Having People, Having Heart by China Scherz;

Author:China Scherz; [Scherz, China]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Performance Philanthropy: Sustainable Development and the Ethics of Audit

You want to be an intelligent giver, but how can you gather enough reliable data to do a meaningful analysis? There is a simple ratio you can use in almost every giving situation to cut through misinformation or lack of information. Just as price-to-earnings (PE) has become a standard ratio for evaluating investments, there is also a ratio you can use in your philanthropy. It answers the question, “What is the cost of improving one person’s life?” I call it the cost-per-life, or CPL, ratio. (Smith and Thurman 2007, 224)

The move toward participation, sustainability, and community ownership at the turn of the twenty-first century was directed at least in part by a desire to increase aid effectiveness. In line with increasing returns on philanthropic investments, both large and small donors operating within this development paradigm have become more concerned with seeing the impact of the money they donate. This mode of normative decision-making relies on NGOs’ having the capacity to produce visible, often quantitative, proofs of their outcomes. These outcomes are then read against project expenses, and the resulting figure serves as a key measure of programs’ success and fundability—as we see in the cost-per-life-changed ratio championed by the philanthropic advising firm Geneva Global. These ever-increasing demands for quantifiable proof of success reflect global trends toward audit as a mode of ensuring accountability and ethical conduct (Power 1997; Strathern 2000). This method for ensuring accountability is fast becoming the dominant ethical framework in contemporary development work.

To comply with this ethical mode, NGOs like Hope Child have now developed internal monitoring and evaluation (M&E) departments dedicated to producing and collating reports and internal studies (Bornstein, Wallace, and Chapman 2006). Bureaucratic writing and statistical documentation play an important role in the composition and governance of populations (Foucault [1977] 1990, 2007; Scott 1998). In addition, these legible forms of bureaucratic practice often constitute structural violence through the “social production of indifference” (Herzfeld 1992), allowing “grave national cris[es]” to become “unexceptional, a matter of routine administration” (Gupta 2012, 22) and making state bureaucrats indifferent to the outcomes of their myriad programs, regardless of the noble intentions or motivations of those the state employs (Gupta 2012). While such insights are important for understanding how qualitative and quantitative forms of record keeping constitute and shape the conduct of the populations that Hope Child defined and managed through their programs, here I want to explore these forms of accounting from a different angle. In turning my attention to audit in this chapter and to virtue in chapter 6, I shift my focus from the roles of dependence and gifting in the ethical assemblages of sustainable development and charity to how actors involved in these assemblages think about questions of accountability and ethics. In doing so I attend to how these particular instantiations of utilitarianism and virtue ethics differ in their understanding of how ethicomoral codes ought to be implemented, the role of discipline and subjectivation within these theories, the

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