Paper long abstract:

How 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? How can they know that their activities and projects in other parts of the world run smoothly and achieve their objectives? Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik explore these and many other questions in the monograph Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Partnerships and Infrastructures (2013, MIT Press). Doing so, they conceive of the world of development aid as a problematic landscape, populated by multiple actors, provisionally tied together by diverse accountability practices that are mediated by information infrastructures.

Seen through the lenses of science and technology studies (STS), infrastructure studies and anthropology, infrastructure becomes a tricky empirical and analytical object; one that is crucial not only for international aid development projects but for the ways in which we imagine global modernization at large. In this talk, Brit Ross Winthereik focuses on some of the empirical and analytical challenges posed by global aid infrastructures. These are due not least to the fact that development partnerships constantly redefine the conditions for improving accountability, and thus for the infrastructures required to support it.