Paper short abstract:

Some of international development's smokescreens of successful interventions disappear under ethnographic scrutiny. Understanding such voids can be more illuminating than studying the interventions themselves, which raises important questions about the interface of politics and development.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on the methodological implications of a multi-sited ethnography undertaken in 2016-17 in India and South Africa, which endeavoured to scrutinise the process of scaling up a particular international development intervention (a secondary school program focused on Education for Sustainable Development) from one country to the other. Faced with the realisation that the object of research existed in policy documents, NGO boardrooms and websites, but did not directly manifest in on-the-ground outcomes, the research turned from an examination of an intervention into an investigation into its absence. The resulting shift in research questions prompted a re-definition of what constitutes an 'intervention' and ultimately led to a new conceptualisation of the concept of scale, and the role of postcolonial states in mediating interventions administered by non-state actors. The iterative process of posing an assumption (existence of the intervention), the assumption being rejected (the postcolonial states' interference with the possibility of the intervention being implemented) and the emergence of a new research question (what political goals was the intervention meant to serve and the ways in which this might have contradicted the state's agendas) points to the strengths of the ethnographic method in its ability to constantly re-invent itself. This paper examines the implications of this constant re-invention to the comparative study of development and education in postcolonial settings.