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- Convenors:
-
Ben Eyre
(University of East Anglia)
Piyush Pushkar (University of Manchester)
Aneil Tripathy (University of Bologna)
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- Discussants:
-
Marc Brightman
(Università di Bologna)
Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge University)
Chika Watanabe (University of Manchester)
- Formats:
- Panel Workshop
- Stream:
- Politics and Power
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel and workshop facilitates conversation about next steps for ethnography of audit and accountability practices. We take forward the project of interrogating the power of audit cultures as well as attending to its limits.
Long Abstract:
Studies of "audit culture" (Power 1997; Strathern 2000) have exposed regimes of truth in which quantitative indicators have become increasingly pervasive. Such measurements have become important as instruments for institutions to use within their internal governance, and in external representations to the public, to employees, and to 'beneficiaries'. Moreover, people have been encouraged to understand their responsibilities as individuals through a prism of accountability conceived through calculable inputs and outputs.
Emerging trends in global health, green and social finance, and academia reveal transformations in audit practices. New conceptions of responsibility (Shore 2017) and accountability (Reubi 2018) raise new questions for anthropologists. As well as documenting the impact of encroaching audit practices and technologies, anthropologists have begun to draw attention to their ambiguities, and even opportunities. Critical responses have been supplemented by attention to 'metrics work' (Adams 2015). Others suggest opportunities for ethnographers to engage outside the audit culture critique (McLellan 2020).
Our panel facilitates a conversation about next steps for ethnography of audit and accountability practices. We take forward the project of interrogating the power of audit cultures as well as attending to its limits. Key questions include:
How does discussion of different meanings of 'responsibility' and 'accountability' enrich the debate?
What role do suspicion and mistrust, resistance and rule-breaking play?
How do different actors engage with the opportunities and constraints of audit cultures?
How are existing power structures, upheld or subverted by quantification, monitoring, and evaluation technologies?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the archaeological links between audit and the Catholic rite of confession, in their structures and the ways subjects are forced to be reflexive. It considers how aid workers negotiate the boundaries of ethical practice within the constraints of audit systems.
Paper long abstract:
Techniques of audit are a prominent feature of contemporary publicly funded institutions. While such accountability systems are often understood as broadly ethical, critical perspectives note their coercive nature, seeing audit regimes as instruments of governmentality for disciplining and creating self-regulating subjects, diminishing autonomy and premised on an absence of trust. In this paper, I seek to extend this critical perspective to the ethics of audit. In so doing I reveal how the roots of apparently modern, scientific systems for eliciting truth are to be found in the Christian rite of confession, audit being one of a number of quasi- scientific disciplines to draw on confession’s mechanisms. The paper then explores the parallels and implications for aid workers as moral agents and subjects in audit systems. Research with those involved in planning, monitoring and evaluation processes suggests how reporting and audit mechanisms both constrain the every-day work of development as well as reach into the future, delimiting what can be done. Respondents narratives’ emphasise their experiences of constraint and frustration as they try to negotiate audit’s more distorting effects. These narratives suggest how in its focus on accountability upwards, audit has more to do with power and control that it does ethics; and to achieve its purposes, it relies on processes of subjection rooted in confession.
Paper short abstract:
Venture capital is a young and mostly unprofessionalized industry; the recent advent of ESG lead these startup investors to being audited for the first time. Unlike in other industries, the arrival of metrics seems to be leading to an overturning of long self-reproducing power structures, however.
Paper long abstract:
Venture capital investors – equity investors in technology startup companies – are part of a young and still mostly unprofessionalised industry. Small partnership and gut-driven investment decision making are still the norm – and audit culture and responsibility pushed to the sidelines. Until very recently, that is, when the techlash movement caught the most well-known companies built on VC investment from Facebook, Twitter and Google to Uber and AirBnB; with the critique of big tech started also more scrutiny of the investors from the side of the entrepreneurs but also the VCs’ investors (the limited partners).
Enter the wave of ESG (environment, social, governance) principles and stakeholder capitalism in 2019. Slowly, more and more VC funds are jumping on the bandwagon of ‘doing investment better’ with ESG frameworks, impact measurement and specialised metrics for early stage companies. Based on ongoing fieldwork in London with a group of venture capital investors, I want to observe how a culture of (specific) metrics arrives for the first time in the VC industry and what the effects this new system has.
Counter to other contexts, many of the newly implemented ESG metrics – e.g. around increasing diversity and inclusion, fair treatment of employees or environmental impact – are turning power structures for VCs upside down. Making investors report data for the first time seems to be leading to more pressure to ‘be good’ across various vectors. How much of it is window dressing will have to be seen.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research about evidence-based development and emic concerns, this presentation offers an interrogation regarding the power of quantitative indicators to shape anti-poverty policymaking around the world.
Paper long abstract:
The last decades have witnessed the growth of "evidence-based development". This is the movement to reduce global poverty by producing evidence about the effectiveness of development programs and using that evidence to shape policymaking. It centers around the question of "what works to alleviate poverty" and on the randomized evaluation as the preferred methodology for producing knowledge. In 2019, three economists who spearheaded this movement were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their research findings which "have dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice". This presentation complexifies the certainty stated in this Nobel Prize’s announcement. Based on ethnographic research across the USA, Kenya, and India, my presentation shows how practitioners of evidence-based development themselves grapple with this question of "What difference, if any, did our work make in the world?” I examine the contrast between the enthusiasm of my interlocutors for the randomized evaluation taken to measure causal impact with the highest degree of certitude and the more difficult task of assessing the policy impact of evidence-based development. By weaving together vignettes that tell about collaborations with governments or suspicions about what kind of evidence an NGO van is moving around in western Kenya, I show that a central question for those who practice evidence-based development is “What does evidence manage to do?” My interlocutors’ experiences exhibit a sincere hope in evidence-based policy at the same time that they qualify the “power” of that evidence to reconfigure livelihoods worldwide.
Paper short abstract:
While donors draw on emotions to affirm development audit rules, emotional registers are also used by local civil society to negotiate unequal power relations with donors. Examining emotions of frustration in audits reveals how civil society strain for recognition in a pre-determined audit system.
Paper long abstract:
Audits are a key mechanism through which donors uphold the rules of accountability in international development projects. Anthropological research has demonstrated that audits are far from the technical practices they appear to be, but are important sites for the reproduction of power. In this paper, I build on audit cultures literature by examining the centrality of emotions in the implementation and contestation of audits within development bureaucracies. I focus on the experiences of national Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) in Ghana, a country often called a “success story” of good governance, to ask how are NGOs enrolled in, contesting, and negotiating audits? This paper contributes ethnographic examples of how power, politics, and position operate through affective registers within donor audits. I find that while donor staff draw on deliberate emotional registers to “instruct” NGOs on audit rules and reaffirm their power to determine these rules, paying attention to the emotions of frustration, irritation, and exasperation of NGO staff within these processes reveals how such rules are negotiated in everyday relations. NGO staff do not necessarily challenge audit regulations or the importance of accounting for aid funding, but they draw on registers of annoyance and dissatisfaction to strain towards self-respect, dignity, and recognition in a system where they have little power. By taking seriously the emotional responses of the NGOs that work within pre-determined audit systems, we can better understand how those with less power to set the rules negotiate recognition for their role and make the everyday work of audits more livable.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores a new social accounting technology in England: the fracking-related Traffic Light System. It considers a notion of power that guides some social analyses of accountability, and whether additional notions of power might provide further analytic purchase over today's world.
Paper long abstract:
Recent decades have witnessed the rise of a large human sciences scholarship on audit and accountability. One abiding concern in this scholarship has been to show how pernicious neoliberal accounting technologies can be, given their proclivity to oppress and repress, coerce and discipline. New social technologies of accounting, many have shown, forge neoliberal subjects, reorder social worlds, and produce perverse outcomes – not least, by failing to achieve their own ambitions of fostering accountability. By attending to new modes of accountability, some social analysts have thus sought to uncover the workings of power in today’s world, and to denounce the novel social technologies that enable them.
Less remarked upon in these analyses is the notion of power they sometimes presuppose. This is a power the powerful hold and the powerless resist; one that is illegitimate, morally dubious, and destined to do bad things to good people. In this paper, we wish to ask to what extent such conceptions of power hinder our ability to understand certain contemporary accounting technologies. We dwell in particular on one new social accounting technology in England: the fracking-related Traffic Light System (TLS). This is a public, open-access monitoring system created by the UK government so that anybody – scientists, activists, journalists, even anthropologists – can monitor fracking-induced earthquakes in real time. The operation of this particular social accounting technology invites an image of power as distributed not concentrated, exercised not possessed, reversible not fixed, morally capricious not certain.