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Ben Eyre
(University of East Anglia)
Piyush Pushkar
(University of Manchester)
Aneil Tripathy
(University of Bologna)
Send message to Convenors
Discussants:
Marilyn Strathern
(Cambridge University)
Marc Brightman
(Università di Bologna)
Chika Watanabe
(University of Manchester)
Formats:
Panel
Stream:
Politics and Power
Sessions:
Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Beyond 'audit cultures'? New critical approaches to accountability, responsibility, and metrics I.
Panel Pol03a at congress SIEF2021: Breaking the Rules: Power, Participation, Transgression.
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?
Anthropologists often critique data use as a move towards quantification that reframes political problems as technical, enabled by the complicity of data practitioners. In contrast, we argue that practitioners are aware of the political nature of data used to create (perform) particular worlds.
Paper long abstract:
The use of metrics to drive policy and environmental interventions is often the stated intention of policymakers, financiers, and engineers working on governance and sustainability. Anthropologists often argue that quantification and measurement reframe political problems as technical problems and that flattens complex realities. This critique misrecognizes the intentions of many practitioners, who are aware of data’s political nature and pragmatically use measurement precisely for its potential to change the environments that they measure. Indeed, they treat metrics very much in the same way as do scholars working within performative and material semiotic frameworks. In this paper, we analyze this intention by putting anthropological theory into conversation with the uses of data and measurement in impact investing and climate finance.
We hope to add to discussions on measurement within anthropology by exploring the ways anthropologists have imagined the perspectives and motivations of those who measure. Drawing from the work of Julia Elyachar on the tandem and often entangled uses of social science artifacts and technologies by academics and practitioners, the authors (including one academic, one practitioner in impact investing and one hybrid academic/practitioner in climate finance) consider the question posed in the panel abstract: “How do different actors engage with the opportunities and constraints of audit cultures?” from a slightly different angle: “How do we best understand the terms of engagement of different actors, including ourselves, to the opportunities and constraints of audit culture?”
The value chain approach to dairy development requires ‘impact work’ by funders, implementers, and supposed beneficiaries to create evidence to pursue their interests. I explore its effects without uncovering an ‘audit juggernaut’ (Sampson 2015) by attending to its uneven transformation of subjects.
Paper long abstract:
Dairy development projects have proliferated in Tanzania, characterised by a 'value chain approach' (Freeman 2013) that valorises market-based and technological fixes. Despite claims that milk is ‘white gold’ (dhahabu nyeupi) for farmers, the rewards flow to small numbers of elites: largely international NGOs and companies, national institutions, and connected consultants.
A value chain approach requires the production of impact data to show 'what works' through metrics that demonstrate efficacy and efficiency; enabling comparison with financial return on investment and influence on government policy. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork, I show how this is possible because of work by funders, implementers, and supposed beneficiaries of these projects. Influenced by analysis of 'metrics work' (Adams 2015) in global health, I suggest that 'impact work' is somehow common to poor smallholder farmers and billionaire philanthropists such as Bill Gates: all are involved in the production and use of evidence of impact to further their interests in and through dairy development.
Impact work is not adequately explained by or as neoliberal governmentality and does not uniformly shape the behaviour, intentions, or subjectivity of those who carry it out. Rather than uncovering an ‘audit juggernaut’ (Sampson 2015) I show how impact work functions without co-opting actors and with minimal collaboration or even commonality. Neither does impact work fail because of ignorance of local knowledge (Scott 1998). Impact work works because it enables the obviation of differing perspectives and through this contributes to profoundly asymmetric effects characteristic of opportunities afforded by ‘white gold’.
Where previous scholars documented the eclipsing of other forms of accountability by the calculative rationalities of accounting, in my field, multiple forms of accountability overlapped. The duty to “balance the books” was a key driver, but also had to be enforced by direct coercion.
Paper long abstract:
My paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the UK public healthcare system, which is undergoing wide-reaching transformations and fiscal austerity. I undertook participant-observation with political activists who objected to these transformations, as well as interviewing the managers and politicians who were administering the reforms.
Campaigners sought to mobilise the concept of accountability against cuts and privatisation, arguing that managers and politicians were not being honest about the potential consequences. While managers and politicians were often sympathetic to activists’ points of view, they felt constrained by “the reality” of limited funds. However, managers felt unable to speak honestly either regarding the financial rationale for reforms, or the possibility of negative consequences, because they feared losing their jobs. Thus accountability to one’s employer became a means of enforcing reforms that were necessary to balance the books according to budgets set by central government.
Activists had no means of engaging with the Westminster politicians whom they understood as primarily responsible. Thus they “held accountable” the local managers and politicians with whom they had a relationship. This recognition of accountability as a relational technology sheds light on the workings of the contemporary state. The various meanings of accountability end up working in favour of increasing power centralisation, as the people responsible for making decisions driving iniquitous healthcare reforms remain insulated from political accountability.
Reflecting on the role of impact assessments in various market-based sustainability initiatives, this paper argues that the audit culture of neoliberal sustainability leads to a performative impactfulness wherein impact assessments do not merely describe impacts, but in some sense constitute them.
Paper long abstract:
Voluntary sustainability certifications are one of the most prominent examples of so-called non-state market-driven governance systems, which reflect a neoliberal belief (following Harvey's understanding of this complicated term) that markets are able to generate efficient, optimal outcomes in terms of social and environmental welfare. And yet, these certification schemes rarely generate the kinds of social, environmental, and economic impacts they promise to deliver. This inconvenient reality threatens the legitimacy of both standards developers and the corporations that rely on those standards in their sustainability claims, prompting these actors to carry out technically complex impact assessments to “objectively” demonstrate that they are, in fact, “making an impact.” Drawing on interviews and participant observation with people responsible for developing, promoting, and enforcing sustainability standards in the Kenyan tea supply chain, and paying close attention to the way this group of standardizers thinks about their own and their organizations’ impacts, this paper analyzes the increasing prominence of formalized impact assessments in the sustainability discourse through the lens of performativity. It argues that impact assessments, despite claiming to be merely descriptive, actually constitute social and environmental impacts for many people working in sustainability today, offering a different way of approaching audit culture and its effects.
Drawing on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork about donor-funded health information system building projects in Malawi, I conceptualize mundane audit technologies as socially constructed and maintained infrastructures. I explore the techno-social networks that undergird accountability routines.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropological research on audit culture in global health has been centered around the proliferation of performance-based indicators and the consequential health data vacuuming from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Taking such interest in neoliberal governmentality as a point of departure, I propose an alternative approach to audit and accountability practices in global health. Instead of only examining audit protocols and how they are mobilized to produce accountable subjects, I pay attention to mundane audit tools and how they are placed across diverse social settings to enable the accumulation of standardized data. To understand the very fabrics of the techno-social networks that undergird accountability routines, I adopt Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier's notion of global assemblage as the main analytical framework to explore large-scale data management systems as accountability infrastructures. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic fieldwork about donor-funded health information system strengthening projects in Malawi, this paper highlights three features of the socially produced accountability in LMICs under complex global health partnerships: (1) The process of building enumerative technologies involves highly contingent and diverse global connections. (2) The networks that support project-based data infrastructures are socially fragile due to its patchiness. (3) There exists a culture of improvisation among health workers to (partially) stabilize documentation procedures in local facilities. This paper illustrates the methodological usefulness of researching the social life of mundane audit tools. Such focus on the multiplicity behind audit expansion allows anthropologists to rethink the politics of accountability production beyond its normative effects.
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