Monitoring Movements in Development Aid by Jensen Casper Bruun;Winthereik Brit Ross; & Brit Ross Winthereik

Author:Jensen, Casper Bruun;Winthereik, Brit Ross; & Brit Ross Winthereik [Jensen, Casper Bruun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3339672
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

5

Weedy Infrastructure: Monitoring Environmental Partnerships

Monitoring in Partnerships

In previous chapters we described some inventive initiatives that aim to create better platforms for knowledge about aid activities and projects—knowledge that is meant to be beneficial not only to aid organizations but also to policy makers and to various publics. A study of these endeavors, however, didn’t get us in touch with any actual aid development projects. So far, we have heard little about how such projects operate, or about how accountability and transparency matter to the people who instigate them. And we have heard next to nothing about the infrastructures for accountability, transparency, and knowledge making that are already in place—the infrastructures that aid organizations currently rely on in their daily operations. Yet such infrastructures do exist, and, as we shall see, they too are inventive in their own ways. These ways, however, have little to do with cutting-edge technological innovation or macro-level knowledge sharing. Rather, such aid information infrastructures result in the invention of organizational and collaborative practices. As Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard say, “much development knowledge is down to earth” (1997a, 18).

Nevertheless, these kinds of practical inventions are also hugely important. They concern always urgent questions about how development consultants can gain knowledge about aid projects taking place all over the world and, centrally, how such knowledge can be transported back and forth between aid headquarters, donors’ offices, and non-governmental organizations’ project sites. In this context, infrastructure making and the knowledge practices that undergird it are themselves political. Indeed, infrastructure making is part of an ontological transformation that reshapes what the politics of development aid is and what it can be.

This chapter focuses on “monitoring and evaluation” (“M&E”) in the Conservation Department of the Danish office of NatureAid. NatureAid Denmark has an executive board and a secretary general. It is divided into three departments: Conservation, Fundraising, and Communication. Located on the renovated third floor of an office building in a run-down part of central Copenhagen, the three departments share a large, semi-open office space. Our fieldwork centered on monitoring and evaluation activities in the self-described “Third World Team” of the Conservation Department.1

In recent years, NatureAid has been short on funds. In this situation, the Copenhagen office has worked to produce new forms of evidence of the effectiveness of its projects. Occasionally, such evidence can be brought to the table during negotiations with donors or other stakeholders. More often, it is simply part of everyday routines. Formal systems of representation are deeply embedded in this infrastructure, and standardized documentation and reporting formats are omnipresent in the office’s work.

We entered NatureAid’s office by signing a standardized form, called the “terms of reference,” that had been drafted and revised through negotiations with the head of the Conservation Department. The terms defined our partnership with NatureAid and stipulated that we would be allowed to study its accountability practices for a year. In return, we would organize two workshops during which staff members would be invited to reflect on existing modes of “doing accountability” in the organization.

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