). Redfield is reflecting h­ ere on P. Wenzel Geissler’s analy­sis (2013) of material in­equality as a “public secret” (Taussig 1999) in international public health research. Geissler demonstrates how obvious material inequalities among t­ hose

158

I mple menting In­eq ua lit y

involved—­research participants who hunger, local scientists and staff who save their travel per diems to pay school fees, and international scientists paying down home mortgages abroad—­are creatively and actively “unknown” by all involved in order to maintain certain presumptions about scientific knowledge production and particularly ­human subjects research. Speaking directly about ­these inequalities, Geissler asserts, would threaten the presumption of equal partnerships among colleagues, and the fiction of voluntary and uncoerced participation by ­human research subjects. He does not argue that material inequalities are functionally necessary for scientific collaboration but that they are known to exist and that ignoring them is essential lest foundational princi­ples be revealed as impossible to maintain ­under such conditions. While clearly true for international public health research, the situation of material and social inequalities in development intervention is dif­fer­ent. The material inequalities between nations, populations, and, by extension, development professionals originating in ­those populations, are functionally foundational to the development enterprise such that revealing them and addressing them directly would be to challenge the central justificatory premise of the endeavor. Development’s common sense holds that the industry combats poverty: material conditions deemed unsatisfactory. Where the development industry sees itself as eradicating poverty, it must reframe its mission as fighting against in­equality, particularly the inequalities that exist globally between rich countries and poor ones. When development professionals declare themselves to be “making in­equality history,” as Julie did, the under­lying presumption is that it is in­equality within a country that is to be fought against—­the inequalities between ­women and men, for example, or between ethnic groups, or between national elites and the lower classes. International development’s “common sense,” remember, is built from a premise of methodological nationalism, taking for granted that poor countries are poor ­because they are not rich rather than b­ ecause ­others are rich. Seeing its work as intervention in zones of in­de­pen­dent historical misfortune rather than in international, relational pro­cesses, helps to focus policy makers’ and man­ag­ers’ attentions on the be­hav­ior of ­those within poor nations, rather than on the be­hav­ior and policies of ­those in the rich, including their own as interventionists. ­There are promising signs that the development industry’s internal inequalities are being addressed; ­there are ongoing movements to “decolonize” development and valorize the qualifications of professionals who come originally from developing countries (but see also Roth 2012). Relocating international headquarters offices to developing countries, for instance, such as Oxfam is ­doing, or decentralizing entirely, as Transparency International has undertaken, is part of this movement and could have genuine impact on thinking and practice in ­these organ­izations. My argument throughout the book, however, was that categorizations of national origin and race are themselves not the w ­ hole equation producing the

Conclusion 159

industry’s disparities but that t­ hese categorizations are produced in part through the misrecognition of work. Recognition that field staff, for example, undertake equally intellectual decision-­making work and, by corollary, that policy makers are acting just as socially and relationally as they are rationally should be better built into development’s structures of design, monitoring, and evaluation. Implementation agents should be seen as decision makers rather than as merely exercising “discretion” within the bounds set by their superiors. What tomorrow’s development ­will know, and ­will refuse to unknow, is that global poverty is a product of historical international relations; that rich countries are indebted to poor countries for their success; that poor countries are not poor ­because their ­people lack “capacity” but perhaps remain so b­ ecause their genuine capacity, their “productivity,” is not accurately assessed and valued. Seeing the sociality of development work more clearly and valuing the dif­fer­ent kinds of activities required to further social change ­will enable f­ uture interventions to fully support their most impor­tant work and their most productive workers.

APPENDIX GGAP Logical Framework (Logframe)

161

Impact Indicators

# of MAs and CBOs adopting participatory practices to jointly plan, develop, implement, and monitor plans and programs that seek to improve social and economic levels

Purpose

To increase the accountability of municipal governments to the communities they serve and to achieve broad community participation in decision making and oversight of public investments

Increased understanding by both MAs and citizens of local government participatory pro­cesses

# of sustainable Municipal Development Forums

5 MAs with the capacity to respond to community development priorities

5 MAs with a pro­cess of preparing a participatory bud­get

# of CBOs that can demonstrate capacities to determine their own development

Mea­sur­able Indicators

GGAP Logical Framework (Logframe)

Narrative Summary

­­table A.1. 

Policy documents/legislation

Research Reports

MA Activity Reports

Development Forum Minutes

Midterm evaluation and final evaluation

Means of Verification

Other development proj­ects working in the same municipalities do not frustrate the operations of the [GGAP]

Provincial administrations cooperate with proj­ect staff and MAs

The Ministry of Finance and other government institutions, such as MAT, are cooperative and do not disrupt the pro­cess of the proj­ect

Other development actors engaged in decentralization in the country participate and complement the [GGAP]

The country remains stable to implement the components of the [GGAP]

The MA shows leadership and willingness to support [GGAP]’s training exercises to create more space for a participatory and transparent environment

Impor­tant Assumptions

# of municipal plans that include priority proj­ects identified by communities

Municipal planning, bud­geting, and proj­ect implementation routinely follow a process of broad and inclusive community participation; meet minimum standards for design, implementation, and accountability; and feed effectively into the provincial planning and bud­get pro­cess

% of municipal financial reports presented and incorporated at the provincial level

% of municipal financial reports that meet standard criteria

# of development forums functional for community-­based participatory input

# of municipal plans that meet the minimum standards of design

Outcome Indicators

Result 1

Result 1

Narrative project/research reports

MA activity reports

(continued)

­ ere are no counter-­productive Th activities for [GGAP] at government level of other organ­izations working within the same context as [GGAP]

The provincial government shows willingness to accept and incorporate municipal plans and bud­gets

Trainings are sufficient and understandable to the MA and communities

The communities show willingness to discuss, plan, and pre­sent their views to the MA

The MA shows willingness to take seriously the priorities of communities

Municipal bud­get management Field monitoring visits/reports

The MA shows willingness to participate in trainings

Impor­tant Assumptions

Existence of [GGAP] proj­ect criteria

Means of Verification

The consortium setup ensures a good communication flow and offers support to field staff

7. 5 Municipal profiles created, documented, and used for municipal planning by both the MA and communities alike

6. Increase of MA capacity to perform local governance and democracy

5. Creation of public participatory spaces

4. Mechanisms and pro­cesses established, in par­tic­u­lar land management

8. # of MA staff trained in specific areas

7. # Municipal profiles completed and frequency of use for policy making and information

6. % MA staff that understand and use concepts and practices of local governance and democracy

5. # of new public spaces for participation created

4. # of new mechanisms and pro­cesses established for increased participation, especially land management

3. # of municipal plans that included community-­identified priorities

Attendance lists of trainings

Field monitoring reports

Feedback/reports on trainings/ workshops

Comparison of municipal plans and information in the municipal profiles

MA staff self-­assessments

Community self-­assessments

The consortium setup ensures a good communication flow and offers support to field staff for such activities

­ ere are no counter-­productive Th activities for [GGAP] at government level or other organ­izations working within the same context as [GGAP]

The municipalities remain stable with a conducive environment for [GGAP] as elections approach

Trainings are of understandable and accessible quality, with sufficient follow-up support by [GGAP] staff

Municipal profiles are of sufficient quality to use for reference in policy making

New legislation does not interfere with potential participatory policies and activities

Review of municipal plans

2. # of municipal plans and bud­gets that are included in provincial plans

2. 5 Municipal plans and bud­gets included in provincial plans Review of provincial policies

Communities, sobas, MA, and provincial levels are willing to participate in discussions, planning, and action on key development priorities

Comparison with the baseline study

1. # of municipal plans that meet the established criteria

1. 5 Municipal plans that meet the established criteria

3. Community-­identified municipal priority proj­ects

Impor­tant Assumptions

Means of Verification

Pro­cess Indicators

(continued)

Output

­­table A.1. 

6. Support capacity building of the communal administrations to monitor pro­gress and provide appropriate support, e.g., seconding staff and training

5. Assist the MA to pre­sent municipal plans to GEPE to include in the PIP

4. Support MA in submitting regular expense reports to the provincial government

3. Assist the MA in developing participatory mechanisms and policies for land management

2. Support the MA to mainstream HIV/AIDS and strengthen the links with the provincial HIV/AIDS coordinator in each of the target areas

8. Complete office setup

7. Telephone and Internet

6. GIS technology and staff

5. Vehicles

4. Criteria for financial trainings

3. Technically skilled [GGAP] staff and sufficient support

Procurement folders/receipts

2. Methodologies for mainstreaming HIV/AIDS and an HIV/AIDS coordinator at a provincial level

Field reports/observations

Photos

Established criteria for capacity building/mainstreaming programs

Work plans of individual municipalities

Financial statements

[GGAP] staff per­for­mance reports

1. Trainings materials

1. Provide technical support in planning service-­delivery, infrastructure, and bud­geting to the 5 targeted MAs to produce a municipal development plan, using participatory methodologies and consultation with civil society

Means of Verification

Inputs

Activities

(continued)

­ ere are no cases of corruption Th with proj­ect resources

The HIV/AIDS rate does not explode exponentially

[GGAP] staff have adequate expertise to implement the activities

Vehicles are maintained and used solely for work purposes to avoid depreciation

Bills are paid on time for phone, ­etc.

[GGAP] staff receive adequate support for field implementation activities

[GGAP] staff can agree on standard criteria and apply them methodically

­ ere are no major delays in the Th delivery of materials

Impor­tant Assumptions

(continued)

# of functional development forums existing

% of community members who register improvement in the participatory pro­cess

# of CBOs involved in M&E activities

# of CBOs involved in management

# of CBOs involved in the delivery of basic ser­vices using participatory standards

Rec­ords of community activities

# of initiatives resulting from collaborative and sustainable actions

Targeted communities can or­ga­nize themselves effectively to make decisions, feed into local issues, and demonstrate basic skills in participatory planning, management, and evaluation

Private sector observations

Municipal plans

Minutes of development forums

M&E monthly pro­gress reports

Rec­ords of CBO structures and participation

Interviews/questionnaires

Quarterly reports

Means of Verification

Means of Verification

Outcome Indicators

Inputs

Result 2

Result 2

8. Conduct GIS mapping/municipal profiles and baseline to understand the par­ameters of each municipality

7. Conduct diversity training and assist capacity and understanding by MA staff

Activities

­­table A.1. 

Management of community proj­ects is not dominated by one or two ­people

That communities have space within the wider context to utilize and advocate for their plans

Appropriate methodologies are used to encourage participation

Sources of conflict are overlooked and lead to adverse repercussions

That ­there is a re­spect for gender and youth issues among communities

The communities are willing to engage with one another in a participatory, inclusive, and accountable manner

Impor­tant Assumptions

Impor­tant Assumptions

List of participants in vari­ous forums Training rec­ords

# communities implementing basic ser­vice proj­ects

# CBOs who have successfully approached higher levels with a development objective

6. Communities are or­ga­nized and represented in comuna and municipal forums

5. Communities are trained in planning, implementing, and monitoring proj­ects

4. Communities can or­ga­nize themselves inclusively

# CBOs/communities represented in comuna and municipal forums, e.g., delegates sent

#CBOs actively lobbying for issues in the community

# CBOs trained in planning, implementing, monitoring proj­ects and advocacy

# CBOs with accountable, transparent, gender-­balanced, and dynamic leadership and participation

M&E monthly pro­gress reports

3. CBOs have capacity to lobby for their own interests

2. Communities are involved in the delivery of basic ser­vices

Community proj­ect reports

# of communities that have implemented sustainable proj­ects (including the environment) with money received from the municipal development fund or private sector contributions

1. Communities have received grants and implemented sustainable proj­ects

Psychosocial assessments of community members, e.g., ­women through [WestAid] ­human interest stories

List of active CBOs in each comuna

Field observations

Community orga­nizational rec­ords

Community participation rec­ords

Community activity reports

Means of Verification

Pro­cess Indicators

Output

(continued)

­ ere are no orga­nizational Th factions within CBOs or forums

Communities are aware of the need of sustainability and how to achieve it

Communities recognize the value of inclusive participation

Sufficient training in grant management and accountability has been given

Impor­tant Assumptions

6. Assist CBOs and MAs in developing and implementing community-­managed basic ser­vice delivery models

5. Enable communities to identify, build, and maximize their assets through community mapping techniques and feed this into municipal development and planning

4. Empower communities to assess, identify, and address their own needs/priorities using as much as pos­si­ble locally available assets

3. Establish the Municipal Development Fund for community-­ based development proj­ects

2. Build the capacity of CBOs—­ including ­women, ­children, youth, and church groups—in bud­get literacy, tracking, and analy­sis

Appropriate methodologies and training materials

1. Build the capacity of CBOs in planning, bud­geting, and orga­nizational management using training, coaching, and exchange visits to see best practice

Complete office setup

Telephone and Internet

Technically skilled GGAP staff and sufficient support

Methodology for tracking locally available assets and community mapping results

Transport

Bank accounts

Inputs

(continued)

Activities

­­table A.1. 

List of new alliances between CBOs and other municipal actors, e.g., private sector

Municipal plans

Reports from MA staff

Psychosocial assessments of capacity through ­human interest stories

Community activity reports

Reports from Municipal Development Committee

Feedback from target groups—­e.g., Women/interviews

Feedback from trainings

Feedback from exchange visits

Means of Verification

Gender is taken seriously

Bank accounts of the MDF are used in the proper fashion

­ ere are no cases of corruption Th with proj­ect resources

The HIV/AIDS rate does not explode exponentially

[GGAP] staff have adequate expertise to implement the activities

Vehicles are maintained and used solely for work purposes to avoid depreciation

Bills are paid on time for phone, ­etc.

[GGAP] staff receive adequate support for field implementation activities

[GGAP] staff can agree on standard criteria and apply them methodically

­ ere are no major delays in the Th delivery of materials

Impor­tant Assumptions

% of ser­vices in the municipality supported by GGAP in which improvement was registered in the areas of social inclusion, community support, value to the community, and sustainability

Completed proj­ects demonstrate social inclusion value to the community, including sufficient community support to give evidence of sustainability

# of completed proj­ects that demonstrate inclusion, support to vulnerable ­people, and sustainability

# of municipal plans implemented that address the needs of stakeholders

# initiatives/collaborations that result in concrete, sustainable action

Impact Indicators

Result 3

Result 3

8. Mobilize and strengthen CBOs to form alliances and provide relevant training to enable them to function effectively and adopt gender-­sensitive practices building on existing consortium expertise

7. Assess the capacity of traditional authorities and develop capacity-­building programs

Field monitoring reports

Comparison with baseline

(continued)

­ ere is enough funding to sustain Th a proj­ect in its lifetime and funds are used accountably

That the needs of ­those on the margins of society are actively sought and capacitated to advocate for their needs

Communities and MAs have sufficient support in organ­izing and managing proj­ects

Municipal plans and policies Interviews and questionnaires

­ ere are adequate definitions of Th improvement applied universally

Impor­tant Assumptions

Reports on completed community proj­ects

Means of Verification

3. # of support networks in each community for vulnerable ­people

3. Support networks established for vulnerable ­people within communities

7. Government officials are satisfied with CBO/NGO per­for­mance

6. The emergence of new forms of livelihood strategies and economic diversification

5. Communities have proposed proj­ects to the MA for incorporation into the municipal plans/ policies

8. # of new livelihood strategies taken by individual members of communities

7. # of communities seeing increased access to basic ser­vices of good and sustainable quality

6. # of proj­ects with community participation against standard criteria

5. # community-­proposed proj­ects presented and incorporated into municipal plans

4. % of increase in access to basic ser­vices for all and vulnerable ­people

2. # of changes in municipal policies as a result of influential community proj­ects

2. Changes in municipal policies as a result of influential community proj­ects

4. ­Great access to basic ser­vices for all communities, particularly the vulnerable

1. # of CBOs implementing inclusive and sustainable proj­ects

1. Inclusive and sustainable proj­ects implemented by CBOs

# of community members involved in the implementation and management structures of proj­ects

Impact Indicators

Pro­cess Indicators

(continued)

Output

Result 3

­­table A.1. 

Interviews and questionnaires

Number of meetings held by CBOs or MAs based on collaborations on key issues

List of CBOs approaching the MA and the reasons

Private sector observations

Field Monitoring Reports

MOUs between communities and MA, or between communities

Construction pro­gress reports

Lists of proposed community proj­ects to the MA against number included in municipal plans

Comparison of the baseline

List of new CBOs or existing CBO mission statements

Comparison of a list of community-­ based proj­ects and municipal plans

Rec­ords of community proj­ect plans

Means of Verification

Means of Verification

Other development actors in the relevant municipalities do not disrupt ­these objectives

The issues that CBOs advocate for do not cause po­liti­cal, social, or economic tensions that disrupt the goals of the [GGAP]

The private sector participates in the creation of new forms of economic diversification

­ ere are no cases of corruption Th within proj­ect implementation

­ ere are standard criteria of Th quality, participation, and sustainability applied and understood

Rec­ords, M&E, and information are stored regularly for comparison

Impor­tant Assumptions

Impor­tant Assumptions

Technically skilled staff

Telephones and Internet

Transportation

Database for existing livelihood strategies and to document changes

M&E activities

Bills

Staff receive sufficient support from central levels to fulfill their job descriptions effectively

The Municipal Development Fund Committee ensures accountability and timely payments for community-­based proj­ect implementation

Databases and information flows are done smoothly and efficiently for M&E

GGAP staff understand sustainability, vulnerability, livelihood strategies

Impor­tant Assumptions

Abbreviations: CBO, community-­based organ­ization; GEPE, Office of Research, Planning, and Statistics [Gabinete de Estudos, Planeamento e Estatística]; GGAP, Good Governance in Angola Program; MA, municipal administration; MAT, Ministry of Territorial Administration [at the time of the research, Ministério da Administração Territorial, now Ministério da Administração do Território e Reforma do Estado]; MDF, Municipal Development Fund; M&E, monitoring and evaluation; MOUs, memoranda of understanding; NGO, nongovernmental organ­ization; PIP, Public Investment Program [Programa de Investimentos Públicos].

4. Work with community groups on developing a wide range of livelihood plans

3. Improve CBOs’ and MAs’ skills in jointly monitoring and advocating for vulnerable groups and to use this information to develop inclusive municipal development plans

2. Work with CBOs on advocating for appropriate and inclusive policies

Criteria of vulnerability

Monthly work plans of field staff

Methodology and training materials for capacity building programs and advocacy

1. Strengthen CBOs’ capacity to develop capacities and secure funds from the Municipal Development Fund and implement inclusive and sustainable proj­ects Field reports

Means of Verification

Inputs

Activities

11. # of MA officials satisfied with CBO/NGO per­for­mance

10. # of CBOs working jointly with the MA for local development issues

9. # of CBOs actively advocating for issues

ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

For essential support of the fieldwork logistics I thank the Jacob K. Javits and Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowships, particularly Jermaine Jones at IIE and Ana Paula Ferreira and Humberto Pereira in Luanda at the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Office. The Catholic University of Angola, particularly Nelson Pestana and Regina Santos of CEIC, provided warm collegiality and intellectual support during my stays in Angola: muito obrigada! In preparing for fieldwork in Portuguese I benefited from the linguistic expertise and infectious enthusiasm of Ana Catarina Teixeira, Leonor Simas-­Almeida, and Ana Sofia Ganho. Thanks also go to the staff of Brown University’s Department of Anthropology, particularly Katherine Grimaldi and Matilde Andrade, the Population Studies and Training Center and especially Kelley Smith, and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Deepest thanks go to the staff and administration of the development program I call the GGAP and its parent and partner organ­izations. I continue to be impressed and humbled by their dedication to their work, and I hope I have portrayed their concerns and accomplishments justly. Although I cannot use their ­actual names, the professionals I call Osman, Helena, Maximino, Rita, Carlota, Paulo, Samuel, and Alexandre deserve special acknowl­edgment for their patience and generosity ­toward me and this research proj­ect. More personally, my ­family and I ­were inexplicably fortunate to overlap in Luanda with Arthur Molenaar and Jojanneke Spoor, and I thank them for lasting friendship and support across three continents. Manuel Rui and Alice, and Mariano and Cathy and their ­children, ­were also wonderful companions in Luanda; thank you for teaching us, driving us, directing us, hosting us. Tânia Paciência and Madôo deserve special thanks for caring for my son David in Luanda, becoming extra ­mothers to him and teaching him what trains and roosters “say” in Portuguese. I have many debts of gratitude from before and a­ fter the fieldwork, as well. At Emory University I was fortunate to study with Jennifer Hirsch, Kathryn Yount, and Peter Brown, who not only encouraged me t­ oward the doctoral research that became the basis of this book but also directed me to the confident guidance of Daniel Jordan Smith, who has become a steadfast champion of me and my work, and remains an example of the sort of scholar and mentor I hope someday to be. I am ever grateful for this trail of connections and network of supporters, exemplars, and mentors. Studying with Dan at Brown University, I am thankful to have had opportunity to work also with Nicholas Townsend, Keith Brown, Lina Fruzzetti, Cathy Lutz, Matthew Gutmann, the late Marida Hollos, Shirley Brice Heath, 173

174

Acknowl­edgments

the late Bill Simmons, Patrick Heller, Nitsan Chorev, and Barbara Stallings. I was delighted to have many fellow travelers through doctoral study in the Department of Anthropology, the Watson Institute’s Gradu­ate Program in Development, and the PSTC, and each has contributed to my thinking and writing: Kathryn Rhine, Andrea Mazzarino, Maya Judd, Rebecca Galemba, Inna Leykin, Kristin Skrabut, Jennifer Ashley, Susi Keefe, Kathleen Millar, Harris Solomon, Molly Wallace, Ruben Durante, Erin Beck, and Florencia Borrescio Higa, among o­ thers. While at Brown and even a­ fter, I have benefited from the unfailingly positive support of Kathy Takayama. Andrea Mazzarino deserves special thanks for care and counsel in Providence and beyond. It was during this period of training and research that my extended ­family grew even more extended in the most wonderful of ways, and I thank my ­brothers and brothers-­in-­law for bringing their lovely partners and ­children into my orbit. For Bill, Magenta, Julie, and Abby; Joe and Penny; Josh, Denia, Alice, and Jackson; Phil, Cindy, Hudson, and Avery Joe, thank you for your love and support and excellent humor at a distance. From my own parents, John and Kim Peters, and the parents I was lucky to receive by marriage, Joel and Tersia Warne, thank you for being exemplars of understanding, ac­cep­tance, growth, and change. In Syracuse, I am especially grateful to Peter Castro, Sue Wadley, Audie Klotz, Deborah Pellow, Robert Rubinstein, Azra Hromadžić, Natalie Koch, Sabina Schnell, Renée de Nevers, and John McPeak for their support, friendship, and advice. I am grateful for collaborations and collaborators further afield too. Claire Wendland has become a remarkable mentor, collaborator, and champion; thank you. I am honored to have ongoing collaborations with Kimberley Coles, Jessica Mulligan, and Kristin Doughty, who also deserve thanks for their advice, encouragement, and support. Comrades and colleagues in the study of Angola, NGOs, and international interventions for whose advice and accompaniment I am grateful include Adia Benton, Ramah McKay, Cal Biruk, Sharon Abramowitz, Johanna Crane, Mark Schuller, David Lewis, Christian Vannier, António Tomás, Ana Catarina Teixeira, Marissa Moorman, Claudia Gastrow, and Jess Auerbach. I have found a wonderful intellectual home in the Association for the Anthropology of Policy, and I thank Janine Wedel for mentorship and support above and beyond the call of duty. Carol MacLennan, Jennifer Hubbert, Cris Shore, Diane O’Rourke, Georgia Hartman, Ted Powers, Fayana Richards, Paul Stubbs, Bill Beeman, and David Haines together make ASAP a vibrant community of anthropologists. I thank Saida Hodžić, Michael Chibnik, Jim Lance, and anonymous readers for their insightful comments and suggestions on ­earlier versions of this book; its faults and flaws are surely mine and not theirs. I am extremely pleased to be publishing with Rutgers University Press and cannot thank Kim Guinta enough for her steadfast support of my research and writing. I wish to thank the Society for



Acknowl­edgments 175

Applied Anthropology for their kind permission to reprint in chapter 3 portions of an article first published in ­Human Organ­ization, volume 75, number 4. Above all e­ lse I remain grateful to my partner, Matthew Warne. As we set up now in Mongu, Zambia, for a new set of proj­ects together, I continue to be amazed that he chooses to do ­these ­things with me. Our delightful ­children, David, Thomas, and Catherine, too, deserve thanks for their understanding, their patience and ac­cep­tance, their curiosity and courage.

NOTES

Introduction 1. ​All personal names are pseudonyms ­unless other­wise noted. Program names are also pseud-

onymous, and international NGOs are not referred to by name but by national origin (e.g., “the British NGO”). 2. ​David Mosse’s opening line, in Cultivating Development (2005), for instance, reads “For 50 years ‘development’ has provided a remarkably stable framework within which the relationship between the affluent West and its ‘­others’ has been understood.” 3. ​As I explain shortly, the term local as applied to development workers (“local staff”) describes the worker, not the work. The classification means that the worker himself or herself is presumed local, meaning native, to the place of work. 4. ​The demarcation of a “field office” is a moving target in international aid work: from an international headquarters office, any in-­country office may be referred to as a field office. In-­ country, however, one office w ­ ill usually be designated the country headquarters (often “the country office”), and only ­those sites nearer to beneficiaries might be termed field offices. Fi­nally, even in the smallest, most remote field offices, most field staff would not consider themselves to be “in the field” while working in the office proper, but only outside the office, when interacting with beneficiaries. Staff regularly stationed at the country office, however, would consider themselves to be “in the field” while merely visiting a field office, without any interaction with intended beneficiaries. 5. ​In the book’s conclusion I consider the analogous cases of “community workers,” volunteers, and liaisons as also part of the development implementariat when using work and work tasks to make this definition of class membership. 6. ​In the week preceding the December forum, the provincial GGAP team and colleagues from across the GGAP’s three parent NGOs had taken advantage of the approaching forum date to or­ga­nize a series of workshops in Andulo for local government officials and community leaders from other municipalities. More than a dozen guests from outside the district and even the province attended t­hese workshops, staying on to observe the forum. B ­ ecause of Angola’s g­ reat ethnolinguistic diversity, ­these workshops had largely been held in the official state language, Portuguese, making the workshops feasible for a diversity of participants but also more difficult to follow for many of t­ hese guests. Though Angolans in Luanda may hold the distinction of speaking the state language as a ­mother tongue in far greater proportion than is usual in Africa, Angolans in the provinces have had only ­limited opportunity to learn Portuguese as provincial schools ­were few ­under colonial rule and then heavi­ly disrupted during the civil war (1975–2002). The December 2008 municipal forum in Andulo was thus officially convened in Portuguese, but throughout the day many local participants made contributions in Umbundu, and the municipal administration staff responded to many of ­these in Umbundu. Members of the GGAP staff found themselves busy during the course of the day both with logistical duties and as translators for out-­of-­district visitors who did not speak Umbundu (see Roth 2019 for an analy­sis of how such translation work is made invisible in the hierarchies of international aid). 7. ​Municipal administrators serve in a type of mayoral capacity in the Angolan government structure, though they have been appointed rather than elected to office.

177

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Notes to Pages 8–13

8. ​Local government officers in Angola are appointed through the central government in coop-

eration between the Office of the President and the Ministry of Territorial Administration (MAT), at the time of the research named the Ministério da Administração Territorial but now called the Ministério da Administração do Território e Reforma do Estado. 9. ​The Canadian organ­ization withdrew from the GGAP consortium ­after the first phase of the program, in 2009, ­after the Diamond Com­pany ended its support ­after the global financial crisis of 2008. At the time of my research ­these events ­were unforeseen. 10. ​Elsewhere in the development studies lit­er­a­ture and particularly for the Anglophone lit­ er­a­tures, ODA stands for Overseas Development Aid or Overseas Development Agency—­here I use the emic term that the GGAP employed to discuss their internally or­ga­nized small community groups. 11. ​Note ­here the Bank’s use of “development management,” which diverges from my own use of the term. The Bank is ­here referencing the presence and effectiveness of national-­level economic policies as the management of what Gillian Hart describes as “small-­d development,” or the organic patterns of economic growth and change broadly conceived of and thought to be influenced by national and international policy. I examine the management of Hart’s “big-­D Development,” specific programmatic intervention into poor p­ eople’s lives and local-­, not national-­, level government policy and be­hav­ior (Hart 2001). 12. ​I began my request for access first with the GGAP’s program director, Osman, who then supported me in requesting related access to each of the three international NGOs that, in consortium together, implemented the program. This pro­cess of seeking institutional research permissions alone taught me a ­great deal about hierarchies of authority and practice in the industry. While receiving permission to conduct participant observation and to invite development workers to participate in in-­depth interviews with me was granted in writing by the country director of each NGO, as well as the GGAP’s program director, all of whom seemed to then consider the m ­ atter settled, I held a further commitment to remain as in­de­pen­dent and neutral as pos­si­ble from ­these formal authority structures and sought out further permissions from the GGAP staff and other NGO staff members individually. This I did by posting on orga­ nizational bulletin boards a synopsis of my study and a schedule of times I would be pre­sent to answer questions about the study, for a period of several weeks before beginning my observations proper. The most concerned individuals ­were the janitorial staff and lowest-­level workers, likely b­ ecause they legitimately had the least secure employment contracts and the least familiarity with what the risks of participating in such research ­really ­were. My request for an interview with a GGAP employee was directly declined only once, but was indirectly declined—­ through tactics of delay—by two ­people. Many sought me out specifically as the year went on to schedule their interviews, concerned that I had overlooked them. I offered no specific recompense for interviews but, in keeping with Angolan and development NGO practice, did always arrange for a small treat to be available that, more often than not, was taken home by the interviewee. 13. ​During this time period, my f­ amily and I rented a flat in Luanda’s Neves Bendinha neighborhood (more commonly called the Bairro Popu­lar—­the ­People’s Neighborhood) from an el­derly Angolan ­couple whose adult ­children had combined their resources (together with the proceeds from renting out the flat) to send them to live in Portugal, where the ­father could receive more regular medical care. This took some time to arrange, however, and we temporarily stayed with a pair of the American NGO’s expatriate development workers in the same neighborhood as this flat was being negotiated. We had no private car but made use of candongueiros and “taxis” to make our way around Luanda. 14. ​This arrangement mirrored that of the male staff members of the Andulo office, all of whom left their families in e­ ither Huambo City or Kuito during the work week and stayed in rented



Notes to Pages 14–37

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rooms in Andulo. Only the sole female staff member, Carlota, moved en famille to Andulo, and her home is where I stayed while visiting this field office. 15. ​On occasion, I was asked to take minutes at what­ever meeting I was observing, in which case my field notes came to essentially double as meeting minutes—­but any such minutes that I submitted to staff remained wholly separate from other notations I might have made for research purposes. I typed up such minutes separately from my field notes proper ­after each meeting before submitting them. Such a request was rare, however, and always came from se­nior staff, usually at formal meetings among se­nior staff—­which themselves w ­ ere also rare. Other ways in which I pitched in involved a fair bit of computer work—­running antivirus software, editing Power­Point slides for typos in En­glish and sometimes Portuguese, ­running the copier as preparations ­were being made for events, and so on. 16. ​In many ethnographies, the first chapter ­after the introduction would be a historical overview of the ethnographic “place” and “­people” ­under study. As my ethnographic focus is on international development institutions, I direct readers interested in more in-­depth orientation to postwar Angola to the recent Magnificent and Beggar Land by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (2015) and to older Angolanist texts by Marissa Moorman (2008) and Tony Hodges (2004) and to further recent work by Justin Pearce (2015) and Jon Schubert (2017).

1 Development Hierarchies 1. ​I draw ­here on Bourdieu 1977 (163–171) and Althusser 1971 (170–183) to inform my theoreti-

cal analy­sis of the “common knowledge” and “common sense” of the development industry. 2. ​Jean-­François Bayart’s work does expressly engage the international ties of poor African countries, but at base he interprets the relationship as one that is exploited by African elites to their own ends—­largely still, then, finding fault internally rather than according causality to the international ties themselves. 3. ​As I discuss in the book’s conclusion, this organ­ization of development work and affiliated terminology is starting to change. Some international NGOs are relocating their international headquarters offices from developed to developing countries and are even engaging in “reward harmonization” to reduce salary inequalities between national and expatriate staff members. Such changes have been hard-­won, and this book addresses the long-­standing inequalities of the industry that ­these adjustments are meant to ameliorate. 4. ​ The Samaritans. Pi­lot and Episode 2 available online at http://­www​.­aidforaid​.­org. Xenium Productions (­Kenya). 5. ​Historically, management lit­er­a­ture has dealt with the arena of private industry and corporations while administration lit­er­a­ture has worked on the arena of public organ­izations and government agencies. Th ­ ese lit­er­a­tures ask very similar questions about the nature of organ­ izations, how they function and change, and what their relationships are to other organ­izations and to broader society. They increasingly converge, and I treat them ­here together as “the managerial and administrative sciences,” but significant differences do obtain between the topical foci of public versus private organ­izations. 6. ​As detailed in chapter 2, the “logframe” is a bureaucratic artifact—­usually a four-­by-­four ­table or similar—­meant to portray the causal interventionist logics of a program in simplified fashion. 7. ​See Boyer 2008 on differentiating between skilled knowers as intellectuals and skilled doers as experts. 8. ​In this notion of certain hierarchies and distinctions interacting with and reinforcing ­others, I am obviously influenced by so­cio­log­i­cal theories of intersectionality (see Collins 2015 and

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Notes to Pages 38–60

Crenshaw 1989). H ­ ere I address not the intersectional whole-­society categories of race, class, gender, and so on, but the development industry–­specific categories of national/international, headquarters/field, and so on, which interact both with one another inside the industry and with the global social categories of race, class, gender, nationality, and more.

2 Development ’s Inputs and Outputs 1. ​Even the term preparatory belies the importance of this work, suggesting as it does that such

work comes before the “real” work of development. However, the term as used h­ ere is meant to place as accurately as pos­si­ble this set of tasks within the temporal trajectory of development activities the GGAP undertook. It should not be read as intimating any relatively lesser importance. 2. ​This use of the subtitle from Lipsky’s classic text Street-­Level Bureaucracy is purposeful ­here. ­These questions have not been adequately examined in international development, in part ­because the field draws so heavi­ly on po­liti­cal science and the policy and administrative sciences to inform itself on orga­nizational be­hav­ior and management, and ­these fields consider the ­matter to have been well studied by Lipsky and ­those following him. The fact that ­these analyses on the actions of “agents” ­under direction by international development’s “principals” are inadequate to the specific demands of development intervention is not commonly noted. It is worth mentioning that Lipsky himself likely never intended his work to be extended to international intervention. 3. ​As described in the introduction, educational opportunities outside Luanda ­were very slim ­under colonialism, and most inhabitants of Moxico Province at this time would have had very few opportunities to learn the official language of Angola. During Rita’s ser­vice in Moxico, just ­after the close of the civil war, Angolan “refugees” w ­ ere being repatriated from Zambia as well, many of whom had been born and raised in that English-­speaking country and ­were arriving in Angola with l­ ittle knowledge of Portuguese. 4. ​­Drivers with international NGOS in this period in Angola w ­ ere always men, for a variety of reasons, including who in the general population had had opportunity to learn to drive and to develop experience ­doing so. ­Women commonly drove motorbikes for their own transport, and ­there ­were a few ­women moto-­taxi ­drivers who took passengers. Expatriate ­women would have been allowed to drive vehicles from the international NGOs’ fleets, but in this period of time ­there w ­ ere only men d­ oing so. Depending upon country of origin, many expatriates did not drive, full stop, having grown up in large cities with reliable public transportation. My own status with ­these NGOs was as observer only, without rights to drive or to direct any of their vehicles. 5. ​Note that this effectively tasks program recipients with d ­ oing much of the onerous “behind-­ the-­scenes” organ­izing—­the social and relational work—­that the field staff is implicitly tasked with. 6. ​Person-­time is an analytical unit used to calculate work effort. In the Rosenberg and Posner example, twenty-­four man-­months is the amount of work one man could be expected to accomplish in twenty-­four months, or the amount of work twenty-­four men could be expected to accomplish in one month. The person-­time unit is useful in estimating the quantity of personnel needed for programmatic action over a specific unit of time. 7. ​This text is taken verbatim from an English-­language version of the position description. ­Certain documents, such as this job description, ­were written first in En­glish by expatriate administrative staff, then translated into Portuguese for dissemination. Each office maintained a haphazard collection of such materials, sometimes duplicated across the two languages but often retaining just one version. My own collection of GGAP artifacts contains



Notes to Pages 63–86

181

only the En­glish ­version of the CDC position and only the Portuguese version of the municipal development coordinator position, in part ­because my collection reflects largely ­those of the Chicala Cholohanga and Andulo field offices, and to a lesser extent the Luanda headquarters archives (which ­were also incomplete). 8. ​­There is a clear comparison to draw between the work of the GGAP’s implementation agents and my own work in the acad­emy as an educator. Legislators and other policy makers trying to account for the work of university professors often erroneously count as “teaching time” only ­those “contact hours” spent in the classroom or, rarely, tutoring students during office hours. The preparation time required to effect a ­whole class lecture or group exercise, or the time spent grading student work a­ fter such encounters, is rarely accounted for as the legitimate work of teaching. In much the same manner, the l­ abor of GGAP field staff was predominantly counted in terms of their formal events with beneficiaries—­forums, group meetings, trainings, and so on. My point h­ ere is to detail exactly how the essential work of producing ­those events—­before and a­ fter them—­can go unrecognized and unsupported in development interventions like the GGAP.

3 Reinforcing Hierarchies 1. ​It is odd for most p ­ eople to consider that ­there might be reason for “accountability” from

donors to implementers. Consider, however, the analogous relationship of ­music composers to their performers—­when composers inadvertently write a musical chord that would require the piano player to have six fin­gers [which I have witnessed myself], ­there is a type of accountability in the per­for­mance preparations as performers demonstrate the impossibility of the task and suggest alternatives [in the case I witnessed, a crashing fist was proposed—­the composer rewrote the phrase instead]. When, in international development, donors ask for effectively impossible-­to-­perform tasks, t­ here is no plausible feedback mechanism enabling them to correct their prescriptions. More commonly, ­there are increasingly power­ful calls for “downward accountability” in which development agents would somehow be held responsible to beneficiaries rather than donors. The target of ­these calls is largely still implementation agencies and agents, however, rather than the largest, most power­ful donors and policy makers in the industry, who remain accountable effectively only to one another through reputational means, as discussed in the coming chapters. 2. ​“Local government” personnel in Angola are assigned to municipal offices by central government authorities and are not necessarily from the municipality, or even the province, that they serve. ­There are no local-­level elections nor taxation authority (and the like), to date. 3. ​In dif­fer­ent phases of the program, the GGAP’s M&E system asked for ­these extra data ­either quarterly (­every three months) or trimesterly (­every four months). That this periodization changed over the life of the program was another frustration for the implementation staff. 4. ​This approach received criticism in the program’s final evaluation report, wherein in­de­pen­ dent evaluators stated that panel data would have been more useful. I am unaware of any discussion of the formation or use of panels for the GGAP’s evaluation at its midpoint. 5. ​The workshop was held in Portuguese; all translations ­here are my own. 6. ​Characteristics of data quality w ­ ere listed (but not defined or discussed) as follows: validity, integrity, precision, realism, and date-­delimitation. 7. ​The “logframe,” as described in chapter 2, is the “logical framework” around which an intervention and its M&E procedures are designed. It is a t­able that causally relates a program’s activities, outputs, means of verification, assumptions made about available resources, and the context of the intervention.

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Notes to Pages 86–101

8. ​In relation to Alexandre’s request that the program’s logframe be expressly discussed, at the

midmorning break on this first day of the workshop, a provincial staff member who had participated in the very beginning of the GGAP brought out his personal copy of the program’s proposal—­not the original, as this was done in En­glish, but an abbreviated Portuguese-­language version. This document was coveted by workshop participants who had entered the GGAP as staff members l­ ater in its life, and several new copies w ­ ere surreptitiously made and distributed to ­those interested, including myself. The Portuguese-­language proposal does not have a logframe included in it, but I take the deep interest staff members had in this document as indicating their genuine commitment and interest in the program, its methods, and what their tasks ­were supposed to be in monitoring and evaluating it. Further, I take this occasion to corroborate field staff ’s statements about how ­little information they had been given about the program or about their tasks upon entering as field agents. 9. ​Though Osman conducted the workshop almost entirely in Portuguese, he spoke the language with a heavy South Asian accent, frequently using the English-­language phrases “you know” and “­isn’t it” as fillers.

4 Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries 1. ​As noted previously, this was true for the first phase of the program, from 2007 to 2009. A ­ fter

2009, the Diamond Com­pany withdrew from the funding consortium, and the Lunda Norte intervention site closed, leaving the GGAP at work in four provincial sites with its national headquarters remaining in Luanda within the American NGO’s country office. 2. ​The term site is rather misleading in the example of the GGAP, as it colloquially implies a fairly small, circumscribed area. In the GGAP’s methodology, however, each municipal intervention site encompassed both the municipal government offices and any resident population throughout the municipal territory. In the case of Chicala Cholohanga this meant a population of roughly 115,000 irregularly dispersed over nearly 4,400 square kilo­meters. In Cuito Cuanavale ­there w ­ ere fewer ­people living in an even larger area. “Municipalities” ­here are roughly equivalent to the U.S. use of “counties” as po­liti­cal and administrative units. 3. ​For example, in a phone conversation on January 17, 2007, the out­going WestAid mission director explained to me that Angola “has a reputation of corrupt, rich government” and that donor relationships for development work in Angola w ­ ere very dif­fer­ent from, using her example, ­those in Mozambique, where “donors own government.” 4. ​This argument about “fit” is often employed to explain how it is that the areas with the most need are often not the areas selected for intervention; the argument is an acknowl­edgment that the characteristics of the intervener also impact the se­lection of sites and prob­lems, but is almost never taken to include the characteristics of the intervener as a member of the class or group of interveners. 5. ​The full summary section reads as follows (p. 27): The [Good Governance in Angola Program (GGAP)] supports a larger, multi-­donor effort to assist the Government of Angola in achieving decentralized planning and bud­geting at the local government level with broad community participation, while at the same time providing basic infrastructure to meet community-­determined needs. [GGAP] is a three-­year program, with the potential for extension to five years, estimated to provide USD 10.9 million (FY2006–­F Y2008) through a partnership between [WestAid] and [the Oil Com­pany] in four provinces and between [WestAid] and [the Diamond Com­pany] in one province. In addition, other corporations may contribute to the program in the out-­years. Throughout this cooperative agreement, [WestAid]



Notes to Pages 102–121

183

and the corporate donors with which it holds individual partnerships ­will be referred to as ‘the Partners.’ ” 6. ​­These interventionist means and methods are considered in chapter 5. 7. ​The RFA before this point took pains to be clear that WestAid’s partnership with the Oil Com­pany would result in work in Cabinda, Huambo, Bié, and Cuando Cubango Provinces, while its partnership with the Diamond Com­pany would result in work in Lunda Norte Province. This section of the RFA was the first to identify potential municipalities in each of ­these provinces. 8. ​MAT was referenced throughout the RFA as the final authority on vari­ous ­matters, including the se­lection of municipalities (see discussions ­later in this chapter), but not as a significant source of useful information. 9. ​See the appendix for the GGAP’s eventual logframe and monitoring and evaluation indicators; the program ­adopted several of the RFA’s proposed indicators as its own in its attempt to track pro­gress ­toward the intended “results” of the program (see also chap. 2). “Illustrative indicators” offered in the RFA included the following: number of municipal plans that meet established criteria; number of community identified proj­ects incorporated into provincial development plans; ­percent of assisted communities that have implemented a regular, productive pro­cess for interaction with government officials; and number of community initiatives that address identified community needs and issues with mea­sur­able impact (RFA, 31). 10. ​I have copies of several e-­mail messages sent among vari­ous of the American NGO’s national, regional, and international offices on January 12, 2006, though not the entire set of exchanges on this decision from all corners of the organ­ization. 11. ​Within the RFA, ­these monies ­were, in fact, significant: of the nearly USD 17 million detailed in the RFA, 4.5 million came from the Oil Com­pany (only 2 million as “untied” donations) and 1.5 million from the Diamond Com­pany. Just over a third of the funding, therefore, was slated to come from ­these corporate donations, prompting the American NGO’s concerns—at least at its U.S. headquarters—­about the ethics of receiving ­these monies in support of their programming and the obligations they might incur upon accepting them. 12. ​Interview with WestAid program officer, June 20, 2008. 13. ​Mark Schuller describes a near opposite case with the NGO Sove Lavi, in Haiti, evidently being directed by donors to focus on geo­graph­i­cal catchment areas in which the implementing organ­ization already had history, and distributing T-­shirts for World AIDS Day differentiating donors’ support by province in a kind of turf war. In both the Sove Lavi case and that of the GGAP, however, donors’ and implementing agencies’ interests diverged on the point of intervention geography and, more importantly for my argument ­here, ­were motivated by social dynamics among interventionist peers. 14. ​Interview with WestAid program officer, June 20, 2008.

5 Partnership and the Development Praxiscape 1. ​Addressing very dif­fer­ent contexts, I read Julia Elyachar (2005), David Mosse (2005), and

Winifred Tate (2015) as making similar arguments. 2. ​Properly, perhaps, practice as techne should be already encompassed in Appadurai’s suggestion of the technoscape, but within the lit­er­a­ture that has applied this concept, the idea of technoscape has been used fairly narrowly to mean not the techne of broad practice but specifically the modern phenomena of computer-­related materials and information. Rather than pointing out again that nearly all h­ uman practices and materials should be assessed properly as “technologies,” it is easier h­ ere to focus on praxis as expressly behavioral action and to

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examine the movement, concurrent production, and co-­optation of development praxes, for example, the formation of new community-­based organ­izations, and so on, around the globe as traveling through the global praxiscape. 3. ​This food relief consortium included the three NGOs that l­ater came to implement the GGAP together, as well as o­ thers that remained active in the postwar period but did not collaborate on the GGAP. 4. ​This interview was conducted in Portuguese on March 17, 2008. 5. ​Most of what follows is taken from an interview (in En­glish) with “Sebastian” in Lubango, Angola, on July 9, 2008. 6. ​This workshop was not officially affiliated with the GGAP but was or­ga­nized and sponsored by the American NGO, which was conducting similar interventions u­ nder separate funding in the southern areas of Angola. Several GGAP officers and municipal officials from GGAP sites in the Central Highlands ­were invited and chose to attend; I accompanied them. 7. ​As noted ­earlier, Jonas Savimbi was the leader of UNITA, the major opposition party and military force confronting the MPLA during the Angolan civil war. His death in early 2002 effectively ended the civil war. 8. ​This interview was conducted in En­glish on August 20, 2008. Sofia is an Angolan national but was raised and educated in France, ­England, and the United States.

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INDEX

accessibility, of intervention sites, 105 accountability: of government, 13; of development programs, 65, 67, 181n1 (chapter 3) administrative science. See managerial and administrative sciences administrative staff: defined, 9–10; communication among, 72; communication with field staff, 83–89, 90, 131–133. See also implementariat agency theory. See principal-­agent prob­lem Althusser, Louis, 5–6, 18, 32, 156 Angola: current events affecting development programs, 51, 124, 131–132, 134; map of, 94 (figure 4.1); perceptions of, 12–13, 93–95, 101, 182n3 (chapter 4); WestAid assessments of, 94–95 Appadurai, Arjun, 121, 128 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 133 articulation work, 28 boundary objects, 78 boundary work and effects, 66, 90 Bourdieu, Pierre, 4, 15, 98, 117, 119 bureaucracy, 67 capacity-­building, 10, 61 CDC (Community Development ­Coordinator), 29–30; daily duties of, 45–48, 75; job description for, 60–62; “Rita,” as example of, 42–48, 52–54 citizenship. See development workers: categorization of Comaroff, Jean and John, 97 common sense, 19 (see also Geertz, Clifford; ideology); of development industry. See development ideology community workers. See volunteers developing countries: presumptions about, 19. See also underdevelopment development: as principal-­agent prob­lem, 23–24; as rational intervention, 54–58; as social field, 6–7, 9–10 (see also development

industry); ­imagined as encounter, 2–3, 18, 96–97, 118, 144–145; knowledge production for, 65–67, 90–91, 104–109; management of interventions, 58, 131, 135–138 (see also Logical Framework Analy­sis) development ideology, 17–20, 23, 32, 37, 144–148, 157–159; as informed by the managerial and administrative sciences, 23–28; role of “principal-­agent thinking” within, 23–24, 153–157; tenets of, 18, 32, 96. See also development: ­imagined as encounter; Logical Framework Analy­sis development imaginary. See development ideology development industry: and corporate donors, 93, 107, 109–112, 126–127; ethical obligations of, 109–112, 126–127; geographies of, 96 (see also site selection for development intervention); goals of, 10–13, 19, 104, 132, 134; hierarchies within, 17; knowledge informing, 107–109; methods of, 120–122, 131–133, 141–143, 154; motivations of, 93–95, 96–97, 100–101, 109–112; parody of (see Samaritans tele­vi­sion series); practices of, 19, 54–58 (see also Logical Framework Analy­sis; Monitoring and Evaluation); professionalization of, 17–20; rites of institution of, 98, 103–104; social capital of, 15, 95–96, 99–100, 119. See also development peerage; development sociality development peerage, 96–99, 102–104, 125–128. See also development sociality development sociality, 35–37, 48–54, 93, 97, 99–104, 117–119, 121, 125–128, 128–133, 144–148. See also development peerage; development worker relationships development work: and class structure, 3–5; as concretizing relationships among professionals and institutions, 133, 141–143; as “doubly social”, 2; as performative, 118; categorization of dif­fer­ent kinds, 19–20, 23; decision making as, 27–28; descriptions of, 60–62 (see also Logical Framework

195

196

Index

development work (cont.) Analy­sis); double-­binds of, 39–40, 59, 63–64; hierarchies of dif­fer­ent kinds, 34, 37, 62; presumed demand for, 26–27; “sticky” methods of, 120–121, 141–143; targets for, 27; underresourced conditions of, 25–28, 35, 46 development worker relationships, 2, 33, 47, 52–54, 58–64, 84–85, 128–133, 144–148, 155–156. See also interpretive ­labor; relational work development workers: as “street-­level bureaucrats”, 25–26, 29, 36–37; autonomy of, 135–138; categorization of, 19, 21, 66, 145–146; classes among, 3–4, 78, 84; dedication of, 135, 147; distinction between national/local and international/ expatriate, 3, 9, 20–21, 36, 66, 146–148, 177n3 (introduction); ­drivers as, 45, 180n4 (chapter 2); hiring of, 42; inequalities among, 17, 20–23, 48–49, 66, 78, 84, 147–151, 158–159; misunderstandings among, 77, 80–83, 85, 90–91; national (local), 20–21; orientation of, 59; parody of (see Samaritans tele­vi­sion series); power dynamics between administrative and field staff, 84–89; subjectification of, 5–6; training of, 59. See also implementariat discretion, as characterization of implementation work, 27–28, 39, 152–153 discrimination, among staff by gender, 44. See also in­equality distributive ­labor, 34, 36, 99, 103–104 DLG (Decentralization and Local Governance Program), 102–104, 104–109, 113–114 Doctors Without Borders (MSF), 39–40 donors: ethical concerns about, 109–112; influence over site se­lection, 95–96, 102–104; knowledge of, 107–109; logics and motivations of, 93, 96–97, 111–112; of the GGAP, 93, 100–101, 178n9 (introduction), 183n7 (chapter 4), 183n11 (chapter 4); relationships with peers, 95–97, 100–104, 105–108, 118 double-­binds, of development, 38–40, 59, 63–64 Douglas, Mary, 20 evaluation. See Monitoring and Evaluation expatriates (“expats”), 20–21, 123–128, 180n4 (chapter 2); defined, 3. See also development worker relationships expertise, 36

FAS (Fundo de Apoio Social, Social Fund of the World Bank), 101–104, 104–109, 139–141, 139–141 Ferguson, James, 28–29, 34 field offices, 20, 177n4 (introduction) field staff: communication with administrative staff, 83, 83–89, 90, 131–133; defined, 9–10. See also implementariat front-­line agents. See implementariat Gasper, Des, 58 Geertz, Clifford, 19 Geissler, P. Wenzel, 157–158 gender: and driving, 180n4 (chapter 2); and work, 28–32; discrimination among staff, 44; “Rita’s” stance on, 52. See also CDC: “Rita,” as example Gennep, Arnold van, 98 GGAP (Good Governance in Angola Program): application to implement, 109–112; as informed by previous interventions, 104–109, 129–130, 139–141; described, 10, 41–42; design of, 108–109; founding of, 112–116, 122–128, 139–141 (see also GGAP: RFA); funding of, 10, 93, 100–101, 109–112, 178n9 (introduction), 183n7 (chapter 4), 183n11 (chapter 4); goals of, 7, 10, 12–13, 41–42, 100–101; implementation activities of, 75–76; implementers’ response to, 109–112; indicators for, 69–73; knowledge informing, 104–109; logframe for, 59, 86, 182n8 (chapter 3), appendix; logic of, 10; management of, 10, 108; methods of, 7, 75, 139–140 (see also ODAs); public forums (municipal forums), 8–10, 75; RFA (Request for Applications) for, 97–99, 99–104, 104–109, 139, 182n5 (chapter 4); sites of, 93–95, 94 (figure 4.1), 102–104, 112–117, 182n1 (chapter 4), 182n2 (chapter 4); staffing structure of, 3, 29, 41, 73–74, 75. See also micro-­projects; Monitoring and Evaluation in the GGAP GGL (Good Governance in Luanda Program), 129–138 governance, as development goal, 10–13, 134, 138 Graeber, David, 78, 92, 148, 151–152 Green, Maia, 99–100 Griesemer, James, 78

Grindle, Merilee, 11–12 Guardian, Secret Aid Worker series, 21–22 Hart, Gillian, 178n11 (introduction) “Helena”, 128–129, 137–138, 147; her narrative of the GGAP’s beginnings, 128–130 Hull, Matthew, 97–98 ­human resources, implementation agents as, 24 ideological apparatuses, development institutions as, 18. See also Althusser, Louis; ideology ideology: defined, 18; of development industry, 17–20 Illich, Ivan, 28, 31, 34, 148 imaginary. See ideology implementariat: compared to “street-­level bureaucrats”, 25–28; defined, 3–5, 10, 31, 145–146; hierarchies within, 4, 48–49, 53–54, 50, 87, 148; influence over intervention site se­lection, 95–96, 102–104, 112–117; innovations of, 131–133; interpretive ­labor of, 36, 65, 73–74, 83, 90–92; invisible work of, 36–37, 58–64, 148–153; relationships with peers, 95–96, 109–112, 139–141; reputations among, 109–112; tenure in intervention sites, 112–117, 140 implementation: as “frontline” work or “street-­level bureaucracy”, 25; as relationship-­building, 44–45, 61, 135–138; as social interaction, 1–2, 7–10, 43; competition for credit in, 112–117; interpretive ­labor of, 65, 73–74, 90–92; invisibility of, 38–40, 47–48, 58–9, 63–64, 148–153; logistics of, 38–40, 45–47, 60–64, 150; misrecognized, 6, 30; shadow work of, 28–32; similarity to policy making, 32–37, 92, 152. See also CDC; Monitoring and Evaluation indicators: in development, 55–57 (see also Monitoring and Evaluation [M&E]); for the GGAP, 70–71 (see also Monitoring and Evaluation [M&E] in the GGAP) in­equality: among development workers, 17, 20–23, 58, 62, 147–151, 158–159; reproduction of, 17, 36, 62, 78, 92, 157–159; of work value, 28–32 information, sources of, 107

Index 197 institutional knowledge, 99–100, 104–109; as produced by intervention, 104, 107–109; role of prior interventions in, 108–109 institutional reputations, 109–112, 117 international staff. See expatriates interpretive ­labor, 23, 36, 73–74, 91–92, 151–153, 157; and monitoring and evaluation, 65–67, 73, 83, 90–91; of implementation, 65, 67. See also shadow work intersectionality, 179–180n8 (chapter 1) intervention sites, as “occupied,” 113–114 invisible work. See shadow work “Jonathan” (American NGO Country Director), 109–112 “Julie”. See Monitoring and Evaluation Officer ­labor. See work Lambert, Craig, 31–32 land mines, 46 language, 8, 43, 80–83, 177n6 (introduction), 180n3 (chapter 2), 180n7 (chapter 2) Latour, Bruno, 55 Lave, Jean, 54 LFA (Logical Framework Analy­sis), 54–58, 62–63, 143 Li, Tania Murray, 66, 91, 96–97, 101, 107–108, 112, 115, 157 Lipsky, Michael, 24–28, 34–36, 180n2 (chapter 2) local knowledge, 36, 88, 106–108; role of prior interventions in, 108–109. See also institutional knowledge local staff. See development workers location of development interventions. See site se­lection for development intervention logframe (logical framework): defined, 40–41, 55–57, 181n7 (chapter 3); example, 56, ­table 2.2; of the GGAP, 59, 86, 182n8 (chapter 3), appendix. See also Logical Framework Analy­sis Logical Framework Analy­sis (LFA), 54–58, 62–63, 143 logistics. See implementation M&E Workshop: preparations for, 48–51; events of, 81–84, 86–89 Malkki, Liisa, 118

198

Index

management styles, 131, 135–138 managerial and administrative sciences: and development ideology, 23–28, 145, 153–157; and professionalization in development organ­izations, 17–20; bound­aries between, 179n5 (chapter 1); neglect of implementation agents’ intellectual work, 27–28, 35, 152, 156–157; neglect of implementation agents’ social relationships, 20, 35, 153–155; presumptions of, 26–27 Marx, Karl, 4–5, 92 Merry, Sally Engle, 74 micro-­projects, 10, 41–42, 53, 75 mise en place, of development work, 63–64 Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), 32, 65–68; and interpretive ­labor, 65–67, 73, 83; as knowledge production in development, 65–66, 90–91; defined, 68; used to demarcate social bound­aries, 66 Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in the GGAP: design of system, 68–73, 108; divergent understandings of, 77, 80, 83; external evaluation of, 76; instruments and tools of, 75–83, 86–88; participant list as instrument of, 77–79, 87–88; prob­lems of, 84–87; scorecards as instruments of, 80–83, 84; role of field staff within, 90; tasks of, 76–77; workshop on, 81–84, 86–89 Monitoring and Evaluation Officer: interactions with field staff, 48, 53–54, 85; “Julie” as example of, 68–74, 91; “Raul” as example of, 48–54, 85 Mosse, David, 2, 33, 116, 126, 156, 177n2 (introduction) MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders), 39–40 municipal forums, 8–10, 75 nationality. See development workers: categorization of national staff. See development workers: national needs assessment. See institutional knowledge ODA, as acronym, 178n10 (introduction) ODAs (Organizações de Desenvolvimento da Àrea/Area Development Organ­ izations): as creating new social forms,

121–125; as innovated by the GGL, 125, 128, 130, 132–133; formation of, 45–47; purpose of, in the GGAP, 8–10, 60–61; use of, following development praxiscape, 128 Olivier de Sardan, Jean-­Pierre, 145–146 Ortner, Sherry, 5 “Osman” (GGAP Program Director), 9, 83–89, 182n9 (chapter 3), 123–124, 136–137; his narrative of the GGAP’s beginnings, 123–128 participant lists. See Monitoring and Evaluation in the GGAP partnership: among colleagues, 138–141; as foundational to the GGAP, 122, 130; as social imperative in development work, 120–122, 141–143 Pickard, Miguel, 122, 141 policy making, similarity to implementation, 32–37, 92, 152 policy sciences. See managerial and administrative Sciences Posner, Lawrence, 55–57, 62, 180n6 (chapter 2) practice theory, 5 praxiscape, 154–155, 183–184n2 (chapter 5); defined, 121, 133 preparatory work. See work principal-­agent prob­lem, 118–119; as directing attention away from development industry sociality, 153–154; as framing for development thought, 11, 23–24, 145, 153–157 productivity: consideration of social work in terms of, 34; of ­labor or work, 29 public forums, 8–10, 75 race, and development worker categorization, 21 “Raul”. See Monitoring and Evaluation Officer Redfield, Peter, 40, 157 relational work: among development workers, 33–34; between development workers and beneficiaries, 8–10, 44–45, 61; misrecognition of, 33–34. See also interpretive ­labor; shadow work reproductive work. See shadow work reputation, of institutions, 109–112, 117 research methods and ethics, 13–15 RFA (Request for Applications): and ethical concerns, 109–112; as part of development’s



Index 199

rites of institution, 98, 103–104; as repre­sen­ta­tion of development intervention, 141–143; defined and described, 97–99, 117–118; of the GGAP, 100–104, 104–109, 109–112, 139. See also GGAP “Rita.” See CDC Rosenberg, Leon, 55–57, 62, 180n6 (chapter 2)

“Sofia” (FAS Program Director). See FAS Star, Susan Leigh, 28, 38, 64, 78 state capacity, 10–13, 96, 130 Strauss, Anselm 38, 64 street-­level bureaucracy, 24–27, 35, 152–153 structural vio­lence, 67, 74–75, 88–89, 147–148, 152–153, 157–159

Samaritans tele­vi­sion series, 22 Scherz, China, 91 Schuller, Mark, 35–36, 183n13 (chapter 4) Schwartzman, Helen, 153, 156 scorecards. See Monitoring and Evaluation in the GGAP Scott, James, 104 “Sebastian” (GGL Program Director), 130, 131–138 Secret Aid Worker series in The Guardian, 21–22 shadow work: as unproductive, 28–30, 149; defined, 28, 34, 148; intersection with social inequalities, 30–31, 148–150; relational work among colleagues as, 32–34, 64, 149–153; relational work with beneficiaries as, 61, 149–151; reproductive ­labor as, 30–31, 149; within waged ­labor, 29 site se­lection for development intervention, 93, 95–96, 102–104, 104–109, 112–117, 182n2 (chapter 4), 182n4 (chapter 4) social capital in the development industry, 15; intervention sites as, 95–96, 100, 112–116, 119; RFA as controlling distribution of, 99 Social Fund (World Bank Proj­ect). See FAS social imaginary. See ideology social work. See relational work

Tsing, Anna, 101 underdevelopment, as intellectual prob­lem, 18–19 UNDP (United Nations Development Program) Decentralization and Local Governance Program. See DLG unproductive ­labor. See shadow work volunteers, 36, 45, 146–147, 149 WestAid, 10, 93–95; interventionist logics of, 10, 94–95; RFA for the GGAP, 100–104, 104–109, 139–142; strategic plan development, 125–128 work: credit for, 36–37, 64, 112–117, 181n8 (chapter 2); invisibility of certain kinds, 28–32, 38–40, 148–153; misrecognition of, 6, 32–37; preparation as, 8, 31, 37–40, 47, 50, 181n8 (chapter 2); productivity of, 29, 34, 39–40. See also development work; implementation; relational work; shadow work World Bank, 11–12 World Bank Social Fund. See FAS ZOPP (Zielorientierte Projektplanung/ Goal-­Oriented Proj­ect Planning), 58

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

rebecc a warne peters is an anthropologist studying social interventionism in southern Africa. She is currently assistant professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Oswego.