Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tension between the contradictory demands of 'participation' and 'bureaucratization' in Pakistan's HIV sector. The ethnography shows that regardless of their relevance to local populations, projects that cannot produce measurable impact lose support from donors.

Paper long abstract:

Colleagues in Pakistan's HIV prevention sector who appear to rationalize their work privately, in terms of its intrinsic worth, or their emotional investment in it, subscribe in their professional lives to the instrumental rationality of the development sector in order to attain calculable ends using means—a rationality that travels (Mosse 2011) the globe, reducing people and their lives and deaths into measurable quantities. Local models of relatedness and personhood, informal networks in communities, and the particular social and emotional skills of development workers are co-opted under the rubric of 'participation' while rolling-out projects, yet the relations of affect, trust and confidence built by these workers during the work of HIV prevention are not translated into templates for reporting-up because they are not measurable in term of head (or body) counts or demonstrable for their impact in the form of diagrams/graphs. This paper explores the tension between the contradictory demands of 'participation' and 'bureaucratization' in Pakistan's HIV sector. The ethnography shows that regardless of their relevance to local populations, projects that cannot produce measurable impact lose support from donors. The staff and community-based organizations who are less equipped in the technical demands of the sector are either forced to extend their roles into report-writing, template-filling and indicator-measuring or are driven out of the sector altogether regardless of their interpersonal qualities. This can be regarded as a violence of aid bureaucratization and raises questions about the value of the 'intermediaries of development' and their unquantifiable work in international aid and development.