Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Based on fourteen months of fieldwork among those who evaluate anti-poverty interventions and work to transform “successful” interventions into policy and programs “at scale” around the world, my dissertation examines the practice of evidence-based development. Since the early 2000s, an influential group of economists and development practitioners insists that global poverty alleviation efforts should be grounded in scientific evidence about “what works” to reduce poverty and propose randomized evaluations as the best instrument for identifying effective solutions worldwide. A method that originated in agricultural sciences and medicine, randomized evaluations are a specific form of experiment that consist of dividing randomly the target population into treatment and control groups in order to measure the impact of an intervention. For instance, I have studied a project in India that compared educational outcomes between adolescent girls that received an empowerment intervention and those who did not.In a context where the eradication of “poverty in all its forms everywhere” has been positioned as the top global priority by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, to be reached by 2030, and a substantial debate persists over the relevance of international aid, evidence-based development has taken shape as a significant movement tying together new research and policy institutes, funding agencies, NGOs, and governments across the planet. Following people and projects across Kenya, India, and the USA, this dissertation aims to document the imaginations of a better world made of ideas but also of centrally constituted through repeated practices and technologies that sustain evidence-based development. In the first chapter, I investigate how my interlocutors situate their work within older and contemporary development efforts, with a focus on understanding what might give randomized evaluation evidence such actionable force to guide decision-making. The remaining chapters are all concerned with showing how evidence-based development seeks to impact millions of lives around the world either by extending a “proven” water sanitation initiative in Western Kenya (Chapter 2), by partnering with governments to reach the highest level of scale across countries (Chapter 3), or by devising frameworks to promote the generalizability of randomized evaluation’s findings across “contexts” (Chapter 4). Across all these case studies, this dissertation aims to make apparent the multiple (political) projects and imaginations that evolve alongside evidence-based development and condition both its possibilities and its limits to shape policy efforts around the world. I conclude with an actor-oriented reflection on the difficulty of assessing to what extent, and exactly in which ways, evidence-based development reconfigures funding priorities and policy agendas worldwide
Source: eScholarship@McGill (McGill)
DOI: 10.82308/50718
Author: Gedeon Achi, Fiona
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: No poverty
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3132704763