Theorizing Aid and Conservation Projects

 
 
 

I look at the bureaucracy of aid to understand how administrative and bureaucratic requirements create social impacts. 

  • The administrative form of the project arose in the mid-20th century. It is a financially and temporally bound unit that organizes outputs and budget lines in the pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness. It grew from the world of business and was integrated into government institutions. Now, the unit of the project has become a defining characteristic of aid and conservation projects. The bureaucratic requirements of projects create new institutional imperatives and incentives both within and outside of aid and conservation. 

  • How has the unit of the project affected aid work and organizations/individuals who interact with aid or conservation? 

  • Ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Haiti with aid subcontractors, grassroots organizations, and farmers associations. 

    • The form of the project and the associated subcontracting within aid and conservation work creates incentives for subcontracting organizations to pursue bureaucratic notions of project success over broader pursuits of wellbeing for supposed beneficiaries. 

    • Grassroots organizations in the countryside change their form in order to acquire aid projects. 

    • Projects essentially become commodities put together by the labor of aid and exchanged between donors and subcontractors.  

    • Participants in aid and conservation projects often put a lot of labor into projects. While they may get compensated, it is meager in comparison to the benefits accrued by aid contractors when they can demonstrate successfully implemented projects.