How my new book unpacks the problem with projects

The ‘project’ is intrinsic to modern international development – yet this basic form of organising our work is not something neutral or benign, says Caitlin Scott, but has real, often distorting, effects on the way development organisations think and act.

Projects are central to contemporary development, indeed so central that the “project” as a form of organising work in the sector is taken for granted. They are an unquestioned feature of how we work, yet rarely directly written about as such. When I started teaching project management at university I realised that, among the many toolkits and guidance documents, there was no one book I could refer students to for a history or overview of “the project” in development: so I wrote my own. 

The book argues that the project in international development and the culture, assumptions, activities and technocratic language that have evolved around it – impact, tools, metrics, inputs, outputs and, of course, logframes – is not something neutral or benign but has real, often distorting, effects on the way development organisations think and act.

My book sets out how the standard “development project” can block transformative change and riskier endeavours, as well as how it might prioritise short over longer term change. The book spells out how too often projects reduce action on pressing global problems to technical and mechanical solutions, in ways that ignore social and political complexity. It also tackles the question of whether projects are propping up colonial structures and mindsets as the sector looks to decolonise.

So, what is a project?

The word itself literally means “a piece of planned work or an activity that is finished over a period of time and intended to achieve a particular purpose” (Oxford English Dictionary). In development contexts, the World Bank notes that the project concept “essentially provides a disciplined and systematic approach to analysing and managing a set of investment activities” (Hira and Parfitt 2004). In the machinery of development today, the project is both a standardised and standardising frame for work, with some critical underlying and often invisible assumptions: such as a simplistic and direct relationships between inputs and outputs. Supporting projects is an abundance of guidance and the tools of project management from stakeholder analyses to logframes to indicator metrics, all part of the modern lexicon of development management.

In development, the ubiquity of projects makes it all the more pressing to unpack what is going in within them and how they shape our work in many ways. Here, I’ll pick out four key themes discussed in depth in the book.

1. How ‘scientific management’ moved out of the factory and into development

Much of the thinking behind how we see projects is rooted in “scientific management” systems for industrial capitalism, which gave rise to the language of inputs and outputs that is so central to project thinking. Project management in development is also linked to the arrival at the World Bank as President of Robert McNamara in 1968, fresh from the US Department of Defence and bringing with him its Project Planning and Budgeting Systems (as well as a career-long focus on statistics as a singular kind of truth).

The use of the project and statistics, embedded in the project through indicators, brought scientific management to development institutions. Purpose became framed in the language of results, of impact, of change, goals and more that will be familiar to most readers of this blog. These days every aid agency has its own results framework, setting out what indicator is required where, and which item is attached to a specific spend.

But an aid project is not a car or weapons factory. Language derived from organisational systems in the military and capitalist production can bring with it a simplistic link between inputs and outputs, and assumptions about linear causal effects. This is an ongoing problem: that scientific management has bequeathed to development a rationalist view of productivity that structures how we think about what we do.

2. ‘Logframitis’, the tyranny of numbers and audit culture

The focus on input and outputs is most apparent in the logframe that sits at the centre of many development projects. Former Oxfam GB CEO Danny Sriskandarajah has highlighted how the peculiar ailment of logframitis pervades the sector and its funding. This means, he says, that donors “want us to package the long-term and systemic change we are passionate about into neat little fundable projects… that channel ever-smaller chunks of money with ever-larger relative reporting requirements. Many in civil society are good at playing this game but many of the most innovative, most ambitious initiatives rarely involve project proposals…”

With the increasing demand for all projects to be formulated according to the most precise and professional management concepts if they are to be funded, projects are today often short-term, focused on narrow results and typically quantified. The power of these numbers and the importance placed on them by risk-averse donors produces unintended consequences, focusing attention to narrow goals, and ensuring that systemic or structural change is off the agenda.

There has been much debate over whether there may be a better way to manage development in decades since the rise of the logframe, including adaptive management, doing development differently and myriad other more flexible approaches. But regardless of the approach, the result in many contexts has been more management, not less. The project has become synonymous with ever more intrusive forms of management, part of an audit culture of management by metrics now seen across institutions in and beyond development, from schools to hospitals.  

3. Do you speak metric? How projects can exclude and silence communities

Projects typically link money in the Global North to work in the Global South, and in so doing demand that those wishing to access funds speak their language, the language of outputs and indicators. As critics of phenomena such as the briefcase NGO and of the decline of civil society links to grassroots have observed, it is a language in which anyone seeking funding must be fluent.  They must be able to speak to metrics, to fill out a logframe, to spell out short- and longer-term objectives, in ways that can be mechanically measured. 

Project language thus privileges certain views and silences others. How does this language, and the project more generally, exclude those who might bring about social change? That question is important as agencies and communities around the world grapple with the challenges of decolonising development.

4. How projects depoliticise development

Many scholars see development projects as part of an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1994). Projects use the language of engineering that, while acknowledging factors that are external to the process and that may impact it, tends to articulate how a series of actions will turn into a series of improvements, with a set of evaluation tools available to assess impact at the end of the project.

This can throw a technocratic veil over the political issues that so often are central to the problem projects are trying to solve. By turning social and political problems into technical ones, projects too often fail to address the real political and historical problems that communities face (Li 2007; Ferguson 1994).

Moreover, the emphasis on measurable outputs – where for instance education might be formulated as a way of increasing ‘human capital’ that can contribute to gross domestic product (GDP), rather than achieving goals of freedom, emancipation or other political transformation – is also rooted in capitalism and neoliberalism, something I consider in the book. This way of thinking prioritises economic outcomes and logic over the political (Davies 2016).

So are projects part of the problem posing as a solution? How much does the logic of the logframe limit what is possible in development? I’m sure many readers will have a view…

Author: Caitlin Scott is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Development Management and Practice at the School of Global Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA), United Kingdom.

The Project in International Development: Theory and Practice, by Caitlin Scott, is published by Routledge. You can also access the text online (£) here.

References:

Davies, William (2016) The limits of neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition, Revised edition, London: Sage.
Ferguson, James (1994) The anti-politics machine: Development, depoliticisation and bureaucratic power in Lesotho, University of Minneapolis Press.
Hira, Anil and Trevor Parfitt (2004) Development projects for the new millennium, London: Praeger.
Li, T. (2007) The will to improve: Governmentality, development, and the practice of politics, Durham, Duke University Press.