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This is a book about emerging aid information infrastructures constructed to enhance modes of creating accountability and of ensuring effectiveness in aid development. It is about technologies developed to monitor organizations , practices, or projects involved in aid and to make information accessible and transparent to a broad range of global users. It is also about aid partnership as an ideal and as a collaborative form. It is at once about these empirical phenomena and about the analytical and methodological challenges they pose for science and technology studies (STS) and for social and cultural anthropology. We describe and discuss a number of initiatives, places, organizations, and people involved in the monitoring of development aid. Across these practices, people are concerned with how to make better use of information technology in order to improve accountability in aid practices. The sites and actors we study differ considerably, and they are not all connected. We designate this loosely coupled global assemblage (Ong and Collier 2005), which some actors would like to see much more integrated, monitoring movement, a term that provides us with a way of keeping the empirical and the conceptual at the same level. In one sense, information infrastructures, monitoring, transparency, and partnerships are parts of the same set of activities and ways of thinking. Without the strong contemporary focus on partnership, aid information infrastructures would look quite different. But then, without information infrastructures that give form to ideas about transparency and accountability the notion and ideal of partnership, too, would differ. However, this is only one side of the story. For in another sense partnership provides a collaborative form encompassing all these different activities. This is important for everything that follows, because partnerships create relations of recursive implication. In a context in which almost everything can be conceived as a partnership, relational loops between widely differing actors are Introduction xiv Introduction rampant. Such loops define what counts as knowledge within partnerships, what counts as transparency, and even what counts as partnership itself. In this sense, partnership is a self-contextualizing form. This is an empirical point, but it is also of conceptual and methodological consequence. Engaging the monitoring movement, we suggest, entails conceptual and methodological invention (see Jensen 2012) and a rethinking of dominant understandings of what is involved in, and entailed by, the knowledgemaking practices of STS and social anthropology. We begin our exploration of aid information infrastructures by pointing attention to a document that aroused our curiosity: the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. The declaration (available at http://www.oecd .org), signed by 111 countries in 2005, “lays out a practical action-orientated roadmap to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development.” It was organized around five principles: “ownership, alignment, harmonization , managing for results, and mutual accountability.” At its heart was a wish to commit donors and receiving countries to making their strategies, their plans, and their actions transparent to one another. Among other things, the declaration committed donors to working toward standardized monitoring and evaluation systems so that partnering governments would no longer be subject to reporting styles and formats defined by each individual donor. Moreover, the signing donors agreed to work toward aligning their funding strategies with the strategies and budgets of the receiving countries. Governments in the countries receiving aid, meanwhile, agreed to make budgets and planned decisions more transparent to donors and more open to public scrutiny in their domestic environments. We were fascinated by this image of the future of aid (see Anders 2005) and by questions of infrastructure that arise once one begins to think about new mechanisms of accountability and transparency. Our first idea centered on the notion of a chain of accountability. How, we wondered, can agencies located in Denmark, in Japan, or in the United Kingdom know that money spent on projects in Vietnam or in India has been spent well? (See also Rottenburg 2009.) How can they know that their activities and projects in other parts of the world run smoothly and achieve their objectives ? Central to this knowledge is aid information about project progress and financial flows. Such information is found in spreadsheets, indicators, charts, databases, and registries, but also in encounters and meetings that never make it into formal infrastructures. Thus, we became interested in exploring what would be required for aid information to remain intelligible and relevant as it moved from development projects to donor monitoring and evaluation units. We imagined [18.117.182.179] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 09:17 GMT...

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