Abstract
In her first book Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development (2020), Rebecca Warne Peters presents an interesting account of the international development industry. This case study is an outcome of her ethnographic investigation of the Good Governance in Angola Programme (GGAP). This was a quinquennial programme implemented in two phases in several provinces of Angola during 2007–2012. It is a comprehensive narrative of how the development industry reinforces and perpetuates the same structural inequalities that it claims to contest.
The book comprises five chapters. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the evolution of GGAP. It examines the interactions among various levels of development workers associated with the programme. It will be of particular interest to development practitioners, policy experts and scholars. It is a remarkable study of development work and workers in the context of international development interventions in Africa.
The author employs a class analysis to decipher the internal dynamics of the international development industry. While donors, policymakers, experts, analysts, and consultants comprise the international development bourgeoisie, the administrative as well as implementation staff form the labouring implementariat. The latter is mainly responsible for programme operations and achieving the goals related to development policy and planning. The hierarchies among workers and recipients as well as among workers are evident; for instance, implementation agents bear the disproportionate blame of programme failures.
The first chapter deconstructs the multiple hierarchies plaguing development interventions. Tasks performed by individuals are unequally valued depending upon the status of the worker. For instance, the development imaginary or common sense presumes that foreign policymakers have greater expertise in designing and formulation of development interventions. The tasks of the local or national staff are not specialised; fieldwork is considered inferior to analytical office work performed by the international elite. The hierarchical distinctions among the various wings of the same development institutions – the international headquarters, country office, or local implementation office – are manifestations of the global inequalities of race, citizenship, gender, or geography. The double burden of interpretive labour is forced upon frontline development workers; they must perceive the attitudes and expectations of not only their superiors but also the communities with whom they work. With impossible demands imposed upon them and inadequate resources allotted to fulfil those demands, most of their work is rendered invisible. This shadow work is analogous to reproductive labour performed by women in households.
Chapter 2 further explains the paradoxes of development through the concept of inputs and outputs. The efforts and inputs that facilitate achieving high order outputs in terms of successful development encounters, such as commute to the field site or rapport-building exercises, are devalued as unproductive. There is a dual commodification of not only the implementariat but also the communities as objects of intervention. For the international elite and donors engaged in planning and evaluation, the last visible level of staff is the project manager. Those below the management level engaged in implementation are invisible and interchangeable, and therefore inputs themselves.
In chapter 3, the example of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities is used to elaborate upon the burdens of interpretive labour. As a critical practice for knowledge production, M&E aims at making the development workers accountable in terms of resource management inter alia. However, accountability is directed upwards from the bottom, but never the other way round. Far from being a constructive exercise, it ends up solidifying and reproducing the extant unequal power relationships among development professionals and beneficiaries, national and expatriate staff, or administrative and provincial staff. The distribution of interpretive labour is skewed because those who wield more power have to bear less burden of labour, and vice versa. The international development industry thus tends to institutionalise various forms of structural violence; surveillance and evaluation mechanisms being key tools for the same. It is not surprising that the GGAP M&E systems, like many others, are designed from the perspective of the donors and administrative staff rather than that of the implementation staff or the beneficiaries.
Chapter 4 digs deeper into the origins of the programme. The corporate interests of donors drove decisions such as the choice of the sites for intervention. The relationship between the developed countries and those to whom they provide aid is often a patron–client relationship. When requests for applications (RFAs) were invited, submissions from small and relatively new organisations were not given due consideration and quickly dismissed. The concerns of donors and the international elite were more reputational than having anything to do with the conditions of the local communities. In terms of knowledge production, the donors prescribed greater value to the knowledge received from existing interventions by other organisations. In contrast, the field staff considered the knowledge they produced via interactions and interventions with the communities as authentic. The interactions among donors and implementers are essentially those among various sections of the dominant class possessing varying forms of capital.
The fifth chapter explores how the goals and methods of intervention were adopted. International development common sense holds that field staff should do as instructed; ideation and innovation is the job of those at the upper echelons. It would be constructive if decisions are taken considering the needs of the communities and not the institutional relationships among staff members.
The concluding chapter makes a case for development without borders. Encounters among development professionals are more frequent as compared to those among them and their recipients. Thus, the inherent social inequalities present in their institutions ought to be addressed first. The development implementariat comprises agents who must act upon the decisions made by the principals – albeit the former are agents without agency. As a class whose work is least recognised, devalued and almost invisible, its members are accorded an inferior status. For development organisations to become progressive, this misrecognition of work must not be the norm. Implementation agents must also be considered as decision-makers performing valuable and productive work for furthering institutional goals.
One of the strengths of the book is its attention to detail. The author’s keen observations add the necessary rigour to the analysis grounded in sociological and development theory. This study is unique in its emphasis on the lowest tier of development agents for exposing the structural power dynamics within the institutions. It questions the underlying pyramidal structures amidst which these agents of social change operate and continue to be exploited. In doing so, it suggests alternative practices to establish equality and dignity of labour within the organisations before working for development in the local communities.
The author acknowledges that her implementariat-centric analysis leads to the exclusion of many other narratives. Similarly, the local community perspectives are not taken into account. Future research could be oriented towards examining how successful such organisations have been in achieving participatory development and decentralisation. Have capacity-building interventions been realised with the participation of communities? Can the latter be imagined as active agents of change rather than mere beneficiaries/recipients of aid and development interventions? Nevertheless, the book manages to lay bare the power imbalances and multiple hierarchies which characterise archetypal development machinery. On the whole, the book is a crucial read for academics, scholars, and students of international development practice in the global South, particularly Angola and Africa.