Monitoring movements in development aid : recursive partnerships and infrastructures / / Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910815198603321
• Autore: Jensen Casper Bruun
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge, Mass. : , : The MIT Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• ISBN: 0-262-31702-8; 0-262-31701-X
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (213 p.)
• Collana: Infrastructures series
• Disciplina: 338.91
• Soggetti: Economic assistance - Information technology; Economic development projects - Evaluation; Information technology - Economic aspects; Infrastructure (Economics); Economic development
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Infrastructures and development aid: fields, fractals and frictions -- Recursions: partnerships, infrastructure, ethnography -- Inventive frontiers: aid infrastructures and their users -- Development loop: technological politics for transparency -- Weedy infrastructure: monitoring environmental partnerships -- Wormholes: loops of audit and learning -- Monitoring movements.
• Sommario/riassunto: An examination of emerging information infrastructures that are intended to increase accountability and effectiveness in partnerships for development aid.In Monitoring Movements in Development Aid, Casper Jensen and Brit Winthereik consider the processes, social practices, and infrastructures that are emerging to monitor development aid, discussing both empirical phenomena and their methodological and analytical challenges. Jensen and Winthereik focus on efforts by aid organizations to make better use of information technology; they analyze a range of development aid information infrastructures created to increase accountability and effectiveness. They find that constructing these infrastructures is not simply a matter ; of designing and implementing technology but entails forging new platforms for action that are simultaneously imaginative and practical, conceptual and technical. After presenting an analytical platform that draws on science and technology studies and the anthropology of development, Jensen and Winthereik present an ethnography- based analysis of the mutually defining relationship between aid partnerships and infrastructures; the crucial role of users (both actual and envisioned) in aid information infrastructures; efforts to make aid information dynamic and accessible; existing monitoring activities of an environmental NGO; and national-level performance audits, which encompass concerns of both external control and organizational learning.Jensen and Winthereik argue that central to the emerging movement to monitor development aid is the blurring of means and ends: aid information infrastructures are both technological platforms for knowledge about aid and forms of aid and empowerment in their own right.