Sociology of Translation, Development Anthropology and Ghanaian ...

Sociology of Translation, Development Anthropology and Ghanaian Waterworks. In support of Richard Rottenburg’s Far-Fetched Facts (2009), by Jean-Pierre Jacob1. 8 of march 2018. Manuscript to be published. Introduction2 Richard Rottenburg’s 2009 Far Fetched Facts. A Parable in Development Aid is, along with D. Mosse’ Cultivating Development (2005) one of the few recent books that propose a renewal of the reflection in development anthropology. Both texts draw cleverly on the sociology of translation methodology. Rottenburg’s book focuses on a theme often avoided in “classical” studies of this sort: the analysis of the relationships between donors and beneficiary institutions, illustrated by a case study of a northern country’ (“Normland”) support to waterworks in an African one (“Ruritania”). In the first part, this article presents R. Rottenburg’s main arguments and stress two of the points he is making: 1) why the new agenda based on similarity and the admission of equality of sovereignty between Northern helping nations and Southern helped ones —under the “partnership” heading— is required and how cooperation organizations try to cope with the problems that this agenda generates in practice; 2) how anthropologists’ knowledge about globalization and its exclusion effects have played a strong role in shaping their approach to development and detach them from doing what they were rightfully supposed to do: give cultural explanations for projects’ difficulties or failure. Renewing the links with cultural issues, Rottenburg shows, through one of his avatars (Edward Drotlevski, see below), that particularism (what he calls “the fidelity to the individual case” or the difficulty of establishing “procedural objectivity”3) acts as a major obstacle in the smooth functioning of the 3 urban waterworks he is studying (see below). In the second part, this article will examine the process through which rural communities secure decisions and implement waterworks, on the basis of some examples taken from the experience of the French Development Agency support to Ghana in the Brong Ahafo Region between 2009 and 20154. The Brong Ahafo project was a 18.5 million euro operation aiming at improving water access and delivery in rural areas. It subsidized the installation of 15 pipe schemes, 470 drilled and 20 hand dug wells (fitted with manual pumps) in the west-center of Ghana. The analysis will concentrate on of the highest type of utility proposed by the project (pipe scheme5) and show that its acquisition and management by communities are governed by different rules, with no apparent continuity between the sociological context that would push a community to acquire a pipe scheme and the technical conditions necessary to maintain and manage it. The



1 Anthropologist. Honorary Professor. Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva).

2 I would like to thank Vera Ehrenstein (Goldsmiths, University of London), Philippe Lavigne Delville (Institut de

Recherche pour le Développement, Montpellier), Pierre-Yves Le Meur (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Montpellier) and Richard Rottenburg (Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg) for comments on earlier versions of this article. 3 i.e the elimination of personal interferences in the description and appraisal of a state of affairs (see on the topic E.W Eisner, 2017: 44). 4 The analysis of the Brong Ahafo project draws from M. Tschibambe (2015), N. Vieux (2015) and J-P Jacob and P. Lavigne Delville (2016) reports.

5 “A pipe scheme consists of a high-yielding borehole that is mechanized with an electric pump to transport the water to

a large overhead tank. From the tank, gravity is used to distribute the stored water to various accessible points (community standpipes), from which community members can fetch their water”. See http: //ghanawashproject.org/water/small-town-piping-systems/ Accessed the 26/12/2017. The pipe scheme can be managed through a community association (CWSMT, Community Water and Sanitation Management Team) or a private operator. Most of the beneficiaries of the Brong Ahafo project choose CWSMT management.



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management of a pipe scheme is supposed to follow rules defined by the international water policies (the 1992 Dublin Statement on Water and Sustainable Development and the 1996 Global Water Partnership —through the Integrated Water Resources Management recommendations—). These policies state that it is through a well organized system of a constantly expanding number of paying customers and a constant increase of water consumption that waterworks should face their costs of production and investment and fulfill their objective: an all-embracing service, progressively giving reality to potable water conceived as a pure public good, defined by non rivalry and non exclusion. A conclusion will propose a synthesis of the structuring dilemmas that define development operations such as the Brong Ahafo project, which give a central place to local government, both as an operator directly involved in the implementation of the last steps of the project (through tender of bids, hiring contractors to build up infrastructures, train associations and monitoring their work) and as a negotiator who determines concretely which communities are going to benefit from the new equipments. Difference vs similarity in Rottenburg’s book R. Rottenburg is a German anthropologist who has spent several years studying development cooperation in Gambia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique and Lesotho. His book is a choral essay and a parable as its subtitle suggests. The author creates multiple subjects of enunciation and gives voices to five development experts gathered around the same puzzle: Normland aid aimed at restructuring public water companies in 3 Ruritanian cities according to the international water policies — see above—. Normland supports the implementation of this model in a former socialist country where the tradition was free access to public services although there was not always much garantee of the continuity of the services provided. The first person to take the floor is the financier, Johannes Von Moltke, director of the SubSaharan division of the Normesian Development Bank who explains the history, framework and goals of the project. He is followed by Julius Shilling, a consultant for the Normesian Development Bank, who describes its practical implementation. Three development anthropologists are also given the floor, providing various comments and attempts at analysis. The first one is Samuel Martonosi — a consultant for Shilling & Partner—, engaged in action but a fierce critic of development processes on the (private) side6. The second one is Edward Drotlevski, involved in a research project, doing participant observation and following as a consequence the consultants in their travels from Normland to Ruritania and back. He is acting as a partial replacement for the author himself, who writes under his name the fourth part of the book (“Trying again”) and also the very fascinating “Prologue”, while the others get or share one chapter each: “Belief” (Shilling and von Moltke), “Doubt” (Martonosi), “Searching” (Drotlevski). With the choral form, Rottenburg sets himself within the “battefields of knowledge” (N. and A. Long, 1992), showing how he slowly builds up his own views and emancipates himself from his protagonists’ perspectives: the realism of Julius Schilling, the constructivism of Edward Drotlevski, the relativism of Samuel Martonosi. He also takes the precaution of fictionalizing his account, a process that, he argues, has the advantage of taking the reader away from the question of individual responsibility, directing his attention to “the significance of general principles and contingencies of mundane practices of the development word” (XVIII). Among development specialists, where one supposes that the readership for this book is mainly located, “objectivity might [also!] be the fidelity to the individual case” (p.141, see below), unless some



6 He looks like some kind of mix between James Ferguson —development as an antipolitics machine (1990)— and

Arturo Escobar —development as hegemony (1995)—.



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formal device is used to guide the reader’s interpretation elsewhere7. As K. Donovan puts it, the sociology of translation allows anthropologists to extend to development organizations the constructivism and aptitudes to build support and networks that were once reserved for the analysis of beneficiaries8 (2014: 874-875). The contribution of Richard Rottenburg to this thesis takes four different paths, each of them organized around a specific definition of the principle of difference and the way it is dealt with by actors. -Difference. Not acknowledging the gap First, the reader is reminded that difference is at the root of all justifications of international aid and its “will to improve” (T. M. Li, 2007)9. It is because people, institutions, states, governance, economics in Southern countries are “different” —i.e less advanced— that they deserve to be helped by more affluent ones in the North (see on this topic, Corbridge, 2007, Mosse, 2013). Funds are raised to help erase these differences. But in the last decades, there has been a second principle, totally unavoidable and forming a loose couple (see below) with the first one, that has emerged. It insists on equality or similarity (“partnership”). Southern countries should also be recognized as sovereign nations, equals to any other, that have a right to self-determination and ownership. The reasons why this new ideology has been adopted should be explored. As N. Lühmann (1997) explains, the totalitarian semantics of our time is a semantics of all-inclusion that stems directly from human rights and values such as equality and freedom. While in earlier times, it was assumed that some (most!) societies could not be included, nowadays it is expected that every society must be. The intense activities which make the world more global everyday requires equality, i.e the image of sovereign nations agreeing to do business together on an equal footing, a representation that cannot be polluted by any soul searching questioning about the fact that some Southern states might be less institutionalized or weaker that they pretend to be, i.e not really capable of making informed and independent decisions, let alone implementing them. Within the development field itself, there might be very diverse motivations for the egalitarian agenda. It might be put forward because it is thought to be in the best interest of the beneficiaries themselves (see below, fourth line of analysis). For development professionals who have carriers out of helping others, differences cannot be essentialized because it will act as a damper on their activities. Financiers need equality to reassure themselves about the fact that



7 D. Mosse doesn’t fictionalize his account of the Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project supported by Dfid he studies

(see 2005) and attracts, as a consequence, a lot of protests, criticisms and pressures from professionals directly associated with it. These criticisms help him extend his analysis of development professionals as epistemic communities that thrive on ignorance, that is on a willingness to ignore information that is not personally or institutionally advantageous to discuss openly —see 2006, and also on this topic L. McGoey, 2012—). 8 See for instance J-P Olivier de Sardan (2005). 9 According to K. Amanor and al. (see Scoones, Amanor and al., 2016; see also Amanor and Chichava, 2016), SouthSouth cooperation puts at the forefront the equality between countries (solidarity, mutual learning) stemming from shared geographies, histories and links forged through struggles against colonialism and slavery. Although K. Amanor and his colleagues’ studies appear very aggregated, focused above all on a will to situate this cooperation within the broader context of globalization and the new patterns of accumulation of capital in new sites across the world, we could find hints that South-South cooperation encounters the same problems as the North-South one. Under the blanket of similarity, differences re-emerge as development operations take their course: “there are far fewer landbased investments on the ground than media reports might suggest, as lack of infrastructure, distance to markets, tenure insecurity, and other challenges dissuade investors” (Scoones, Amanor and al., 2016: 3); “For Brazil, the deep commitment and political solidarity found among many Brazilian experts (involved in policy and technology transfers) combines with a lack of understanding and failure to engage with local realities. These features are of course not new to Chinese or Brazilian cooperation but it means that new cultural and political dimensions are introduced, and must be negotiated as part of development encounters” (Scoones, Amanor and al., 2016: 8).



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national project beneficiaries assume liabilities as borrowers. The new emancipatory agenda might also function to instill a “new cycle of optimism” (Quarles van Ufford and Roth, 2003), i.e boost and refresh the spirits under which development was thought of and undertaken until now, as a remedy to aid fatigue. Donors need equality to fit their scenario of cumulative progress being made and validate the reforms they launched. In the recent past, they put pressure on Northern operating agencies to roll back some of their activities (cutting their functioning expenses, i.e expatriated staff, increasing their investments). In their opinion, steps forward had been made and decades of development operations under the difference narrative had led to basic infrastructures and national competencies being created, which would justify the new policy. As a consequence, Southern institutions could take the relay for a majority of development tasks (see below). These recommendations were done international development style, as lessons that could easily translate into norms to be presented as a blanket strategy to define cooperation in all needy countries. For the less advanced among them —Ruritania obviously belongs to this group— that was an aspirational policy which spelled out a blueprint for an orderly development community and tried to create reality out of words. According to Richard Rottenburg, in this dominance of the similarity paradigm, the difference narrative tends to be underplayed, being deliberately suppressed or living a life confined to rhetorical matters or specific practical grounds. This idea is illustrated first by the author showing, as a direct substantiation of Donovan’s proposition, that the donor, the Normesian Development Bank, acts as a center of calculation. As development operations gather heterogeneous actors (donors, consultants, operators, beneficiaries, national institutions…) separated from each other geographically as well as politically, culturally and cognitively, it is very important to be sure that these distances —and the differences that they imply— are never construed as definitive obstacles. The notion of a center of calculation drawn from B. Latour (1987, see also Callon and Muniesa, 200310) serves to give a name to these registering processes which act at continuously bridging worlds, collecting “far-fetched facts”, putting them in a common context by the imposition of a metacode, i.e a standardized way to report reality from one end of the chain of actors and institutions to the other, using the same taxonomies, criteria for selection and ordering, procedures for measuring and aggregating data and lines of reporting11. When these operations have been successfully carried out, information related to a given project is made commensurable, calculable and transportable. It consists mainly of inscriptions on sheets of paper, curves and graphs collected in documents which constitute the common references of all the parties involved and that can be easily mobilized to answer calls for accountability. There are “immutable mobiles”, objects which can be transported over long distance without deformation (Latour, 1987)12. -Difference. Acknowledging the gap The second line of analysis in Rottenburg’s book, stresses the changes that the dominance of the similarity framework has provoked in the division of labour between actors within the development field. Difference continues, obviously, to be the main justification of international aid at its inception—it is still very much necessary to secure funding! — but the reality that it involves is quickly forgotten in the concrete processes of development interventions. The new agenda offers to each donor agency the opportunity to reinvent itself as a coordinating or



10 For a presentation in French, see Jacob (2015).

11 The simple notion of « project » that doesn’t distinguish between the support given to put in place a service and the

service that takes reality as a result of this support is in itself a fundamental part of this enterprise in differences neutralization (see Jacob et Lavigne Delville, 2016). 12 Since R. Rottenburg is a man of reiteration, endless reformulations and careful reconsiderations, we have another hint as how this center of calculation builds up and gathers momentum in pages 177-179 of his book, where he shows, in a nice illustration of the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy (see on this topic, H. Putnam, 2002), how procedures, negotiations, inscriptions and documentation allow for the reciprocal selection and progressive convergence of the two components that, combined, constitute the very basis for any kind of development project: knowledge (“what is true?”) and norms (“what is good”?).



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facilitating entity, leaving the beneficiary countries, under the guise of partnership or ownership, the task of setting their priorities, designing programs, implementing them and being accountable for what is being achieved13. Except that difference —i.e underdevelopment— is still very much at work in many beneficiary countries and to pretend otherwise is to credit them with a capacity to direct and implement projects that they do not possess. Donors, who are aware of this problem without being allowed to recognize it officially, have to invent unofficial and not entirely satisfying ways to get around this constraint (see third line of argument, below). It cannot work otherwise and it is easy to understand why, applying some simple logical reasoning: if the difference narrative is to be taken seriously, we have to admit that it is systemic, it concerns all sectors in the beneficiary country. As a consequence, there is no internally developed domain that can be used to gain traction and lift another one out of its misery. In other words, there is no strong infrastructure that would already exist and could be used to build another strong infrastructure. R. Rottenburg states this clearly in reference to his case study: “The lion’s share of financial assistance in development cooperation flows into the public infrastructure of developing countries. This includes formally organized systems …which aim primarily at securing education, health, communications, transportation, and administration […]. As soon as the support gets underway, organizational structures and appropriate procedures must be set up to enable the transfer of funds, ideas, models, artifacts. This poses a second and more fundamental problem: insofar as the key internal issue requiring external support is the weakness of organizational structures and the unreliability of bureaucratic procedures, the entire process is caught in a vicious circle…Needing an infrastructure in order to be able to establish an infrastructure, is a typical “Catch-22” situation” (2009: XXI-XXII)14. -Difference. Trying to fill up the gap The third line of analysis, which takes up a great deal of room in the book, entails an exploration of the relationships of the main actors involved in the implementation of a project (the financier, the beneficiary — the national organization, also the borrower and theoretical “project owner”— and the consultants) to resolve the difficulties alluded to before: circumventing the constraints imposed by the similarity agenda and getting something accomplished at any rate. To analyze these relationships, Rottenburg uses the agency theory and its stress on asymetrical information (principal-agent relationships). M. Jensen and W. Meckling present the agency theory main hypothesis as follows: “We define an agency relationship as a contract under which one or more persons (the principal(s)) engage another person (the agent) to perform some service on their behalf which involves delegating some decision making authority to the agent. If both parties to the relationship are utility maximizers, there is good reason to believe that the agent will not always act in the best interests of the principal » (1976: 310). Within this framework of analysis, we can characterize the position of the financier as having several problems, specifically in relation to the beneficiary. He wants to be represented as respecting the emancipatory paradigm that puts the national entity in the principal position (“in the driver’s seat”) (problem n° 1) but he also wants to retain this position because he wants to be sure that his money is used wisely and efficiently by the borrower in a context where there are



13 For an explanation of the slowness of the World Health Organization to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa

linked to this question, see N. Chorev (2015). 14 The Brong Ahafo project shows an example of this kind of Catch-22 situation with the difficulties of delivering potable water to rural populations through a local administration (districts) that was largely unable to deal with the new public procurement rules (tender of bids) and didn’t have the skills or competencies to monitor the infrastructures being constructed and the participation work involved in the project. The solution was to recentralize these tasks and entrust them to the head office of CWSA (see M. Tschibambe, 2015 and N. Vieux, 2015).



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no immediate mechanisms —in the form of the amortization of the loan for instance— to prove that (problem n° 2). Finally, he wants the possibility of escaping responsibility for any possible project’s failure and to extend the same immunity (mainly for diplomatic reasons) to the national organization (problem n° 3). For Rottenburg, to achieve these different goals, the actors resort to two different scripts, an official one (O script) that is put forward and paid homage to in all public circumstances and an unofficial one (U script), that is mobilized sometimes as a substitute, sometimes as a complement to the first one, within a principle of loose coupling15. Their alternate use allows actors to answer objections or escape practical difficulties coming either from the emancipatory or from the difference (and efficiency) frameworks, depending of the context. —O script: financier (lender)=>borrower/national organization (principal) => consultant (agent); —U script: financier (lender, principal) => consultant (agent) => borrower/national organization. The O script is good for answering problem n° 1 (respect the emancipatory paradigm) but not for answering problem n° 2 (the wise use of funds and the constraints necessary to have the national organization accomplish that). To tackle this problem, the U script is mobilized. It allows the financier to secretly stay in charge and try to induce institutional change in the national agency —to transform it into a center of calculation for instance— through very directive instructions that have to be implemented by the consultants16. Both scripts are equally good for answering problem n° 3 (the exoneration of the lender and the national agency responsibilities) by making possible the transformation of consultants into scapegoats in case of difficulties17. -Difference. The anthropological way of not acknowledging the gap The fourth line of analysis is an inquiry into the prohibition of difference, here in the sense of cultural differences, in explanations for a project’s difficulties or failure. Rottenburg introduces this question by identifying the arguments raised by two of his anthropologist avatars, S. Martonosi on one hand and E. Drotlevski on the other, around the puzzle that constitutes the official objectivist presentation of the project as a technical game, an old theme in development anthropology since the publication of James Ferguson’s book (The anti-politics machine, 1990), given a new life by T.M Li (see 2007). For Samuel Martonosi, following J. Ferguson (1990) and A. Escobar (1995), the technical game is the disguise under which a highly political game is being introduced. It functions like a Trojan horse and smuggles in a new social order and a new web of belief. Edward Drotlesvski would have none of it. For him, if the project is presented as a technical game, it is because it is the only code available for carrying out transcultural negotiations, in a context where everyone —especially the national staff in charge of the



15 They sometimes show up simultaneously in the same sentence! See for instance the first principle of the Paris

Declaration (2005): “Ownership “Ownership: Developing countries set their own strategies for poverty reduction, improve their institutions and tackle corruption.” http://www.oecd.org/dac. As S. Bellina, D. Darbon and al. put it: « The national governments appear both as objects to be fashioned and as subjects with whom agreements are to be concluded » (2010: 84). 16 With very little chance of success if the national organization sticks to the O script. “Consultant » here a is broad name for several entities that can be used by the financier to try to realize his goals, depending of the project: technical assistance, national operating agency, project management unit…. 17 M. Tschibambe’s study (2015) contains several examples of the bad consequences that technical assistants or consultants have experienced as the result of the impossibility of blaming the true culprits (the national agencies) for their poor performances or their deliberate efforts to “kill” a project.



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waterworks and the concerned ministries— is eager to transact18. Drotlevski also stresses the shortcomings in Martonosi’s positioning. He notes that his antipolitics stance is not relayed by any will to identify the local cultural aspects that would be rendered invisible by the new hegemony blanket and could possibly explain the project’s difficulties. “In doing so, Drotlevski comments, he is observing one of the strictest taboos of contemporary anthropology, which absolutely prohibits using people’s cultural patterns to interpret their actions” (136-137). Drotlevski is raising here an important issue that seems structurally linked to development anthropology since its beginning. The « first » (pretranslation!) researchers’ attempts, mainly focused on beneficiaries’ constructivism —see for instance J-P Olivier de Sardan, 2005— were already marked by a strong insistence on the local actors’ strategic skills (their agency!) and a constant avoidance (rejection!) of cultural themes. Rottenburg links this implicit self-censorship to anthropologists’ extreme awareness of the rules of exclusionary inclusion characteristic of modern life. As N. Lühmann states (1997), traditional societies included or excluded persons by accepting or not accepting them into stratified communities. Modern society is made of function systems (law, science, economy, politics, religion..) and these function systems claim to be open to everyone, except that any actor trying to enter one system would realize quickly that his inclusion is conditioned by the possession of the media necessary to communicate within the system (money in economy, power in politics…). Globalization might be equated with the promises of free movements for all people across the world but they are in fact inaccessible to poor would-be migrants who are without ID cards, school education, bank account, regular work, access to public services (C. Atekmangoh, 2016). Development resources may be delivered to Southern countries provided the stress is put on their capacity to absorb this aid, hence on the skills of their institutions and agency of their citizens, not on their differences and difficulties to adapt. As Rottenburg explains in another article: "Today we presume…that anthropological discourse about excluded groups or cultures can itself contribute to their exclusion. It has in other words, become more difficult to speak about difference, because the central topos of the present is exclusion and because the establishment of differences can contribute to mechanisms of exclusion in globalization" (2006: 32). Our own experience tends to make us think that anthropologists took anti-culturalist stances because a lot of development professionals —at least the ones approaching them— were culturalist, or were, on the basis of their own experiences, trying to link the difficulties encountered in their work with local culture characteristics. In taking this counterposition, anthropologists showed that they had a better understanding of modern society’ functioning than development professionals and saw very quickly that is was no time to defend local values, i.e to raise issues that could lead to a denial of Southern nations’ aspirations for « full membership rights in a world society », as J. Ferguson (2006: 166) puts it. Within this context of censorship, the difficulties of the projects were and continue to be attributed to a train of always changing but equally neutral causations (lack of funding, of technical means —computers, cars…—, of training, participation or communication…) but never to a problem of difference, for instance the non-existence, in beneficiary countries, of something already there that would be usable to go further, some infrastructure (what is usually called “an enabling environment”) that would be mobilizable to create some other infrastructures, like public services. Among these infrastructures and in reference to his case study, Rottenburg explores specifically the absence of what he calls procedural objectivity (see above) that prevents common understanding among all the parties involved in the water management system, and especially



18 R. Rottenburg: “The urban water engineers are the most adamant supporters of the blueprint approach” (p. 142).



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at the lowest level (meter readers and maintenance teams), about what data are relevant, how they are to be formatted in order to be recognized as data, and how they are to be linked together to be considered as information. In reality, something called list autophagy by S. Martonosi19 is plaguing the whole system: the accuracy and the quality of the existing lists of facts and figures that are used as basic references for management decisions is altering quickly, everyone knows it but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. List autophagy has important negative effects as it prevents the development experts to transform the different waterworks into centers of calculation —and to introduce for that purpose, the “mother of all calculations”, i.e an accurate computerized database of water customers—, locating users and listing them, being able to figure out how much they consume and as a consequence, how much they should pay for their consumption, making sure that their bills reach them and can be paid and what is the ratio between the water produced and billed. Going into the systemic problem of the documentation of customers that prevents computerization from being implemented to the general satisfaction of the parties involved20, Drotlevski (see chapter 5 of Rottenburg’s book) shows the consultants examining the completed customer forms accumulated at the waterworks headquarters archives and working themselves into a state of progressive perplexity as they uncover the huge gap between what the meter readers are asked to achieve and their actual performances, identifying various levels of misunderstanding of the recording procedures that made it impossible —to select only a few problems mentioned in the book—: 1) to proceed from a list of water meters to the actual site where a water meter with a particular number is located; 2) to make links between the maps that represent the individual taps within the different technical zones that divide up the city and the information collected on the individual customer forms; 3) to have a house number that would be consensual enough to allow managers to be able address a bill for water consumption to a mailing address without risking confusion and protest. For Drotlevski, it is these expressions of uneasiness with written procedures and the kind of underlined dispositions that they ask from the meter readers which require explanation and give us incentives to look at cultural differences. These dispositions are so obvious to us that they don’t need further thinking and it is only after this exotic detour that they appear for what they are: exercices in decentration, demanding, from the person who fills out the form, an understanding of the goal that is sought after by the organization which produced the document and to care about this goal. In Ruritania, procedural objectivity obviously makes unreasonable demands on Ruritanian common sense, probably because in this country, there is no great need or opportunity to give priority to written documents over narrative knowledge (the superiority of written procedures has not been demonstrated!). Objectivity in this context is, above all, the “fidelity to the individual case”. As Drotlevski puts it “people are not willing to adjust their sense of reality to a mysterious procedure that subordinates the complex and always specific reality of individual cases to that of categories predetermined in printed form” (p. 141). Printed forms might not be the only example where we feel that some pre-existing immaterial infrastructure should be there in order to make progress in the establishment of a service delivery. The “fidelity to the individual case” (or “particularism” —as opposed to universalism—, to refer to a concept proposed by the old structuro-functionalist tradition), applies nicely to characterize various types of non optimal development situations. In our general studies of public service delivery in West Africa for instance, we noticed (see for instance Jacob and al., 2009 ; see also Olivier de Sardan, 2014) that its outputs were the product of the bilateral relationships between



19 For Martonosi, list autophagy leads to an objectivity trap (there is no common ground between the consultants and

the project’s owner about what are the problems at stake) that leads to an interface trap (the consultants’attempts to get the margin of manœuvre necessary to adapt the model transferred are constantly resisted by the project’s owner that insists that everyone should stick to the technical game and the O script) that leads to an accountability trap (the work billed by the consultant’s firm is subject to contestation) that leads to list autophagy (consultants stop doing their remediation job, see chapter 5). 20 And also past attempts at building up a master database by entering information from an outdated survey.



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civil servants and service users —a confrontation made of bargaining, personal knowledge, informal pressure, corruption, application of practical norms and promises of reward— and not from a trilateral one —the interactions of the producer and the consumer being mediated by norms inherent to the notion of public service itself: indifference to status21, commitment to treat every citizen equally well, subordination of personal interests to the general good, government of the self, claims of rights and not favour…—. In a study on primary education, S. Carboni (2015) stresses the fact that a large number of rural Burkinabè parents explain their childrens’failure at school in reference to some kind of prenatal destiny —for them, some children are simply just not made for school!—, an interpretation which social scientists can easily link to pre-sociological thinking: a strong tendency to reify individual responsibility, an incapacity to connect their offsprings’ performances with the inequality of the social conditions under which they are living (see on this topic, C. Lemieux, Saint-Oma, 2016: 131-133). From the 3 cases that we have examined, we can see that the methods required to break with particularism and produce some kind of procedural objectivity necessary to go further in the building of institutions differ somewhat (decentration, the integration of the notion of public interest within the self, some sociological skills) but only slightly as if they proceeded from each other and were nested in a Russian doll. They seem to indicate a general need for an individual versed in metaphysics, i.e able to integrate society within himself at various levels (cognition, knowledge, ethics…) within a social environment which would integrate these kind of personal dispositions as tests of worth (in L.Boltanski and L.Thevenot’ sense, see 2006), i.e a base on which the group at large would judge its members behavior 22. Ghanaian small town pipe schemes -a statist framing of local culture The attachment to particularism which Drotlevski is stressing is not always an immediate hindrance to development processes, although they might find their limitations further on in their advancement, because of it (see below). As Rottenburg said before, a large share of financial assistance flows into the public infrastructure of developing countries (education, potable water, health, communications, transportation, administration…) but it is delivered concretely one change in community life at a time, that is one constructed dispensary, social service, school, manual pump or pipe scheme after the other. This disaggregation process is what makes interventions so hugely popular, as particular resources aimed at specific communities are reinterpreted as inputs that could them help keep their development trajectories or extend their sense of worth. This sense of worth has a long history in West Africa and our longitudinal studies (see J-P Jacob, 2007, also P-Y Le Meur, 2012) show a constant search by members to maintain their community’s existence and expand its influence and prestige through changes that constantly modify the norms under which a residential unit can be judged worthy23. Something along the lines of the remark made by Tancredi in G. Tomasi di Lampedusa’novel (The Guepard) is at work in these dynamics: “If we want things to stay the same, everything has to change”. Briefly sketched and for a West African community that would have passed all the stages successfully, the search for community worth was linked in the XIXth century-beginning of the



21 On its importance for bureaucracy systems since M. Weber, see M. Herzfeld (1992).

22 In the authors language, “operate the critique of behaviors and the social selection of people” (2006). One think here

to G.H Mead (1963 [1934]) who defines modern consciousness as the integration of the other into oneself and the capacity to see oneself as an other. 23 See L. Boltanski (1990: 175) on this issue. Development anthropologists have in general denied that communities existed (even as a metaphysic, i.e a preoccupation in the mind of its members for the defence of something bigger than their own’ individual interests). The poor have to be individualistic because community attachment is considered as another obstacle to their access to development rights.



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XXth century to strong demographics and attempts to attract “strangers”24, in a context where there were plenty of natural resources, not enough people and human establishments were constantly under the threat of disappearing (see J-P Jacob, 2007). In the second half of the XXth century, this search was linked to its capacity to secure development funding for projects and public infrastructures. Nowadays, it is more and more associated with the community ability to launch into a career in local government (becoming a district head for instance), within a context of decentralization policies that have multiplied opportunities of this sort. As D. Graeber puts it (2001: 46), solitary pleasures being mostly unsatisfactory, these ends are realized in front of a collective audience, the group of villages belonging to the same area and forming an acquaintanceship. The search for community worth is to be situated within this local and somewhat competitive framework. Now, if we look at the communities synchronically 25 , considering their inequalities of development at a given time, we can see very well that 1) not all communities have had the resources to pass through all stages identified above successfully; 2) as a consequence, the sociological problem that their members have to solve if they want to maintain their worth can vary greatly; 3) the acquisition of waterworks can play an important role in solving it, at least for a time, but the dimensioning of the utility to access water should fit the sociological problem that has been identified. Easy access to potable water constitutes a formidable tool of “interessement” (Callon, 1986) or attachment for the community that possesses it but the attachment sought can differ greatly in nature. In some areas, access to potable water is so difficult and the drudgery linked to its provision so huge that the men of the community cannot find spouses. Women are not willing to marry into a residential group that provides such harsh conditions of life. In these cases, simple water devices like manual pumps might resolve the problem nicely and in harmony with local capacities26. In other areas, much more advanced, where these kinds of marital problems disappeared long ago or never existed, waterworks might be linked with the community capacity to provide other public services like schools and electricity and considered together in their ability to attract important economic and political actors and help the polity to pursue a career in local government (on this aspect, see also Akrich, 1992). In these contexts, the acquisition of a pipe scheme is considered as a must and it is very likely that simpler devices that would not secure the desired goal would be rejected27 . It is useless to propose a given technology in a context where the attachment this technology can bring on is not yet or no longer considered as a serious sociological issue. In other words, one has to take into account what we have called elsewhere the “local histories of global policies” (Jacob, 2006, 2007) i.e the fact that international or national policies have differential resonances within spaces that are not endowed with the same economic, political and social conditions, don’t face the same sociological problems and are not embarked in the same dynamic. We are not sure that all professionals have these questions clearly in mind when they plan water interventions. We have to explain now why this segment of local history informed by the search for community worth could match with a segment of public policy dedicated to developing the country’s water access and lead to some positive results (waterworks being implemented), instead of coming into conflict with it. We will do it on the basis of the Ghanaian example, dealing with a state that



24 As the Agni of Ivory Coast say “ it is the stranger who builds up the village” (N. Kouassi, 2014: 217)

25 Comparing states of development within regions or between regions in the same country (for instance North and

Center Ghana) or between countries (Ghana and Niger for instance). 26 It is likely that manual pumps or wells which are not very demanding in terms of management competencies or the quality of the surrounding institutions correspond —when they are really needed! — more or less to what the local milieu can offer. 27 It is interesting to note that in the case of the Brong Ahafo project, the French Development Agency planned to install 112 hand dug wells (the lowest technology in its range of offer, below drilled wells and pipe schemes) but that only 20 were actually implemented (see M. Tschibambe, 2015: 73).



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seems particularly efficient in its identification of the ever changing constraints imposed by development policies and, as a consequence, is able to renew its institutional positioning28 so as to always appear in the most favorable light. In Ghana, what are the new and old constraints which define the central state position in matters of waterworks? —on one hand, decisions concerning the allocation of resources in water equipment escape it more and more. Under donors pressure, it is the decentralized levels —implemented since 1988/89 in Ghana—, notably the district assemblies (DA) and the district chief executives (DCE) who are given the authority resources to allocate waterworks to communities, a situation which opened the door in Brong Ahafo to lobbying and pressure by villages competing with each other for the infrastructures of the highest prestige: notably pipe schemes managed by community associations (CWSMT)29; —on the other hand, it continues to have an obligation to show good indicators of development performance. In Ghana, this is particularly important and the country has earned its reputation as a model pupil of international aid since structural adjustment times (see C. Ake, 2001). No longer at the origin of equipment decisions, the state had to accompany the local dynamics and align its indicators on the ones fixed empirically by the communities themselves if it wants to pursue this strategic line. As we have seen before, communities have a very pragmatic perception of what development means for them. Based on the search to maintain community worth, it is seen as an exit from rural village status (perceived as the lowest economic and political state) to reach the level of a small urban center and (possibly) administrative head of a cluster of villages (considered as a higher state of development). But to be able to make this scenario real, the central state has to clear the way and to get rid of constraints that would prevent this kind of dynamic from unfolding freely, notably the a priori geographical and institutional division between urban and rural settings for water equipments that functions like a sealed wall in many Southern countries. Until a few years ago, Ghana had two national institutions —inherited from colonial times— that took care of water access and delivery respectively in urban settings (the Ghana Water Company Limited, GWCL) and rural ones (the Community Water and Sanitation Agency, CWSA). This division was functional when the central state had a monopoly on the territorial development and was the point of entry of all foreign funding, making all decisions concerning water equipment. But this turned quickly into a hindrance when local governments gained full legitimacy and control most of the decision making in matters of utility equipments. In a first move to undo these barriers, the central state had authorized GWCL, an institution that has many financial problems, to extend its service supply to rural areas everywhere it could reach customers without excessively increasing its connection costs. In a second move, it imagined a clever institutional path to accompany the changes in communities’ status and help their transformation from rural to urban. It is the concept of small town which allowed it to do so (see on this topic, G. Owusu, 2004, 2005 a and b). In Ghana, the concept doesn’t have any clear demographic definition (all communities having between 5000 and 50 000 inhabitants can get this label30) but it is recognized in different and connected sectors, a situation which makes it possible to produce urbanity out of rural settlements. First, the small town is the third level of urban planning (after large and medium-



28 Distinguishing between the old norms that should be kept and respected at all costs and, the ones that can be

disposed of, even though they may have long organized the ways in which public services were delivered (the division of labour between public institutions taking charge of the organization of water access in rural and urban settings for instance, see below).

29 N.

Vieux (2015: 60-61) reports the vigorous protests of the Districts Assemblies (DA) and the District Chief Executives (DCE) to the French Development Agency proposal to regroup the tender of bids of several districts under the heading of one lead district instead of leaving each concerned administrative entity to manage its own procurement system. 30 George Owusu, personal communication (20/2/2017).



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sized towns). Second, it is considered as the privileged level for the installation of district headquarters (the district is the lowest level of decentralization, the highest one being the region). Third, the laws on water, especially the 1998 Community Water and Sanitation Agency Act, state clearly that each rural community which succeeded in acquiring a certain level of equipment in matters of waterworks (pipe scheme) must be considered as a small town31. In other words, an ambitious community aiming at maintaining its worth within an array of villages in competition for the same end, should absolutely secure the installation of a pipe scheme if it wants the small town label. This label doesn’t automatically ensure it the status of district headquarters but rather the possibility to compete with other small towns to get it. Chances of competition are numerous as the Ghanaian government has the habit of launching regular reforms aimed at creating new districts, justified by the idea of tightening the links between citizens and the local administration. If a community succeeds in becoming a district headquarters, it earns prestige by securing a small spot within the local administrative hierarchy, a position that could always evolve with time. -Particularism vs universalism As we alluded to before, the acquisition and maintenance of a pipe scheme are governed by two different types of rules. Its acquisition is determined by a development administrative policy which privileges since some decades now, decentralized decisions, that is decisions that could be influenced by popular pressures. In fact, the localization of a pipe scheme’s implantation is vigorously negotiated between local representatives32 and it fits a very particularistic agenda. At the end of the day, the utility goes to this community and not to this other one, giving the beneficiary group an opportunity to extend its sense of worth and possibly change its status. The management of a pipe scheme, on the other hand, is supposed to follow rules defined international water policies (see introduction). There are rules from above (and from outside) and because of the strong dependency between the different flows (money, customers and water) that condition pipe scheme functioning and the importance of the investments granted to construct one, it is also one of the first times that donors and national agencies are really serious about the fact that these rules need to be made community rules. The equipment in manual pumps is also conditioned to the respect of management rules (a water committee needs to be put in place, money collected at the pump, accounts should be held) but there is no clear link between the availability of water and the respect of these rules at least as long as the pump is not broken33. As a consequence, rules remain the concern of outsiders (civil servants, NGO, for examples in Niger, see J-P Olivier de Sardan and El Hadj Dagobi, 2000). This is not the case here as the availability of water and its delivery to an increasing number of customers are conditioned by stable financial flows, hence to accounting processes and strict monitoring, hence to a shift in individual attitudes that would contribute and not be obstacles to the smooth integration of these variables within the system. Rules from outside and from above needing to become community rules means that the society and the water associations ought to undergo the ordeal of normative self positionning (V. Descombes, 2013 : 244) with its inherent aporias. As V. Descombes remarks, in any society, social life is not the result of rules being applied from above, it is about the possible support that rules coming from above encounter in the rules coming from below, i.e the aptitudes, the dispositions, the habits, the knowledge, that people



31 « "small town" means a community that is not rural but is a small urban community that has decided to manage its

own water and sanitation systems » Act 564, section 22. See also F. S. Gbedemah: « Defining urbanity in Ghana as far as water is concerned does not look at the population but rather at the water systems being managed either by the Ghana Water Company Limited (the company in charge of delivering water in “classical” urban settings, see above) or the communities themselves (through a pipe scheme managed directly by a community association or indirectly through a private operator, our addition)» (2010 : 130). 32 See foonote n° 29. 33 And when it is broken, it can be fixed through a punctual raising of funds or a sponsor donation.



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have already acquired and which can make sense and make room for new top-down proposals34. Considering development situations and their inherent “otherness”, there is a great likelihood that rules from above and rules from below don’t correspond and need to be adjusted. There are at least three domains where we are unsure that a background can be provided for pipe scheme management norms to become effective: the customers’ obligation to disembed water payment from social considerations, their willingness to abide by the supply monopoly of the pipe scheme rules and the necessary transformation of the members of the CWSMT into water professionals. First, the customers need to depart from the usual panafrican representations of water as a good that should not be denied to anyone (like land or air) or at least one that should be accessed free of charge by the disadvantaged. With the new model, water must be paid for by everyone and it should cost an amount that matches its costs of production, distribution and investment. The application of the model might be enforced by the technical design of the pipe scheme itself which involves meters at the network head and on each standpipe and makes easy the comparison between the volumes of water produced and paid for. At the standpipes, the money collectors (they are always women!) are compelled to make the consumer pay for the amount delivered, because if they don’t do it —ceding to compassion or the desire to please someone— they put into danger their own revenue and position. Account balances can be more easily reached when human interactions are disembedded from the logic of sociability and solidarity which usually frame them, with the advantage that this decision of disembeddness appears as the decision of no one but rather as the technical design of the water conveyance system itself, sparing the society the torments of normative self positionning 35! Thanks to water meters, operators are delivered from the warm embrace of social relationships and moral issues’ messy compromises and justifications. Second, the customers have to accept the supply monopoly of the pipe scheme. This monopoly and a prevision of an ever-increasing water consumption are necessary if the CWSMT wants to collect maximum water revenues. In the communities we visited, this has led to the closing of the pre-existing manual pumps that were perceived as an “unfair” local offer of potable water (since it was accessed free of charge). However, pipe scheme operators confront some problems in this assertion of this monopoly. Unlike the new customers of big national water companies that serve cities (like the Office National de l’eau et de l’assainissement —Onea— in Ouagadougou36) who can benefit from the advantages of a well established monopoly (universal service with differential prices), here the clients are obliged to consider the pipe scheme standpipes as obligatory passage points even though this obligation brings no immediate benefits for them or the poorest members of the community, but an increase in price for all. The operators might be helped in the general acceptance of such an unfavorable situation by three strategies: the reference to the sociological virtue of the pipe scheme (it enhances the village worth!), an alliance with customary chiefs (CWSMT have traditional chiefs on their board), the promises of a better future, highly conditioned by the CWSMT performances and the validity of the international water policy main hypothesis: the reconciliation of efficiency with equity. Third, the operators (community members with no particular skills regrouped into associations, the CWSMT) need to extend their technical and accounting knowledge to operate the pipe



34 V. Descombes refers here to the distinction made by C. Castoriadis (1990) between constituting and instituting

power. 35 As A, Amiraly and P. Prabhakar put it, water meters with volumetric charges holds out the promise of a “virtuous cycle” that can cut the Gordian knot of unsustainable pricing practices, poor supply management and resource depletion: “The water meter is a multifunctional tool embodying the centrality of information systems in the effective management of water supply networks, to evaluate water demand and subsequently set infrastructure investment priorities. It enables the setting of water charges based on usage that can serve simultaneously the purpose of assuring the utility’s financial sustainability and regulate demand”(2016: 5). 36 For a presentation see J-P Jacob and P. Lavigne Delville (2016).



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scheme under the required conditions, incorporating input, material, moral, organizational, financial and recording technologies in such way that they would have an accurate perception of the different flows (water, money, consumers) which constitute the system at any given time and are able to finance and expand the service on the basis of customer payments. Beginning with a particularistic agenda, how can we be sure that, in the end, the actors have departed from it enough to be acting as professional water managers, incorporating all of the universal skills necessary? How can we be sure for instance that the CWSMT has received enough training not to be victim of list autophagy? This is probably the domain where normative self positionning has the least chance of being backed up by the proper attitudes. Already, some official voices in Ghana suggest that the community management model is not at the level of the challenges raised (but there are no further details on the grievances addressed to CWSMT). According to the chief executive officer of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA, see above)37, the Community Water and Sanitation Management Teams (CWSMT) which had oversight responsibility for managing and ensuring the sustainability of the community water systems over the years have not been impressive in their management, resulting in the breakdown of the water systems in most of the communities in the country. He said that CWSA was considering engaging the services of private operators to manage the small town water and sanitation systems effectively in various beneficiaries metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies in the country. Conclusion: similarity vs difference; particularism vs universalism at the local level African countries are submitted to intense external pressures and don’t frame their problems as public problems at their own pace, i.e once solutions have already started to emerge internally38. They are under the domination of the “projected administrations” (D. Darbon, 2003), obliged to undergo the ordeal of normative self positionning with its inherent aporias within the specific context (or lack of thereof) proper to development situations. Here, it is very likely that rules from above are not matched with habits coming from below since rules from above are also rules coming from outside and need to be given a content that is not already there and which can only be constituted by increments, training after training, information after information…. Hence the differences between what can be expected from a local administration or a water association performance and what these organizations are actually able to deliver at a given time: for instance, the difficulties of the districts to apply the new procurement rules (tender of bids) that are all the fashion in international aid nowadays, as was the case with the Brong Ahafo project 39 or the poor performances of the CWSMT in pipe scheme management as reported by the chief executive of CWSA (see above). At the same time, development operations which appear from above as a repetition in multiple copies of the same proposal (facilitating access to water for communities for instance) appear from the point of view of each community, as taking very particularistic trajectories, in resonance with sociological trends and singular “projected village” visions. Utilities such as pipe schemes start with apparent concessions to local dynamics and that explains the communities’ enthusiasm for their acquisition. But in order that they remain the communities’ possessions, customers and operators have to undergo drastic changes of attitudes. They need to incorporate universal dispositions such as the disembedding of water access from social considerations and accepting the supply monopoly (for the customers),



https: /www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/regional/CWSA-to-engage-private-operators-for-sustainabilityCommunity-Water-Systems-458536. Accessed 27/12/2017. 38 A situation referred to by K. Marx in the following words: “Mankind […] inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation” (Foreword to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) 39 As M. Tschibambe observes: “The district assemblies didn’t have the resources to organize correctly the tender of bids and to monitor the contractors’ work. As a consequence, it was a public institution —the head office of CWSA— which substitute to them in the majority of cases » (2015: 114). See also footnote n° 14. 37



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