Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development

IMPLEMENTING INEQUALITY

IMPLEMENTING INEQUALITY

The Invisible Labor of International Development

REBECCA WARNE PETERS

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

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.

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CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Development Hierarchies

2 Development’s Inputs and Outputs

3 Reinforcing Hierarchies: Monitoring and Evaluation

4 Designing Interventions for Peers, Not Beneficiaries

5 Partnership and the Development Praxiscape

Conclusion: Development without Borders

Appendix: GGAP Logical Framework (Logframe)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

IMPLEMENTING INEQUALITY

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 democratization 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. 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 every one of these 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 others, 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 these internal development encounters and their influence on interventions’ success or failure.

The concept of encounter may actually work to obscure implementation agents, those lynchpin middle figures of global intervention (Hunt 1999; Merry 2006), and so here I place them in central position for critical analysis. The broad concept of encounter presumes a meeting of two groups that would otherwise be separate from each other, coming together from different histories and for different 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 were 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 were 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 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. There 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 little control over those 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 will do and what its trajectory will be through their determination of programmatic goals and standards. Implementers then make up the laboring class: following orders, 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 were, 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 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 orders of others and only contingently eligible for employment. Indeed, in larger Angolan society these workers were also dominated members of the dominant class as they were 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 those 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 those 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, those of in-country managers, field agents, and recipients. These 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 those 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 ideology: as its agent 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. These 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 family, 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 these 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 structure 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 people and the games that they play, and in which people 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 were 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 others, 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, whether conducted one-on-one between GGAP staff members and individual government officials or local community members as beneficiaries, or whether 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 these 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 behavior. In coordinating this external social work, however, the GGAP field staff also had to conduct a great deal of internal social work that usually went unnoticed and unsupported.

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 were 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 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 because 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