Repopulating Development: An Agent-Based Approach to Studying Development Interventions

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World Development Vol. 80, pp. 19–32, 2016 0305-750X/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.11.019

Repopulating Development: An Agent-Based Approach to Studying Development Interventions ERIN BECK* University of Oregon, Eugene, USA Summary. — When analyzing development projects, applied and critical scholars alike often place inordinate emphasis on the outcomes, depicting development projects as happening to people and overlooking the interactional nature of projects. This article oﬀers an agentbased approach as a corrective, drawing on actor-oriented sociology, actor-network theory and alternative theories of power. An agentbased approach views development projects as socially constructed processes constituted by the interactions of policymakers, workers, ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and their socio-material environments. Such an approach is able to provide a nuanced analysis of power in development projects and generate generalizations about the landscape of development NGOs, which is characterized by two types of tensions: the ﬁrst deriving from the interactions of various lifeworlds at development interfaces; the second deriving from the conﬂicting organizational and development goals. The utility of an agent-based approach is then illustrated through a comparative, ethnographic analysis of two microcredit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Guatemala. While both oﬀer small loans and classes to women, the two NGOs operate according to divergent organizational values, structures, and developmental models. This comparative analysis reveals the interactional origins of organizational characteristics and developmental models across contrasting NGOs and shows that these in turn aﬀect, but do not fully determine what happens on the ground. Even though policymakers exercise disproportionate power, the tensions inherent in both development NGOs ensure signiﬁcant room for maneuver and negotiation on the part of workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” Thus, the two NGOs’ trajectories and outcomes are products of top-down values, structures and models and the creative, emergent interactions between actors involved at various levels of development. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words — international development, non-governmental organizations, agency, ethnography, Guatemala, microcredit

1. INTRODUCTION

agent-based approach, and provides evidence of these tensions by drawing on comparative ethnographies of two microcredit NGOs in Guatemala that embody competing approaches to development.

Development scholars and practitioners have often focused on outcomes —judging projects in terms of their preestablished objectives. Others have been more interested in development institutions’ role in reinforcing global power disparities, and grassroots attempts at resistance. Despite their diﬀerences, however, at times both groups have depicted development projects as happening to people, and thus overlooked the interactional nature of projects. By focusing on the outcomes of projects in terms of their stated or ‘‘hidden” agendas, scholars have downplayed questions that are analytically prior: how are development projects constituted in the ﬁrst place? What determines what actually happens on the ground? Answering these questions requires a diﬀerent approach that explores how interventions are embedded in, and transformed by, particular environments, actors, and their interactions. This article oﬀers such an approach by drawing on actororiented sociology, actor-network theory, and alternative theories of power. It ﬁrst outlines how an inordinate emphasis on outcomes leads to incomplete depictions of people and projects. Then, it demonstrates how agent-based models act as a corrective, and outlines the key tenets of an agent-based approach to the study of development that analyzes projects as socially constructed processes constituted by the interactions of policymakers, workers, ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” 1 and their socio-material environments, using the ﬁeld of development NGOs to illustrate. 2 This approach provides a more nuanced analysis of power in development and generates generalizations about the landscape of development NGOs, which is characterized by two types of tensions: the ﬁrst deriving from the interactions of lifeworlds at development interfaces; the second deriving from the conﬂicting organizational and development goals. The article then demonstrates the utility of an

2. THE WEAKNESSES OF OUTCOME-FOCUSED RESEARCH Interested in improving the lives of the poor, applied researchers and critical scholars alike historically focused on outcomes. In their evaluations, practitioners and applied researchers compared ‘‘before” and ‘‘after” measures, attributing diﬀerences to the intervention at hand (in the ﬁeld of microﬁnance see: Amin & Becker, 1998; Angelucci, Karlan, & Jonathan, 2014; Brau, Hiatt, & Woodworth, 2009; Fiala, 2013; Pitt, Cartwright, & Khandker, 2007; Tarozzi, Desai, & Johnson, 2013; Weber & Ahmad, 2014; Wydick, 1999a, 1999b). These studies rested to varying degrees on punctualization (Latour, 1999): the fact that any given intervention was constituted by numerous networks, interactions, and nonlinear processes (many originating outside of the project at * This research was funded in part by Fulbright-Hays and the University of Oregon’s Center for Latino/a Latin American Studies Faculty Collaboration Grant. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Sociology of Development Conference in Providence, RI. I thank the conference participants for their thoughtful feedback and comments, as well as those generously oﬀered by Jocelyn Viterna, David Lewis, Philip Oxhorn, Gerald Berk, Craig Parsons, and Yvonne Braun. In addition I owe a debt of gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers who provided insightful feedback that strengthened the manuscript considerably. Any and all errors are my own. Final revision accepted: November 24, 2015. 19

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hand) was concealed so that the intervention could be handled as a single object of study. Practitioners and applied researchers held instrumental views in which policies were developed purely on the basis of the problem at hand and thereafter guided implementation and interactions on the ground (Mosse, 2003, 2005). In this view, gaps between policy and implementation were dysfunctions to be addressed with better policy, technologies or oversight. Numerous scholars—some evaluating development projects from the outside (De Herdt & Bastiaensen, 2007; Mitchell, 2002), others drawing on ‘‘insiders’ views” (Korf, 2006; Mosse, 2003, 2005)—have since noted a persistent instrumental view of policy and techno-rational bias even in the face of shifting discourses about indigenous knowledge and participatory development. This tendency has become all the more apparent today in the face of the increasing popularity of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which prioritize quantitative measures, stated objectives, and ‘‘before” and ‘‘after” comparisons (Davidson, 2006; Faulkner, 2014). In competing tradition, critical scholars (often grouped under the label of ‘‘post-development”) highlighted development’s ‘‘hidden” agenda of expanding Western hegemony. Early critical scholars characterized development eﬀorts as self-serving, part of a much longer history of colonization (Hancock, 1989; Hayter, 1971). Some argued that the primary, hidden aim of development agencies was to reproduce the aid apparatus or widen market relations (Gould, 2005; Rist, 1997). Others ‘‘deconstructed” development discourses, arguing that far from necessary, empowering, natural or neutral, development discourses and practices reproduced inequality and facilitated cognitive and social control (Apﬀel-Marglin & Marglin, 1990; Brigg, 2001; Crush, 1995; Escobar, 1992, 1995; Ferguson, 1994; Ganesh, 2005; Lairap-Fonderson, 2002; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997; Sachs, 1992; Shore & Wright, 1997). Scholars in this tradition connected development, structural adjustment, and the growing global divide, accusing practitioners of hiding behind techno-rational instruments such as logframes in the process of rendering development technical (Kroeker, 2012; Li, 2007). In this view, even development interventions that failed to meet their stated goals succeeded in their political purpose. Post-structural scholars tended to be ‘‘domino-centric” (Diawara, 2000), focusing on how powerful networks shaped the world to perpetuate their power and depicting grassroots movements and organizations as potential sites of resistance (Apﬀel-Marglin & PRATEC, 1998; see Lewis & Mosse, 2006a, 2006b for further discussion of this tendency). Thus while applied researchers often operated on the spectrum of failure and success, critical scholars operated on the spectrum of domination and resistance, even if they did not use this language explicitly. While NGOs have a much longer history (see Lewis, 2009; Lissner, 1977), the international humanitarian and development community became especially interested in NGOs in the face of NGO eﬀorts in the aftermath of violent conﬂicts in places like Biafra (1968–69), Bangladesh (1971–72) and Cambodia (1979 and after). The 1980s saw a dramatic increase in the number and involvement of NGOs in development, as well as a growing scholarly interest in ‘‘third sector” organizations. 3 Scholars wrote of the ‘‘associational revolution,” and one compared the rise of NGOs in the late twentieth century to that of the nation-state in the previous century (Edwards & Hulme, 1996; Fisher, 1998). Those in the applied tradition were initially optimistic that NGOs could better implement development projects, serve intermediary roles between the grassroots, governments and development institutions, and challenge mainstream thinking and practice (Ahuja, 1994;

Bebbington, Farrington, Lewis, & Wellard, 1993; Carroll, 1992; Clark, 1991; Drabek, 1987; Edwards & Hulme, 1992; Fowler, 1993; Korten, 1987, 1990; Paul & Israel, 1991). Yet, by the mid-1990s, many began to question NGOs’ comparative advantages. Dialogs between scholars and practitioners raised questions about NGOs’ eﬀectiveness, accountability, relationships with donors and states, and ability to ‘‘scale up” without compromising their grassroots connections (Atack, 1999; Banks, Hulme, & Edwards, 2014; Bano, 2008; Bebbington, 2005; Bebbington, Hickey, & Mitlin, 2008; Edwards & Hulme, 1996; Farrington, Bebbington, Lewis, & Wellard, 1993; Markowitz & Tice, 2002; Miraftab, 1997; Power, Maury, & Maury, 2002; Vivian, 1994). 4 Early critical literature on development at times overlooked NGOs, or saw them as sources of resistance—evidenced by NGOs’ push for the New International Economic Order (Hancock, 1989; Sen & Grown, 1987). But the fusion of neoliberal prescriptions and support for NGOs in the late 1980s and 1990s led critical scholars to connect ‘‘NGOization” to neoliberalism (Arellano-Lo´pez & Petras, 1994; Feldman, 1997, 2003; Gideon, 1998; Goldman, 2005; Kamat, 2004, Karim, 2011; Mitchell, 2002). They explored the ways that NGOs helped transform problems of structural inequality into issues of individual responsibility, to be addressed with technical solutions (Crush, 1995; Elyachar, 2005; Eriksson Baaz, 2005; Feldman, 2003), and claimed this process undermined grassroots organizing, muting oppositional voices as service delivery took precedence over advocacy (Alvarez, 1999; Arellano-Lo´pez & Petras, 1994; Feldman, 1997; Gideon, 1998; Kamat, 2004; Kapoor, 2005; Lang, 2013; Petras, 1999; Silliman, 1999). Many came to see NGOs as bureaucratized organizations, contaminated by donor-driven agendas and foreign ‘‘expertise” (see Hodzˇic´, 2014 for a description of the ‘‘NGOization” literature), and sites of governmentality (Foucault, 1980), in which ‘‘developers” shaped the poor’s behavior and desires in ways that maintained the status quo (Brigg, 2001; Karim, 2011; Lairap-Fonderson, 2002; Sharma, 2014). As a result, these scholars tended to overlook the diversity of NGOs 5 and their struggles to maintain their core values, ensure downward accountability, and resist international pressures (Andrews, 2014; Beck, 2014; Kilby, 2006, 2011; Smillie, 1995). Despite their many diﬀerences, however, applied and critical researchers at times fell into similar traps when studying development interventions: relying on incomplete depictions of ‘‘developers” (policymakers and workers), ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and development organizations. Applied researchers and practitioners often focused on models, policies, and outcomes in order to identify characteristics of more successful strategies. At times, they failed to question policies that depicted ‘‘beneﬁciaries” as recipients alone and relied on homogenizing depictions of the ‘‘consensual village,” ‘‘altruistic women,” and the ‘‘powerless poor” (Olivier de Sardan, 2005). While it was common to ask how interventions changed ‘‘beneﬁciaries” lives, it was rarely asked how ‘‘beneﬁciaries” changed interventions (for exceptions see Andrews, 2014; Kilby, 2006). The push toward participatory development shifted attention to ‘‘beneﬁciaries” for a time, based on the premise that the poor had the relevant development expertise. However, even when the principles of participatory development were sincerely pursued, the focus on ‘‘beneﬁciaries” as diverse people with agency was rarely complemented by similar treatments of policymakers and development workers. Since that time, there has been a noted shift from the participatory approach of the 1990s ‘‘to a more control-oriented upward accountability” that emphasizes results-based management

REPOPULATING DEVELOPMENT: AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO STUDYING DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS

and impact assessment, although these changes are not passively accepted by NGOs (Chambers, 2010, p. 10). RCTs have been depicted as ideal for evaluating development projects ranging from microﬁnance, immunization, or infrastructural projects to community participation (Chambers, 2010, p. 10; Faulkner, 2014). 6 The result has been further erasure of the diversity, subjectivities, and actions of policymakers, workers, and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” in favor of input–output models. Critical scholars, by contrast, focused on hegemonic discourses and neoliberal governmentality, implicitly depicting policymakers and workers as cogs in an ‘‘antipolitics machine,” and reducing their beliefs and actions to their role in reproducing inequality and hegemony (see Mosse, 2005 and Yarrow, 2011 for further discussion). As a result, policymakers and workers as real people, often with sincere desires to ‘‘help,” and always with their own personal experiences, goals and meanings, were often deemed irrelevant or morally suspect (Mosse, 2003; Venkatesan & Yarrow, 2012). Because they were ‘‘domino-centric,” critical scholars unintentionally depicted ‘‘beneﬁciaries” as victims of development and overlooked the multiple forms of agency that they exercised, including aid-seeking, collusion, and compromise. Applied and critical scholars also promoted skewed views of development interventions by depicting them as arriving in communities in the global south. In the applied tradition, participatory approaches, inspired by the work of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, and Robert Chambers, among others challenged this tendency (Chambers, 1983; Freire, 1970; Illich, 1997). Yet scholars who embedded themselves in participatory projects often found that, ‘‘no matter how ﬁrm the commitment to good intentions, the notion of ‘powerful outsiders’ assisting ‘powerless insiders’ [was] constantly smuggled in” (Long, 2001, p. 89). Critical scholars often focused on large-scale Western projects as exemplary of monolithic, top-down forces, and depicted development discourses as forming ‘‘an extremely eﬃcient apparatus for producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World” (Escobar, 1995, p. 9; see Apﬀel-Marglin & Marglin, 1990; Ferguson, 1994; Hobart, 2002; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997; Sachs, 1992). Both therefore promoted an artiﬁcial divide between the global and local, overlooking the fact that even ‘‘global” policies, discourses, and practices only had eﬀects because they were experienced, given meaning, and enacted locally (Latour, 2007; Long & Long, 1992). 3. AGENT-BASED APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF DEVELOPMENT A third strain of development studies oﬀers a potential corrective. By the 1980s, ethnographic studies of development projects that adopted actor-centered views undermined linear and sparsely populated depictions of projects (Bierschenk, 2014). Some scholars, inﬂuenced by Thomas Bierschenk’s theory of strategic groups (1988), focused on projects as arenas of negotiation and conﬂict over economic, political, and symbolic resources (see Quarles van Uﬀord, 1993). Similarly, Norman Long’s actor-oriented sociology emphasized projects’ inherent contingency, resulting from the fact that, faced with the same conditions, people could react in a variety of ways (Long & Long, 1992). The ‘‘entangled social logic” approach of Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and others focused on various stakeholders’ interlocking subjectivities, goals, and perceptions and the role of social actors acting as development brokers navigating diverse worldviews (Arce & Long, 1993; Bastiaensen, De Herdt, & D’Exelle, 2005; Campregher, 2010;

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De Herdt & Bastiaensen, 2007; Hilhorst, 2003; Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Many of these scholars drew on actor-network theory, developed in the ﬁeld of science and technology studies. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987, 2007), they focused on social processes of knowledge production and translation. In this view, despite ubiquitous ‘‘fragmentation and dissent,” people involved in projects were ‘‘constantly engaged in creating order and unity through political acts of composition” (Mosse, 2005, p. 5; see Bierschenk, 2008; Lewis & Mosse, 2006a, 2006b). Scholars inﬂuenced by actor-network theory additionally challenged the artiﬁcial divide between the social and material by demonstrating the ways that social and environmental/material factors were tied together in actor-networks such that wildlife, hurricanes, soil quality, and evaluation reports were as ‘‘active” as people (Gareau, 2007, 2012; Mahanty, 2002; Mosse, 2005). The agent-based approach presented here follows in these traditions by exploring the socially constructed nature of development interventions, recognizing that even in topdown projects, policymakers, workers, and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” exercise agency by reﬂecting on their experiences, assigning various goals and meanings to projects, and acting in diverse ways in the face of given development models and policies (Giddens, 1984; Long & Long, 1992; Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Those involved in development strategize, negotiate, and collude, and through acts of translation they enroll human and nonhuman actants in pursuit of their projects. An agent-based approach informs the study of every aspect of development projects. Beginning with the analysis of policymakers as social actors, it shows that models and policies do not simply suggest themselves as the most eﬃcient solutions to obvious problems. Indeed the very ‘‘problems” to be solved ‘‘tend not to present themselves as problems at all but as messy, indeterminate situations” (Scho¨n, 1991, p. 93). Thus, to understand the origins of organizational and developmental policies, researchers must take seriously policymakers’ habitus (Bourdieu, 1990): their dispositions, values, and strategies of action, informed by their previous experiences and interactions. In the ‘‘implementation” of policies, there is likely to be a ‘‘loose coupling” between workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” meanings and actions and those inscribed in written policies, because policies are not able to account for the diversity and agency of implementers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” (Fechter & Hindman, 2011; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Rottenburg, 2009). Actors arrive to projects with multiple goals and meanings that are likely to diverge from the project’s stated rationale and they are likely to act in ways not predicted by policymakers, transforming development interventions in the process. An agent-based approach also forces researchers to abandon neat depictions of interventions’ outcomes (see Radhakrishnan, 2015 for an excellent discussion of this need in the ﬁeld microﬁnance). Projects have many more eﬀects than those sought by policymakers. People use such projects for their own purposes, outcomes are never uniform across ‘‘beneﬁciaries” and contradictory processes such as empowerment and disempowerment can happen simultaneously (Mowles, 2013; Pawson, 2006; Pigg, 1992). Additionally, the perceived outcomes of projects depend on plural assessments. We cannot assume that people join NGOs or development projects for the same reasons that policymakers design them or that all people participate for the same reasons. This opens up the possibility that ‘‘beneﬁciaries” may judge an intervention as successful even when its goals established by policy-

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makers are not met, or unsuccessful even when they are (Horan, 2002). (a) Power in an agent-based approach An agent-based approach acknowledges the critical role of macro-phenomena in shaping project trajectories and possibilities. But it also demonstrates that these are malleable points of reference that can be adapted, translated, and recomposed, and they only have eﬀects in situated contexts where they are ‘‘grounded in the meanings accorded them through the ongoing life-experiences and dilemmas of men and women” (Long & Long, 1992, p. 7; for an example applied to microﬁnance, see Radhakrishnan, 2015). External discourses and practices enter the lifeworlds of diverse actors who are not passive recipients, but active mediators that interpret, strategize, collude, and resist, all while leveraging interactions and drawing on broader frames of meaning and action (Bourdieu, 1977; Gareau, 2012; Giddens, 1984; Hilhorst, 2003; Latour, 1996). What is more, an agent-based approach highlights that macro-phenomena do not arise independently but are themselves the result of a ‘‘complex interplay of speciﬁc actors’ strategies, ‘projects,’ resource endowments (material/technical and social/institutional), discourses and meanings” (Long, 2004, p. 15). Power inequalities are themselves products of processes of translation and composition; those who more successfully enroll others in their projects are more powerful as a result, and they are able to institutionalize actor-networks to their beneﬁt. In the context of a development NGO, for example, they may further entrench and materialize their positions through the creation and manipulation of organizational structures, evaluation procedures, documentation and calculation techniques, and databases. In these contexts, knowledge does not involve the ‘‘simple accumulation of facts” about the global South, poor women, and ‘‘best practices,” but rather a way ‘‘of construing and ordering the world” to the beneﬁt of some over others (Long, 2004, p. 15; see Foucault, 1980; Sletto, 2008). The result is that projects are akin to living games of chess ‘‘where some control many more pawns, some are only allowed a few moves, whereas others can change the rules to their advantage” (Bierschenk, 1988, p. 146; Gareau, 2012). While ‘‘beneﬁciaries” can stretch the room for maneuver in this uneven playing ﬁeld, their acts are often located in the realm of audacity rather than privilege, and they are likely to view their own actions as a sort of improvization (what Berk and Galvan (2013) call ‘‘ramshackling”) rather than an attempt to redesign the institutional order (what Berk and Galvan (2013) call ‘‘engineering”). This represents a very diﬀerent exercise of agency and power than is often undertaken by policymakers. Policymakers work to create subjects that are both instrumental to and constitutive of their visions of development (Adams & Pigg, 2005; Li, 2007; Mosse, 2005, p. 6; Swidler & Watkins, 2009), but power in development projects is not limited to that of ‘‘developers” deploying power over and through their ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” Power may be uneven, but it is also diﬀuse, and ‘‘government is a congenitally failing operation” (Rose & Miller, 2010, p. 288). The diversity of goals, meanings, and criteria for evaluation involved in projects provide stakeholders with opportunities to do much more than resist or comply (Mosse, 2013; Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Often, workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” exercise agency through collaboration, manipulation of dominant rhetoric, aid seeking, or undertaking small acts of reinterpretation (Bending & Rosenda, 2006; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Rossi, 2006). Even

when ‘‘developers” appear to succeed in enlisting ‘‘beneﬁciaries” in their projects, we cannot assume that ‘‘beneﬁciaries” are mere dupes. ‘‘Beneﬁciaries’” support of topdown narratives is often a legitimate strategic response that expands their room for maneuver in the short-term, even if it further reinforces the existing order in the long-term (Bending & Rosendo, 2006; Mosse, 2005; Rossi, 2004). Apparent success may also result from interlocking projects or guile—all of which reﬂect ‘‘beneﬁciaries’” agency but do not ﬁt neatly into the category of resistance. 4. GENERALIZING FROM AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH An agent-based approach reveals that project design, organizational structures and values, and development models are themselves products of relational processes, and that they inﬂuence, but do not wholly determine development trajectories and outcomes. Instead, interactions among ‘‘developers,” (policymakers and workers), ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and their sociomaterial environments transform development interventions in unpredictable ways. The contingent nature of projects means that the best we can do is to generalize about development’s interactional terrain, rather than the value of particular development technologies, approaches, or organizations. Applying an agent-based approach to the study of Guatemalan microcredit NGOs, for example, revealed common tensions that characterize development NGOs the world over, even among those that are based on widely diﬀerent organizational types and development models. These tensions are widespread, but they are not resolved in predictable ways. Rather, they are productive in the sense of generating multiple potential meanings and actions. In the case of development NGOs, two types of tensions prevail: those arising from the intersection of diverse lifeworlds at development’s interfaces and those arising from the convergence of NGOs’ developmental and organizational goals. (a) Tension at development interfaces One set of tensions results from the intersection of social actors at development’s interfaces, which are the ‘‘critical point[s] of intersection between lifeworlds. . .where social discontinuities, based on discrepancies in values, interests, knowledge and power” are located (Gareau, 2012; Long, 2001, p. 243). Development ‘‘insiders” and scholars alike have noted the tendency of policymakers to rely on stereotypical views of ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” creating reiﬁed categories for people or places as part of the process of rendering development ‘‘technical” (Korf, 2006; Li, 2007; Mohanty, 1991; Mosse, 2003, 2005; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Pigg, 1992; Soss, 2005; Trinh, 1989). Project frames that represent ‘‘beneﬁciaries” according to social, demographic, or economic categories such as ‘‘the landless poor,” ‘‘indigenous women,” or ‘‘informal workers” serve to ‘‘[stabilize] and [homogenize] speciﬁc people within a larger group” (Craig & Doug, 1997, p. 52). Doing so overlooks the diversity and ongoing dynamics within these groups and assumes subjectivities and cohesion that may not exist. While developers draw on simpliﬁed views of ‘‘beneﬁciaries” (often associated with a degree of powerlessness), they also draw on their own experiences and perceptions to imagine ‘‘beneﬁciaries” needs and desires. Often these align with the needs and desires of ‘‘developers” themselves (Long, 2001, pp. 85–88). It is assumed that

REPOPULATING DEVELOPMENT: AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO STUDYING DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS

women in the global South wish to engage in paid labor outside the home and seek independence from their husbands (Kabeer, 2011; Pearson, 2007) or informal workers want to expand their businesses. In parallel fashion, those targeted by development interventions construct simpliﬁed conceptions of ‘‘developers” (Olivier de Sardan, 2005), drawing on their own experiences to judge the power, needs, and desires of ‘‘developers.” They compare development institutions to others with which they are familiar, generating expectations about what participation in them will entail. Based on their previous experiences with other ‘‘developers,” they are likely to ask for things that they expect ‘‘developers” to be willing and able to provide (Olivier de Sardan, 2005). Indeed, ethnographers have found that ‘‘even in the most remote village of the third world, people have developed an impressive capacity for decoding the language of the project oﬀers on hand. . .[t]hey rapidly sense whether to talk of ‘poverty,’ ‘gender,’ ‘care for the environment,’ or ‘small business dynamism’” (De Herdt & Bastiaensen, 2007, p. 877). In this context, ‘‘participatory sessions” may act as ‘‘schools” where the poor develop expectations of developers and ‘‘learn to speak in the global language of poverty and development” (De Herdt & Bastiaensen, 2007, p. 877). Thus ‘‘developers” and ‘‘beneﬁciaries’” meanings and expectations alike are grounded in their respective past experiences and socio-material surroundings. Policymakers, workers, and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” respective points of reference also lead to diﬀering views of development interventions. Policymakers often see interventions as ‘‘central, omnipresent, unique” (Olivier de Sardan, 2005, p. 33) and suffer from ‘‘amnesia” (Bierschenk, 2014, p. 89; Lewis, 2009, p. 34) when it comes to previous projects (Bierschenk, Elwert, & Kohnert, 1993; Richards, 1985). Aid agencies tend to live in the ‘‘perpetual present” (Lewis, 2009, p. 33) in part because these institutions and ‘‘experts” tend to be embedded in their own cognitive structures, knowledge systems, and communication channels that exist apart from those of diverse local contexts and subjectivities (Bierschenk, 2014). As a result, ‘‘failed” technologies or approaches often reappear as ‘‘new” development in experts’ eyes. In other cases, projects may simply be repackaged using the latest rhetoric (Bierschenk, 2014, p. 91). Policymakers may be prone to amnesia, but ‘‘beneﬁciaries” are not. Instead, they consider interventions in light of their previous experiences and knowledge of other projects (Hilhorst, 2003) and are thus likely to see interventions as ‘‘temporary, relative, and incidental—just another link in a chain of consecutive interventions” (Olivier de Sardan, 2005, p. 33). Development workers are likely to have their own views of the intervention, seeing it as philanthropy, a job similar to previously held positions, or a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. Some may be motivated by altruism, but others may not even believe in the principles of the intervention at hand. In sum, when diﬀerent lifeworlds meet at development’s interfaces, a number of tensions are produced. ‘‘Developers” and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” alike construct and act on simpliﬁed conceptions of each other while maintaining more nuanced views of themselves, assign various meanings and expectations to development projects, and experience these projects diﬀerently. Because their goals, expectations, and meanings arise from their particular histories and networks, communication and relational practices at development’s interfaces proceed through series of ‘‘mutual misunderstanding[s]” that open up room for negotiation and interpretation (Rossi, 2004, p. 559; see Marsland, 2006).

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(b) Developmental goals meet organizational goals In the ﬁeld of development NGOs, tensions additionally arise from the intersection of NGOs’ developmental and organizational drives. Development NGOs are value-based organizations that are guided by distinct worldviews (Kilby, 2006; Lissner, 1977), including visions of development. These visions of development are associated with images of ‘‘developed persons,” and thus NGOs are simultaneously motivated by a desire to help alongside a desire to manage ‘‘beneﬁciaries” thinking, behavior, and relationships (Karp, 2002; Murdock, 2008). Policymakers and workers often leverage materials (forms, contracts, photographs) and monitoring and evaluation technologies (site visits, databases) in hopes of resolving this tension. Conﬂicting drives to ‘‘help” and to ‘‘manage” explain why behind participatory rhetoric, one may ﬁnd ‘‘projects as usual.” As organizations, generally accountable to external donors, NGOs inherently face high demands for eﬀective management, requiring central control and meeting preestablished objectives. These demands often run counter to those of ‘‘bottom-up” participation, which entail relinquishing control and accepting potential ‘‘ineﬃciencies” and uncertainties (Craig & Doug, 1997; Mosse, 2003, 2005; Nauta, 2006; Quarles van Uﬀord, 1993). Although this tension can be managed in a number of ways, scholars with in-depth knowledge of particular interventions have often noted that even projects designed to cultivate local participation ‘‘tend to be more managed than participatory,” with the ‘‘balance of control (and project resources and funds) [ending] up inside the organizations which are managing the projects” (Craig & Doug, 1997, p. 50). 7 Tensions between helping and managing are exacerbated by the fact that development NGOs often aim for lofty goals but, unlike ﬁrms, lack ‘‘speciﬁc technologies with known relationships between inputs and outputs” (Watkins, Swidler, & Hannan, 2012, p. 289). ‘‘Developers” may address this tension in a variety of ways, leveraging materials and technology, as well as adjusting the ways that they frame their goals to make the situation more manageable. They may reframe goals in processual rather than ‘‘outcome-based” terms. They may leverage ritualistic documentation and measurement techniques like logframes to create a virtual reality in which cause-and-eﬀect relationships predominate, unknowns are knowable, and projects are coherent (Chambers, 2010; Craig & Doug, 1997; Eyben, 2007; Rossi, 2004). Or they may leverage ignorance by neglecting to verify certain project characteristics or to measure particularly problematic outcomes (Mosse, 2003; Quarles van Uﬀord, 1993; see Arce & Long, 1993; Bierschenk et al., 1993). Development NGOs additionally face contradictory pressures regarding long-term goals. On the one hand, they aim to transform ‘‘beneﬁciaries” lives in ways that make further projects unnecessary. On the other hand, as organizations, they are inﬂuenced by system goals of their own survival and growth (Bob, 2001; Fox, 2014; Krause, 2014; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Watkins et al., 2012). These conﬂicting goals aﬀect many aspects of NGOs’ trajectories, including learning processes, such that the relationship between ‘‘feedback” and subsequent policies and practices is neither automatic nor linear. Even policymakers and workers who believe deeply in a NGO’s vision of development have a host of other goals, including status, job security, and a sense of purpose. Because these other goals are tied up with organizational survival, it is quite rare that evaluation leads to questioning the ‘‘whole idea of planned intervention and the rationality of planning,” much less the project itself. Instead, one may interpret ambiguous

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feedback as proof of success, attribute failure to outside forces, or see failure as ‘‘the starting point for the next round of interventions” (Long & Long, 1992, p. 37). As a result ‘‘single-loop learning,” concerned with improving organizational performance, is more common than ‘‘double-loop learning,” concerned with questioning underlying power relations and worldviews (Ebrahim, 2003, pp. 109–110). In sum, the tension between NGOs’ development orientations and their organizational drives manifests in a number of ways: in the simultaneous desires to help and to manage, in struggles to achieve lofty goals with uncertain technologies, and in attempts to create lasting changes while also lasting as an organization. As common as these conﬂicting drives are, they are not determinant—those involved in development projects creatively negotiate conﬂicting pressures in a wide variety of ways, and the manner in which they do so shapes what happens on the ground. 5. AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO MICROCREDIT NGOS IN GUATEMALA (a) Methods In order to show what an agent-based approach looks like in practice, and the advantages it aﬀords, below I apply it to a comparison between two micro-lending NGOs working with Guatemalan women, Fundacio´n Namaste Guatemaya (Namaste) and Fundacio´n de Presbiteriales Mayas (the Fraternity). The two NGOs are similar sizes in terms of staﬀ and ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” target similar populations, poor women living in mostly rural and semi-rural communities, and deploy similar technologies, small loans accompanied by education. Yet, despite their similarities, Namaste and the Fraternity embody distinct NGO types and development models that are popular the world over. Their comparison is therefore ideal for exploring the interactional nature of a wide variety of policies and practices. 8 All told, the ﬁndings presented here are based on 20 months of research in Guatemala, interviews and observations with donors and founders in Canada and California, and regular engagement from afar (through telephone, Skype and email), spread out over the course of over 7 years. In order to explore the projects’ multiple realities, I conducted interviews at all levels of the development chain—from donors, policymakers, and workers, to current ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and additionally carried out surveys with potential and past ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” I complemented this research with in-depth comparative ethnographies, embedding myself in the interfaces of donors, policymakers, workers, ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and their sociomaterial realities in an attempt to capture the NGOs’ interventions ‘‘in something like [their] fullness,” including their complexity and mundanity (Bayard de Volo & Schatz, 2004; Cunliﬀe, 2009; Scott, 1987, p. 42). Ethnographies included observing and participating in daily life in NGO oﬃces, attending staﬀ meetings, lunches and planning sessions, taking part in informal conversations, and analyzing NGO databases and paperwork. This allowed me to analyze the ways that policymakers and staﬀ talked about each other, their work, and ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and the quotidian ways that ‘‘developers” (policymakers and workers) enacted and transformed development models through their interactions with ‘‘beneﬁciaries” and materials. Ethnographies also focused on observing NGO-led activities with ‘‘beneﬁciaries” that unfolded in oﬃces, community centers, and women’s homes, and spending time with women as

they managed their businesses. Through observations and conversations with ‘‘beneﬁciaries” in the context of NGO activities and in one-on-one interviews, I was privy to the ways that ‘‘beneﬁciaries” pursued their own goals and meanings, as well as the multiple ways that they accommodated, reinterpreted, resisted, or leveraged NGO discourses and strategies. I was thus exposed to the inconsistencies inherent in attempts at development and people’s subsequent reactions to them. (b) The interactional origins of contrasting values, structures, and models Namaste and the Fraternity’s organizational values and structures and development models did not emerge in a vacuum but were rather intimately linked with each organization’s contrasting interactional origins and the habitus of their founding members. Like some development NGOs in the global south, Namaste is a foreign transplant, locating its roots in social entrepreneurship (Edwards, 2010). Namaste’s visionary, Robert Graham, was a successful Californian businessman and Certiﬁed Public Accountant (CPA). Through his business networks, he was drawn into spheres that promoted social entrepreneurship among successful businesspeople. He participated in international trips arranged by these networks (to the Middle East, Russia and Central America), which inspired spiritual and social awakenings—pushing him to dedicate himself to helping ‘‘people to whom little seemed possible” (Graham, 1997, p. 42). Graham’s business background and networks, aﬃnity toward measurement as a CPA, and initial forays into nonproﬁt work, alongside a number of chance encounters—with a Wall Street Journal article about Muhammad Yunus, Jonathan Hatch (founder of FINCA), and a delayed plane in which he was seated near an USAID representative, contributed to Graham identifying a problem (the poor’s lack of credit), developing a solution in which he was central (microﬁnance), and successfully enrolling others in this project. Graham and a network of largely North American businesspeople serving on Namaste’s board then drew on their habitus to apply the ‘‘strategies of action” (Swidler, 1986) and values they had developed in business, and replicated the organizational structures with which they were familiar in their design and management of Namaste. Based on their backgrounds, Namaste’s leaders institutionalized an ‘‘audit culture” by leveraging hiring procedures and requirements, training programs, paperwork, databases, and evaluation techniques that focused on quantitative measurements. They also drew on their existing ties and ability to speak the language of results-based management to successfully enroll donors and volunteers. They institutionalized networks to their favor by replicating organizational structures with which they were familiar and that would give them disproportionate inﬂuence in the future, cultivating a bureaucratic organizational structure (Beck, 2014). This structure was organized internally according to ‘‘impersonal” rules and valued technical capacity, eﬃciency, and measurement. Decisions were made at the top (among the founder and board members in California) with little to no input from workers or ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and task diﬀerentiation was extensive. Meticulous ﬁles and internal feedback mechanisms contributed to a high degree of institutionalization. Although Namaste’s founder was called to social entrepreneurship through a spiritual awakening, the ‘‘faith” that inﬂuenced Namaste’s leadership was not religious but was instead rooted in a faith in the market. As such, the

REPOPULATING DEVELOPMENT: AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO STUDYING DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS

founder and board focused on providing women small loans and business education based on the ‘‘fact” that one of the key obstacles to development is women’s lack of access to capital and business skills, and that once this obstacle was overcome, women could help themselves, their families, and their communities through small businesses. Rather than being the an objective description of reality, this fact was itself the result of various acts of translation and composition that tied together a network of institutions, evaluation reports, newspaper articles, scholars, practitioners, and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” testimonials, and now enrolling Namaste’s policymakers. Based on their faith in the emancipatory power of business and assuming that Guatemalan women were entrepreneurs but lacked access to capital and business knowledge, Namaste’s leaders set out to integrate poor Guatemalan women into the market. To encourage women’s transition from nonproﬁt to commercial borrowing, they aligned Namaste’s interest rates with those of commercial banks and placed limits on the number of loans women could receive. Namaste’s policymakers (the founder and board) acted based on model of what I call ‘‘bootstrap development,” which relied on resource-based deﬁnitions of development and focused on the individual. They assumed that given the opportunity, women would be able to lift themselves up ‘‘by their bootstraps.” Although they recognized non-material aspects of human wellbeing, they ‘‘specialize[d] in increasing women’s incomes,” (Namaste founder) because they believed that doing so would contribute to broader goals and ensure sustainability by helping the poor ‘‘help themselves.” 9 Namaste’s policymakers targeted women because they were assumed to give them more ‘‘bang for their buck.” Based on simpliﬁed conceptions of third world women promoted in media, academic studies, personal conversations, and promotional material to which policymakers were exposed, women were assumed to have less access to resources, paid employment, or loans and have limited business knowledge, yet be more likely to channel resources toward their children and community’s wellbeing. In contrast, the Fraternity, like many NGOs in Latin America, originated in social mobilization. During the 1980s, a small group of Mayan women in the Presbyterian Church mobilized for participation and leadership opportunities for indigenous women. They leveraged international connections with members of religious organizations who were attracted to indigenous women’s projects given international trends promoting the inclusion of women and indigenous peoples in development. In this way they accessed funds for Bible study and productive projects, enhanced their legitimacy, and expanded their room for maneuver in churches. While indigenous women’s ‘‘exotic” sounding Mayan languages, colorful trajes, and ‘‘ancient” rituals had traditionally been used to marginalize women in religious spaces, now they helped to enroll international actors into the Fraternity’s networks. Eventually, the Fraternity’s leaders broke away from the Church in the face of conﬂicts with other members, taking with them international relationships and funding. Like Namaste, the Fraternity eventually oﬀered its ‘‘beneﬁciaries” small loans and education, but the NGO arrived at this project design and its organizational values and structures through very diﬀerent networks and webs of meaning. Looking back at their previous experiences, the Fraternity’s policymakers (director and board members) noted that when indigenous women were given donations for productive projects from sister churches, they often failed to dedicate themselves adequately to those projects. Hoping to prevent irresponsible management of generous gifts, the Fraternity’s

25

policymakers decided instead to provide ‘‘beneﬁciaries” with extremely low interest loans so that women would have an incentive to use the money wisely. They assigned diﬀerent meanings and goals to these loans than did Namaste’s policymakers, seeing them as relatively unimportant—simply the ‘‘lure” to encourage women’s participation in classes that would inspire more important transformations. Classes focused on the importance of self-esteem, caring for the environment, and recapturing Mayan and Christian values but neglected even basic lessons on ﬁnancial literacy or business management. Based on their experiences of mobilization and struggle, the Fraternity’s policymakers came to see indigenous women’s participation and leadership as both instrumentally and intrinsically valuable. One early board member explained, ‘‘[a]s we suﬀered, as we have lived, other women have lived. . .and we do not want it to continue. Because of this we have battled, we have established [trainings and classes] so that women can participate.” Thus women’s attendance in classes itself was seen as evidence of success. Founding members’ also drew on their habitus as Protestants in the cultivation of educational programing, imbued with Christian discourses and practices, and organizational structures. The NGO provided both required and optional Bible study and theology classes, workers incorporated prayer into all of their activities and replicated practices common in churches such as giving testimony. Policymakers and workers creatively combined Christian discourses and practices with their interpretations of Mayan culture, emphasizing the importance of recapturing traditional practices, caring for the environment, eschewing foreign products, and focusing on the community rather than the individual. Policymakers materialized these values and their authority to enforce them in educational material, attendance sheets, pre-loan ‘‘exams,” and contracts. Founders also cultivated what I label a charismatic structure (Beck, 2014). They developed a hierarchy that depended on personal characteristics and histories, and prized loyalty and relationships over formal training or technical expertise. This structure, materialized in operating and oversight procedures and oﬃce space alike, allowed the director a considerable degree of discretion for much of the organization’s lifespan. Drawing on creative combinations of Mayan and Protestant values and beliefs and their own personal histories, the policymakers operated according to a holistic model of development, which included non-quantiﬁable goals such as community well-being, culturally diﬀerent citizens, indigenous women’s voice and inclusion, as well as a revalorization of non-human life that would result in ‘‘communities that are green, with crystal waters [and] pure air” (The Fraternity’s director). This model entailed addressing multiple obstacles to development at once because, as the then-director explained, ‘‘it is not enough [for Mayan women] to have food to eat,” because they should also be physically and psychologically healthy, educated in their rights and obligations as women and citizens, active in their churches and communities, as well as connected to their Christian values, Mayan spirituality, and nature. 10 In sum, policymakers (in Namaste, Graham and the board of directors in California and in the Fraternity, the founding members and board of directors in Guatemala) drew on their diverging environments and histories in founding and designing Namaste and the Fraternity and in so doing applied diﬀering values (secular and religious worldviews), meanings, structures, and development models to similar technologies. Although they reﬂected broader international trends that valued microﬁnance, incorporating women and indigenous peo-

26

WORLD DEVELOPMENT

ples in development, (in the case of Namaste) results-based management, and (in the case of the Fraternity) ‘‘bottomup” development, seeing these characteristics as caused by those trends would overlook the contingent, interactional processes of translation that produced them. 6. COMMON TENSIONS ACROSS CONTRASTING ORGANIZATIONS While policymakers’ values, structures, and models aﬀected what unfolded in the context of development projects, they did not determine it. Even though policymakers exercised disproportionate power, the tensions inherent in development projects ensured signiﬁcant room for maneuver and negotiation. Namaste and the Fraternity’s multiple realities were products of top-down strategies, values, structures and models and the creative, emergent interactions between actors involved at various levels of development. (a) Tensions at Namaste and the Fraternity’s interfaces Namaste’s policymakers developed an intervention based on their assumptions about poor Guatemalan women’s need for credit, desire to expand their business, and ignorance of good business practices. They drew on their own experiences and needs as Western businesspeople in providing loans and business education, developing conferences that allowed for ‘‘networking” among ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” and introducing metrics that calculated women’s hourly wage. Many women, however, had ample access to loans and saw Namaste as just one of many microﬁnance institutions (MFIs). Few desired to dramatically expand their businesses, because they feared neglecting their other responsibilities, taking on too much debt, and hiring non-kin employees. Many saw business education as a cost and conferences as a time to have fun and socialize. Few separated their productive and reproductive duties—businesses were often in women’s homes and were operated while caring for children or tending to housework. This made calculating an accurate hourly wage nearly impossible, and the resulting ﬁgures relatively meaningless to women themselves. Namaste’s policymakers saw the NGO as diﬀerent from other MFIs because it focused on business mentorship and education and was motivated by women’s success rather than proﬁt. However, in their interactions with potential ‘‘beneﬁciaries” on the ground, employees translated Namaste’s policies in ways that replicated recruitment strategies of proﬁt-driven MFIs. They emphasized loans in their interactions with women, based on their assessments of women’s desires and the competitive environments in which they worked, populated by many MFIs targeting women with loans with few requirements. For their part, women, accustomed to interacting with MFIs, relied on simpliﬁed views of Namaste as just another MFI, only distinct because it is foreign (a ‘‘gringo bank”). Initial interactions with employees generally reinforced this impression. As a result, most ‘‘beneﬁciaries” demanded little other than a loan from Namaste and generally saw their participation in activities as the ‘‘price” they paid to access that loan. They were less likely to use voice in the organization because if they were dissatisﬁed, they could simply exit and access a loan from another MFI that they saw as roughly comparable. Thus, the way that workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” interacted over time based on the tensions they faced between their perceptions of each other in the context of competitive environments enabled women’s agency as consumers (allowing

them to pick and choose between, in their view, similar MFIs and exit when they were dissatisﬁed). Yet it also reduced their incentive to exercise their agency as members, giving them little reason to use voice to change NGO practices. When asked about how to better help Guatemalan women, for example, few ‘‘beneﬁciaries” had any suggestions and those that did focused on loan terms, basing their answers on their perceptions of ‘‘developers” capabilities and desires. Seeing their project as central to the lives of workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” policymakers asked them to dedicate more time and energy to Namaste’s project than they were willing or able to give. They required employees to attend staﬀ meetings, recruit new ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” pursue late payments, visit loan groups, conduct one-on-one visits in which they provided customized advice, complete ever-changing forms at every interaction, accurately enter information into an online database, cooperate in pilot projects, and work with volunteers. Employees often felt overwhelmed by their many tasks. Similarly, policymakers asked more of ‘‘beneﬁciaries” than other MFIs, requiring them to attend educational sessions and mentorship meetings and pressuring to record every businessrelated purchase or sale in notebooks that were monitored by employees. Comparing Namaste with other MFIs in their communities that did not have as many requirements, many women saw these activities as part of the ‘‘cost” they paid for a slightly lower interest loan, while others saw them as evidence that NGO policymakers and workers actually cared about women’s success. The discrepancies between policymakers’ perceptions of Guatemalan women and the project, and employees’ and Guatemalan women’s lived realities, perceptions, and goals, opened up room for maneuver. Employees reacted to their interactions and environments by pitching Namaste’s program as a loan to women but emphasized the importance of education while in the presence of higher-ups. They gained status by leveraging simpliﬁed views of women to position themselves as ‘‘teachers” helping ‘‘ignorant” women. Because they assigned diﬀering levels of importance to Namaste’s activities than did policymakers, employees and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” at times colluded to get through classes and paperwork more quickly by limiting participation and estimating ﬁgures to calculate monthly proﬁts/losses. ‘‘Beneﬁciaries” leveraged simpliﬁed conceptions of themselves to access loans, skirt Namaste’s requirements for tracking costs/sales, or claim ignorance of expectations regarding attendance and repayment. Women could feign interest in business education at the time of application, but later complain of the time spent in activities because they angered their husbands or took them away from their business or household responsibilities. Some valued the education Namaste provided, but others tested the limits of compliance, missing classes, arriving late, or leaving early. Follow-up surveys with former ‘‘beneﬁciaries” revealed that many complied with business advice only during the time they were participating in Namaste and later abandoned these practices. These unscripted actions and meanings on the part of workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” transformed Namaste’s loan and educational components. Combined, policymakers’ designs and these unscripted actions produced trajectories that led to short-term positive outcomes for many women’s incomes, but limited spillover eﬀects in the areas of business growth, community development, identity transformation, or social/political empowerment. In parallel fashion, the Fraternity’s policymakers drew on their own experiences of collective action when establishing the NGO. Because they had been blocked from full participation in churches on the basis of gender and ethnicity, they

REPOPULATING DEVELOPMENT: AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO STUDYING DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS

came to see indigenous women’s participation in a wide variety of spheres as inherently valuable. They were motivated to participate and enjoyed doing so, and assumed that other indigenous women also had similar desires. In some cases, their assumptions were correct but in others women were already active in other spheres or did not have the desire to become active. As in Namaste, the Fraternity’s policymakers saw the NGO as ‘‘diﬀerent” from other organizations and as central to employees and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” lives. The NGO’s policymakers and workers distinguished the NGO from MFIs by emphasizing education over loans in their daily interactions, labeling loans ‘‘revolving funds,” and the interest they charged ‘‘recognition fees.” In activities, the Fraternity’s employees highlighted that the Fraternity was ‘‘not like a bank that just gives a loan and then charges high interest rates,” but rather encouraged women ‘‘to be diﬀerent, to change” (Fraternity employee 2009). Women perceived this diﬀerence but many continued to join simply for loans, seeing the education as less important. This can in part be explained by the fact that members of social networks radiating from churches and ethnic associations generally recruited ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” These actors were less dedicated to the Fraternity’s discourse and served as mediators, at times translating the Fraternity’s program as one centering on loans. For example, one ‘‘beneﬁciary” heard about the Fraternity through her pastor who explained, ‘‘listen sister, there is a fund. And if you are in agreement, you have to get together with each other [to form a group] and take out a loan. Not a loan, a fund.” As in Namaste, the Fraternity’s policymakers asked for a good deal of time and energy from its employees and ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” Employees were expected to develop educational material with little support, travel at times very far distances to visit groups, complete evaluations, plan events with short notice, and seek external funding. Policymakers labeled its many, long activities mandatory for ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” In addition to regularly scheduled classes, which often lasted for multiple hours, they required ‘‘beneﬁciaries” to attend daylong conferences, ‘‘perform” in the presence of visiting donors, participate in NGO-led community projects and petitions, and gather with little notice for unscheduled activities. The Fraternity’s policymakers saw these additional activities as extra beneﬁts, but many women did not share this perception. The Fraternity’s policymakers were able to leverage the organization’s historical links to communities, and religious and ethnic identity in order to successfully enroll women into the view that it was not ‘‘just another MFI.” Many women saw the NGO as comparable to church projects with which they were familiar and were therefore more forgiving of numerous and long activities that mirrored church activities and less likely to think that other MFIs could serve as equivalent alternatives. The lack of equivalent alternatives in women’s eyes led to a number of outcomes among women: some became loyal to the Fraternity because they ‘‘bought in” to the NGO’s project; some ‘‘went through the motions” to maintain access to a loan; while others stayed in the NGO but reduced their levels of participation or exercised voice when they became dissatisﬁed. The Fraternity’s workers juggled the many demands placed on them and came up with creative solutions, or quickly left the organization by choice or dismissal. For example, because they were expected to promote attendance and women’s investment in education, but there was no eﬀective system for collecting basic information on ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” workers developed informal practices of sharing women’s contact information as well as the latest news about their progress,

27

families, or health among themselves. Rather than creating brand new educational components, they commonly recycled parts of previous lessons. Policymakers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” diﬀering perceptions of the Fraternity’s project inspired multiple forms of agency. In some cases, the Fraternity’s policymakers’ assumptions about indigenous women’s desire to participate created opportunities for previously inactive women to develop or fulﬁll desires for education, participation, and leadership. In other cases, it allowed others to deploy the language of participation and self-esteem instrumentally, to please staﬀ and leaders. Other women developed creative solutions to navigate policymakers’ expectations, disproportionate power, and their materialized manifestations. Realizing they could not avoid all mandatory activities without risking loans or prestige, some women developed hidden transcripts in which they complained among themselves about the time spent in activities. Others realized that they could miss a few activities, provided other members of their loan group attended, because the Fraternity was unlikely to discontinue a group if the majority of its members usually showed up. They therefore developed implicit agreements among group members to alternate missing activities. In the activities themselves, some arrived on time and actively participated whereas others, realizing attendance was usually taken at the end of activities, arrived late, stepped outside to use their phones in the middle of activities, or talked among themselves, indicating that women agreed to attend ‘‘required” activities but did not give them the level of import that policymakers expected (a subtle compromise). Thus, diﬀering views of development activities generated multiple responses, including hidden transcripts, guile, and compromise, which in turn shaped project trajectories. The Fraternity’s top-down policies and meanings interacted with workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries’” unscripted actions to produce heterogeneous outcomes for women. Some underwent internal transformations whereas others participated for extended periods of time without signiﬁcant changes in their self-esteem or sense of eﬃcacy. Even though the Fraternity charged a much lower interest rate than did Namaste, women across the board seemed to beneﬁt very little ﬁnancially from their participation. 11 (b) Developmental goals meet organizational goals Namaste and the Fraternity’s policymakers and many of their workers were driven by sincere desires to help Guatemalan women and create lasting changes. But these desires conﬂicted with organizational drives toward management and survival, alongside the lack of known technologies that clearly linked inputs and outputs. In the face of these tensions, policymakers and workers responded creatively by leveraging interactions with ‘‘beneﬁciaries” and materials. Namaste’s leaders sought to help poor women with small loans but their attempts to do so became intimately tied with their attempts to manage women. Policymakers expected women to see businesses as central to their lives, desire to expand them, and invest considerable time, energy, and risk in doing so. These notions manifested, for example, in monthly one-on-one visits between women and workers. These visits were designed to help women calculate their profits/losses and provide them with advice, and ensure that women were investing loans in their businesses and implementing previous advice (in part to determine their eligibility for another loan). In practice, employees often emphasized managing over helping, focusing on paperwork and pressuring women to take personal responsibility for their businesses’

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WORLD DEVELOPMENT

successes or failures. They provided such advice as ‘‘take your business seriously because only you can be detrimental to it,” ‘‘you have to be careful to not take rests in your production because your interest payments depend on this,” ‘‘dedicate more time to your business,” and ‘‘weave more” (Namaste Volunteer, 2010). In the face of uncertain technologies, Namaste’s policymakers substituted their lofty goals of poverty reduction and development for more manageable, quantiﬁable goals that were assumed to have these as spillover eﬀects. They focused on increasing women’s business incomes as the key to addressing more ambitious goals, carefully tracking women’s monthly proﬁts and developing a single indicator (return on investment) as a proxy for success. By assigning each woman a borrower identiﬁcation and loan number, collecting demographic and business data, and assigning women ‘‘scores” for their levels of adherence to workers’ advice, they displaced and then reassembled women in a more ‘‘transportable, reproducible, and diﬀusible” forms (Callon, 1986, p. 11), essentially creating a virtual reality in which borrowers were roughly equivalent. Yet, policymakers made no similar attempt to collect data on the degree to which loans were indeed improving family and community wellbeing. Policymakers therefore leveraged both ‘‘knowledge-producing” materials and ignorance to maintain the illusion of a predictable, knowable world. Although policymakers’ emphasized transparency and evaluation, system goals of organizational survival, felt by policymakers and workers alike, critically shaped feedback loops. For example, Namaste was originally founded with the aim of helping the poorest of the poor women who lacked access to loans. Through evaluation processes, Namaste’s policymakers realized that they were not having the desired eﬀect among these women because they would often channel their loans toward consumption. In response, policymakers simply adjusted their target population, rather than questioning their core programs. Thus Namaste’s ‘‘failure” only served as an impetus for similar projects, although targeted at diﬀerent ‘‘beneﬁciaries.” The Fraternity’s policymakers aimed to challenge a status quo that marginalized indigenous women but replaced it with their own vision of ‘‘appropriate” identities and behaviors. They leveraged interactions with ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” procedures, and materials to communicate their vision of a ‘‘good, Christian, Mayan woman:” one who raises animals and makes her own organic animal feed, has a vegetable garden fertilized by organic compost, makes traditional handicrafts and wears a traje rather than Western clothing, cares for the environment and prepares healthy foods, and upholds traditional Mayan values that focus community, rather than individual, wellbeing. Policymakers incorporated classes that aligned with this vision. Women were taught how to compost and use organic fertilizer even if their businesses involved buying and selling scarves, to make cloth bags to replace plastic bags even if their businesses involved raising pigs, and to care for vegetable gardens even if their businesses involved embroidery. Loan contracts reinforced these values by including a number of behavioral and value-based provisions. For example, policymakers banned women from using loans in tiendas (small stores), in which women sold sodas, chips, and sweets because they involved selling unhealthy products that were packaged in environmentally-unsound plastic, and made by foreign companies, like Coca-Cola, that promoted a materialistic ‘‘consumer” culture. In the face of ambitious goals and uncertain technologies, the Fraternity’s policymakers maintained their focus on multiple, long-term goals and managed the uncertainty this

generated by focusing on process over results—emphasizing the slow nature of internal and community transformations. This allowed ‘‘developers” to remain conﬁdent in the face of uncertainty as long as they could point to anecdotal stories as evidence of their eventual success. They additionally relied on headcounts and photographs in order to link ‘‘inputs” and ‘‘outputs,” all the while decoupling evaluation materials from their actual practices. Policymakers leveraged ignorance, neglecting to collect even basic information about women’s businesses and incomes, which allowed them to assume positive economic eﬀects. Policymakers’ emphasis on process also allowed them to navigate tensions between development and system goals, such that they were able to interpret a variety of behaviors as signs of success. For example, employees mentioned women bathing as evidence of their self-esteem, using organic compost as evidence of recapturing indigenous values, and making vague statements in the context of NGO activities as evidence of new-found senses of eﬃcacy, even when women were clearly repeating ‘‘correct” answers. Policymakers and employees alike pointed to women’s participation in NGO activities as proof of success, despite the fact that they often required women to attend. They enlisted exceptional ‘‘success cases” as ‘‘spokeswomen” (Callon, 1986)—presenting their experiences as representative. Thus in both Namaste and the Fraternity, policymakers and workers creatively intertwined attempts at assisting and managing ‘‘beneﬁciaries” in order to address the tension between their drives to help women and maintain control. ‘‘Beneﬁciaries” reacted in a variety of ways. Women sometimes cooperated with these attempts to manage their identities and behaviors, some went through the motions to establish relationship with wellconnected employees or organizations, and still others leveraged the inconsistencies between discourse and practice to criticize ‘‘developers” behavior. Policymakers also creatively framed their goals and enlisted people and materials to mitigate the sense of uncertainty generated by the tension between their ambitious goals and uncertain technologies, and leveraged evaluation processes and materials to buﬀer their core practices and reinforce their existing projects. This allowed policymakers to balance development and organizational goals (Ebrahim, 2003). While the tensions being addressed and the general processes were comparable across the two NGOs, the particular strategies ‘‘developers” selected were products of their distinct webs of meaning, creative strategizing, and interactions of the ground, leading the two NGOs in very diﬀerent directions. 7. CONCLUSIONS Although they have advanced our understanding of development, applied and critical scholars have at times relied on incomplete depictions of interventions and the people they involve. An agent-based approach that is attuned to the ‘‘multiplicity of practices under the name of development” (Rossi, 2004, p. 556) and focuses on the interactions between diverse people and their socio-material environments acts as a corrective. It repopulates development by recognizing agency and diversity, and complicates development by recognizing that development projects ‘‘have multiple social lives,” (Rao & Greenleaf, 2013, p. 290) and are characterized by various forms of power. In the cases of Namaste and the Fraternity, an agent-based approach revealed the interactional origins of interventions, organizational characteristics, and development models and the various ways that NGOs’ policymakers

REPOPULATING DEVELOPMENT: AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO STUDYING DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS

institutionalized development networks to their own advantage. But it also demonstrated that because development NGOs are characterized by tensions at multiple levels, there remained considerable room for negotiation and translation on the part of workers and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” alike. This approach forces researchers and practitioners to view development interventions as ongoing, contingent relationships rather than one-sided interventions on the part of the

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global north into the global south. It pushes them to see ‘‘beneﬁciaries,” development workers, and their socio-material realities as co-creating development practices and experiences. Perhaps most notably, it encourages scholars and practitioners once and for all to abandon the search for the ‘‘best” development technology or organizational model, because it demonstrates that these never convert predictably into practices, experiences, and outcomes.

NOTES 1. Policymakers are those who craft NGOs’ formal policies, regardless of the degree to which these formal policies reﬂect on the ground practices. Workers are those who carry out NGO activities in oﬃces or communities, and ‘‘beneﬁciaries” are those who receive goods or services from NGOs. Of course, the degree to which people on the ground actually beneﬁt from development projects varies, and unfortunately the term ‘‘beneﬁciary” implies passivity, which this article is actively attempting to combat. Thus, throughout the article, the term is placed in quotes to reﬂect these notes of caution. These terms refer to ideal types; in reality the positions of these actors are likely to vary across organizations, or even within a given organization over time. For example, a NGO may undergo transformations such that workers have more inﬂuence in policymaking such that roles become blurred and change over time. 2. The term NGO covers a wide variety of organizations. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on the literature on development NGOs— those that provide goods and/or services in hopes of contributing to broader development goals, rather than rights and advocacy-oriented NGOs. 3. The increased role of development NGOs accompanied trends that ‘‘decentered development,” represented by rapid/participatory rural appraisals, participatory learning action, and other strategies aimed at empowering the poor (Chambers, 1994, 1999, 2008). By the end of the 1980s, powerful development institutions such as the World Bank held up NGOs as ‘‘new agents with the capacity and commitment to make up for the shortcomings of the state and the market in reducing poverty,” that oﬀered comparative advantages over government-led development, which ‘‘included cost-eﬀectiveness, administrative ﬂexibility and an ability to work [closer] to the poor.” In the following decade, NGOs were incorporated in the ‘‘good governance agenda” (Lewis, 2009, p. 32; see Diamond, 1999; Staudt & Jaquette, 1983). 4. Some have continued to argue that NGOs possess enormous potential in the ﬁeld of development and humanitarian aid. Riddell (2007) ﬁnds that NGOs often meet their immediate objectives, although he acknowledges gaps in data and relies heavily on NGO and donor agencies’ own publications. 5. European-funded NGOs often faced less pressure to conform to results-based management, beneﬁted from discourses of ‘‘partnership” to a greater degree, and often enjoyed more ﬂexibility on the ground than did US-funded NGOs (see for example Schuller, 2012).

6. For examples, see the studies conducted as part of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (http://www.povertyactionlab.org/). 7. The fact that NGOs are able to act creatively to ‘‘integrate critics and critiques in their policy discourse [for example, regarding ‘‘bottom-up” participation] with limited eﬀect on practices” (Bierschenk, 2008, p. 10) challenges typical instrumental views of development policies in which policies address development problems and guide practice. Yet, even when they do not guide on the ground practices, policies continue to serve other ends, including enrolling other actors (donors, media, government oﬃcials) in one’s project (Mosse, 2003, 2005). 8. As a caveat, some may consider Namaste a ‘‘pure” development NGO and the Fraternity a social justice NGO. I ﬁnd these distinctions a bit arbitrary, as the two NGOs leverage similar technologies, Namaste’s policymakers frequently speak of the social and political spillover of their programing, and the Fraternity’s leaders explicitly draw on the language of development. Because NGOs have several diﬀerent faces, rather than establish at the onset what ‘‘counts” as a development NGO, I follow in the tradition of Dorothy Hilhorst in treating development NGOs not as static entities but rather as open-ended processes (Hilhorst, 2003). 9. This belief reﬂected broader trends in the ﬁeld of development in which, while scholars and practitioners increasingly recognized the multifaceted nature of poverty, they saw limited access to health, education, and political power as consequences of resource deﬁciency rather than the causes of it (Kabeer, 2004, p. 2). 10. This reﬂected a broader trend in which development is seen as entailing both personal, internal, transformations alongside other changes in the poor’s environments (Appadurai, 2004; Nussbaum, 2001; Rowlands, 1997). 11. Unlike Namaste, the Fraternity did not make any attempts to track women’s incomes or levels of business growth, so it is diﬃcult to assess the degree to which women beneﬁted from the Fraternity’s loans. However, interviews and ethnographies revealed that many women felt that their businesses could not survive without loans, indicating that they were not becoming more proﬁtable over time. One woman described the period between repaying the loan and receiving a new one as ‘‘living without water.”

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