THE AID EFFECT Giving and Governing in International Development Edited by DAVID MOSSE AND DAVID LEWIS P Pluto Press LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI MMoossssee 0000 pprree iiiiii 3300//88//0055 1166::1133::0000 First published 2005 by PLUTO PRESS 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © David Mosse and David Lewis 2005 The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2387 1 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2386 3 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England MMoossssee 0000 pprree iivv 3300//88//0055 1166::1133::0000 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi 1. Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid 1 David Mosse 2. Good Governance as Technology: Towards an Ethnography of the Bretton Woods Institutions 37 Gerhard Anders 3. Timing, Scale and Style: Capacity as Governmentality in Tanzania 61 Jeremy Gould 4. The Genealogy of the ‘Good Governance’ and ‘Ownership’ Agenda at the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation 85 Jilles van Gastel and Monique Nuijten 5. Whose Aid? The Case of the Bolivian Elections Project 106 Rosalind Eyben with Rosario León 6. Interconnected and Inter-infected: DOTS and the Stabilisation of the Tuberculosis Control Programme in Nepal 126 Ian Harper 7. The Worshippers of Rules? Defining Right and Wrong in Local Participatory Project Applications in South-Eastern Estonia 150 Aet Annist 8. Unstating ‘the Public’: An Ethnography of Reform in an Urban Water Utility in South India 171 Karen Coelho 9. Disjuncture and Marginality – Towards a New Approach to Development Practice 196 Rob van den Berg and Philip Quarles van Ufford Notes on Contributors 213 Index 216 MMoossssee 0000 pprree vv 3300//88//0055 1166::1133::0000 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The chapters of this book (with the exception of Chapter 1) made their first appearance as contributions to a conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London between 26 and 28 September 2003 on the theme of ‘Order and Disjuncture: The Organisation of Aid and Development’. This was jointly organised by SOAS and the London School of Economics by the two editors under the auspices of EIDOS (the European Inter-University Development Opportunities Study Group) founded to bring together anthropolo- gists studying development from across the continent. We would like to thank EIDOS co-members who provoked the organisation of this event, especially Rüdiger Korf, Philip Quarles van Ufford, Monique Nuijten, Oscar Salemink and Heiko Schrader. The volume editors are grateful to all the participants in the conference, both paper givers and discussants, for a highly stimulating and intel- lectually productive event (for details see Benedetta Rossi, ‘Order and Disjuncture: Theoretical Shifts in the Anthropology of Aid and Development’ Current Anthropology, 45 (4) August–October 2004, 556–560), and to those who offered behind the scenes and ‘on the day’ administrative support, as well as website and CD preparation. We would like to extend special thanks to Benedetta Rossi, and also to Charlotte Wilcox, Kazu Ahmed, Becky Stringer, Mora Mclagan, Azzura Malgieri, Maria, Duncan Franklin, Robert Whiteing and David Martin. Further outputs from this conference which will appear under our joint editorship are Brokers and translators in international development (Kumarian Press Bloomfield, CT), and a special issue of the journal Oxford Development Studies (Vol. 34, No.1 March 2006) on the theme of ‘Encountering order and disjuncture: contemporary anthropologi- cal perspectives on the organisation of development’. We would like to thank the authors of the book’s chapters for their insightful contributions, their efforts in revising earlier drafts, building on parallel and complementary perspectives and so making this such a coherent and distinctive volume. We would also like to thank Sophie Richmond for her copy-editing labours, and Anne Beech, Robert Webb and the team at Pluto Press for their support of this project. David Mosse and David Lewis July 2005 vi MMoossssee 0000 pprree vvii 3300//88//0055 1166::1133::0000 1 G LOBAL GOVERNANCE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF INTERNATIONAL AID David Mosse Today international development policy is characterised by the convergence of ideas of neoliberal reform, democratisation and poverty reduction within a framework of ‘global governance’. What insights into the social processes and effects of this new consensus on aid and global governance can anthropology give? This is a good moment to ask such a question. In recent years there has been a gradual expansion of the scope of ethnography from its classical concern with ‘the local’ and ‘the other’, or the impact of global processes on local places, to more sophisticated conceptions of local–global relations. Some of these examine the way in which global capitalism has to negotiate its presence in specific settings; some explore the ‘production of locality’ in the context of global processes (Appadurai 1997); and yet others focus on the production of globalisation in terms of the relationships and institutions through which ‘the global’ is articulated (Burawoy 2001). The aid effect is a contribution to this ethnographic trajectory. Its chapters demonstrate the fruitfulness of an ethnographic approach to aid, policy reform and global governance. Together they provide powerful commentary on hidden processes, multiple perspectives or regional interests behind official policy discourses. The book raises important questions concerning the systematic social effects of aid relationships, the nature of sovereignty and the state, and the workings of power inequalities and biases built through the standardisations and efficiencies of a neoliberal framework. At the same time, a ‘global aid architecture’ presents new challenges to the anthropology of development. How are relationships (international, state–citizen) reconfigured in the contemporary transnational aid domain? Are boundaries between nation-states, donors and self- governing international financial institutions (such as the IMF and the World Bank) blurred by the new technical demands of managing aid flows? Does the ‘moral resurrection of aid’ with its emphasis on 1 MMoossssee 0011 cchhaapp0011 11 3300//88//0055 1166::1122::4455 2 The Aid Effect ownership, participation and good governance in fact conceal an era of greater intervention by international agencies in the internal affairs of developing countries? The contributors here do not regard ‘governance’ in its global form as simply a matter of ‘super-state’ dominance and hegemony. Rather they turn research attention to understanding how legitimacy is won for international policies, how programmes enrol participants with the rhetoric of freedom, partnership, ownership or participation; how order or control is achieved through internalised disciplines of power (Rose and Miller 1992); how (as in the past) states govern through community control (Li 2002); and how the representational practices through which state power operates (e.g. spatial metaphors of vertical encompassment which put the state ‘above’, people ‘below’) are extended, but also disrupted, within the transnational sphere (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Since the work of ‘governance’ is dispersed to private sector service providers, enterprises, communities, NGOs (non-governmental organisations), donors (and a host of competing, rival or parasitic transnational lobbying and financing networks, 2002: 994), it is, as Tania Li noted,1 ‘an empirical question whether these are coordinated by state bureaucracy’, or located within the framework of the nation-state at all. Attention has then to be directed to transnational systems. Focusing on those of international aid, ethnographers in this volume ask what might be the instruments (technical, procedural, legal, statistical) of an aid regime of ‘rule’ through mutual complicity? What (or on whom) does the order of an internationalised policy regime impose, exclude, suppress or depoliticise? Alternatively, how does it liberate, include and make accountable? In answer, the chapters of the book trace the paper trails, the protocols and practices, the rules and routines, the idioms and identities through which people become subjects of, as well as subject to, global development. Drawing attention to these dispersed procedures and instruments of governance, often autonomous from the state and national politics, some authors draw on the notion of ‘governmentality’ (of a transnational kind, cf. Ferguson and Gupta 2002), although, as will be clear, overall the book challenges this Foucauldian concept as an explanation for the workings of the international aid system.2 This introductory chapter begins with an explanation of the new framework of international aid, its commitments and modalities. I then set out the neoliberal and institutionalist underpinnings of this framework, and examine concerns raised in the recent literature about the implications of policy convergence. Third, I ask what approach has anthropology taken, or might it take, to researching global governance. In this context I reflect, fourth, on the significance and limitations of the Foucauldian notion of ‘governmentality’ for MMoossssee 0011 cchhaapp0011 22 3300//88//0055 1166::1122::4466 Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid 3 an ethnographic approach to global processes. Finally, I examine some alternative conceptualisations that allow simultaneously for the contingencies and specifics of power and the reproduction of universal policy frames. THE NEW AID FRAMEWORK: GLOBALISATION, GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND AID Much of this book focuses on what has sometimes been characterised as a ‘new architecture of aid’. To what does this refer? First, it refers to the focus of aid on policy reform rather than conventional investment projects; reform which is ‘neoliberal’ in the sense of promoting economic liberalisation, privatisation and market mechanisms as the instruments of growth and efficiency. Instead of funding individual projects donors collaborate (in principle) to make concessional finance available (in the short term through budgetary support) to assist governments to develop their own overall strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction (through Comprehensive Development Frameworks, sector-wide approaches [SWAPs], and the like) or finance the cost of fiscal, governance or pro-poor reforms that would make these strategies sustainable in the long run (such as privatising loss-making public sector operations, cutting civil service, decentralisation and anti-corruption measures). In some cases loans and grants are now made to states on the basis of demonstrable commitment and past performance on the reform agenda – that is aid ‘selectivity’ rather than ‘conditionality’ – and outcomes known through state-level poverty monitoring.3 This change in aid, Eyben (with León, this volume) suggests, can be regarded as a shift from ‘gift’ to ‘contract’. Second, in the new architecture, aid is framed by an international commitment to poverty reduction. In particular many donor agencies have pinned their goals to internationally agreed development targets.4 Among other things, this means that austere 1980s structural adjustment lending is replaced by debt-relief initiatives linked to pro-poor policy reform as part of new aid packages resulting from Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). A policy drive for poverty reduction and empowerment is thus joined onto and, under the rubric of ‘making globalisation work for the poor’ (DFID [Department for International Development] 2000), helps to re-legitimise continuing donor emphasis on policies of trade liberalisation, macro-economic stability and fiscal discipline overseen by the IMF, while mobilising new aid resources.5 Third, reform agendas go beyond economic and financial management to ‘governance’ more generally, including aid packages for public sector management, the support of civil society, and the promotion of consultative and participatory mechanisms MMoossssee 0011 cchhaapp0011 33 3300//88//0055 1166::1122::4466 4 The Aid Effect for development planning. The failings of ruling regimes (including corruption within them) are no longer censored as internal matters but have become central to the concerns of external donors; although at the same time (as noted) aid relationships are reframed in the language of partnership and local ownership. These approaches to aid have brought about new levels of convergence in the agendas of major donors underpinned by greater interdependence through country-level coalitions (although important differences of approach remain – between British, Scandanavian, US or Japanese aid, bilateral and multilateral – which deserve separate comparative study).6 This new aid framework has two key theoretical underpinnings: neoliberalism and institutionalism. Following the collapse of communism, international aid became underpinned conceptually by a neoliberalist confidence in market exchange, the doctrine of comparative advantage and the framing of development goals not in terms of national economic development (through the administered economy) but rather in terms of establishing the conditions for successful participation in (production for) world markets. As international markets replaced independent states as the real agents of change, the role of government was to secure the conditions for market integration, including the rule of law, secure private property, anti-corruption measures, accountable and effective government, ‘economic freedom’ (liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, controlled inflation, the removal of protectionism), as well as investment in education, health and communications (Burawoy 2003; Robinson 2002: 1052–53, 6). And the instruments of aid – stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes engineered and imposed by the international financial institutions (IFIs – the IMF and the World Bank) – were oriented towards assisting an internal restructuring of national economies to harmonise with the ‘new legal and regulatory superstructure for the global economy’ so as to allow the free movement of capital. And the ‘enterprise models’ applied ensured that various state functions were increasingly taken over by the market (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989). Now, growing evidence of ‘market imperfections’, economic instability and the financial crises of the 1990s challenged the neoliberal vision, but did not derail the project. Instead, a second complementary body of theory was deployed to explain and manage market imperfections – the new institutional economics (NIE) (Soederberg 2004a: 284). Grounded in neoclassical models of rational choice, the NIE is concerned with institutional constraints on individual behaviour, which account for the fact that information is not perfect and that transactions have costs (Robinson 2002: 1058). Policy prescriptions can thus focus on institutions conceptualised as sets of rules structuring incentives and modelled mathematically, MMoossssee 0011 cchhaapp0011 44 3300//88//0055 1166::1122::4466 Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid 5 reshaping social behaviour so as to increase efficiency and enhance the economic behaviour of individuals (2002: 1058–59). Recent work extends institutional analysis to the relations of international aid itself, so that ‘partnership’ and ‘local ownership’ become strategies to restructure incentives and overcome the ‘moral hazard’ or ‘principal agent’ problems inherent in aid processes (Ostrom et al. 2002). In parallel, the idea of ‘path dependency’ allows that structures of incentives are shaped by the historical interactions of institutions (e.g. Putnam 1993; Robinson 2002: 1059). These ideas, and especially the importance of getting institutions and incentives right, underpin a re-accommodation of the role of both the state (in the rubric of ‘good governance’) and self-organising society (community or social capital) as complementary mechanisms for development in a ‘post- Washington consensus’, although the market retains its inherent powers of organisation, rational allocation, benefit optimisation and non-territorial transnational regulation (Duffield 2002: 1055; cf. Fine 1999). The conceptual tools of the ‘new institutional economics’ allow a new managerialism in international development, no longer confined to project cycles, and driven by a combination of poverty target orientation and policy-based objectives.7 Indeed, as its ends have narrowed to the achievement of quantified targets on poverty or ill-health, the means of international aid have expanded from the management of economic growth and technology transfer to the reorganisation of state and society needed to deliver on targets (Mosse 2005a: 3–4, 237–38; Quarles van Ufford et al. 2003). Globalisation and universal knowledge for global governance So, international aid policy frameworks continue to endorse globalisation as a process of economic and political freedom (democracy) and poverty reduction, despite the fact that free trade seems more clearly linked to growing inequality than gains in income or welfare for the poor (Storm and Rao 2004: 571), and that the experience of sharp increase in relative deprivation and distributional conflict is only intensified by reduced state protection (Chua 2003; Storm and Rao 2004: 573–74). Despite long being questioned (Storm and Rao 2004: 571, citing Marx), the notion that there is a close positive relationship between freedom for capital and freedom for the poor carries more conviction than ever; while this view of development as a matter of free markets and democracy persistently ignores the highly interventionist course of much actual employment, welfare and poverty alleviation (Fine 2004: 586). Those who hold the free-market faith while proposing that its failings can be addressed by further building democratic institutions for global MMoossssee 0011 cchhaapp0011 55 3300//88//0055 1166::1122::4466