Implementing Inequality
The Invisible Labor of International Development

Published in January 2020, Implementing Inequality examines the international development industry's internal social dynamics and how they inadvertently replicate global inequalities.

An ethnographic study of development work in postwar Angola, Implementing Inequality demonstrates how the international development industry's internal social dynamics inadvertently replicate global inequalities. Underestimating the intense relational work of the development implementariat, its in-country implementation agents, the development industry sabotages itself and must revisit how to assess its work and workers.

Implementing Inequality is a rare book that comes alive in the best tradition of ethnographic description while building on solid theory. 
-Mark Schuller, author of Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti
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See more reviews here.

Chapter Summaries

​Introduction: inside the development encounter

​The introductory chapter presents the central case study of the Good Governance in Angola Program, or GGAP, operating at the time in the five shaded provinces shown here. Reviewing common characterizations of "the development encounter," this chapter outlines the book's central analytical concept of the development implementariat as that class of development workers charged to carry out interventions in-country.

Chapter 1: development hierarchies

This chapter discusses how development organizations "think" about their work and their workers, arguing that the industry's increasing professionalization and managerialism does not adequately recognize, nor support, the social, relational, and interpretive labor inherent to intervention, especially at the level of implementation. ​

chapter 2: development's inputs and outputs

Here, the everyday work of the GGAP's provincial field staff is presented and compared to the program's official prescriptions for such work, revealing how much of the field staff's daily labor is considered merely preparatory to the "real" work of development intervention. ​

chapter 3: reinforcing hierarchies: monitoring and evaluation

​This chapter demonstrates how the implementariat is doubly tasked with interpretive labor: development field agents must accomplish as much relational work inside their institutions as they do with their intended beneficiaries in local communities and partner organizations.

chapter 4: designing interventions for peers, not beneficiaries

Moving back from the day-to-day work of delivering the Good Governance in Angola Program, this chapter recounts how the intervention came about, tracing contentious debates over where the program should be implemented. Donors' and implementers' reputational concerns are shown to work at cross-purposes in international development as donors seek status among their peers and implementing organizations seek distinction from their peers. These lateral ties among interventionists may have more influence on development programming than is commonly recognized.

chapter 5: partnership and the development praxiscape

​This chapter examines how the GGAP came to adopt its interventionist methods, arguing that these were selected not because they were best suited to the development problems at hand but because they served the more immediate, instrumental purpose of cementing interventionists' working relationships with one another.

conclusion: development without borders

The book's conclusion recaps its arguments about the internal social dynamics of international intervention, urging practitioners, theorists, and critics to examine the organization and conduct of humanitarian and development work differently. Recent efforts to decolonize the profession and redress its internal inequalities of race and nation will not be successful unless the ideas and practices underlying them are also addressed.

This is a timely and well-judged analysis of the 'internal inequalities' that exist at the heart of the project of international development. 
-David Lewis, author of Non-Governmental Organizations, Management and Development
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See more reviews here.

Teach ​Implementing Inequality

I hope you’ll consider incorporating Implementing Inequality and its themes into your courses. This page includes many plug-and-play resources to provide students with essential context and to kick start the discussion. 

Resources include:

• Teaching Guide
• PowerPoint slides
  
• Angola one-pager
  

Click here to learn more and download the materials.

Additional Reading

Many of my journal articles complement Implementing Inequality through the exploration of themes such as how definitions of "local" and "international" staff constrain development professionals and the differential benefits afforded to each group with respect to cosmopolitan and transnational identities. 

I have also edited two collections that explore Africa and development more widely. The Critical African Studies collection reflects on methodological and theoretical issues inherent in the project of studying up anywhere.  The collection in Critical Policy Studies focuses on relationality in development work and state-society frontline relationships.