Implementing Inequality

The Invisible Labor of International Development

Rebecca Warne Peters

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978808980
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Implementing Inequality argues that the international development industry's internal dynamics—between international and national staff, and among policy makers, administrators, and implementers—shape interventions and their outcomes as much as do the external dynamics of global political economy. Through an ethnographic study in postwar Angola, the book demonstrates how the industry's internal social pressures guide development's methods and goals, introducing the innovative concept of the development implementariat: those in-country workers, largely but not exclusively "local" staff members, charged with carrying out development's policy prescriptions. The implementariat is central to the development endeavor but remains overlooked and under-supported as most of its work is deeply social, interactive, and relational, the kind of work that receives less recognition and support than it deserves at every echelon of the industry. If international development is to meet its larger purpose, it must first address its internal inequalities of work and professional class.

1 • DEVELOPMENT HIERARCHIES

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 those changes. Seen in this way, it is a paradox that this global enterprise to reengineer social relationships cannot or will 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 those 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 adopted 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 actual, everyday, social and relational work of development professionals is actively unseen and “depreciated” (Schmidt 2015). Later 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 about its internal structures and relationships increasingly, but indirectly, derives from ideas prevalent in the management, administration, organizational behavior, and policy sciences. These 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 imagined 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 problem 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). Embedded in this conceptualization of international development is the presumption that the behavior of ordinary people 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 doing it. Development common sense holds that good decision makers are rare, having traveled from afar and acting out of generosity for the benefit of others 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 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 these are concerned with policy implementation in general for insight into the managerialist thinking of contemporary development organizations. 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 because while any “in-country” (that is, “in a developing country”) office is considered a field office from the perspective of those working at international headquarters, there 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 organization. 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” 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 those 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.

The message of these twinned on-the-job medical crises—and, indeed, the title of the posting itself—is that there 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 these 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 here, 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 those 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 every right to believe the permanent posting was going 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 Kenyan 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 requirements 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, those 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 inequity 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 r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Epigraph
• 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
• About the Author