This study is an ethnography across levels and processes, as set forth in the introduction. To capture the aid story, I have followed aid issues through actors and processes on both donor and recipient sides, with aid as the common thread. Interactions between donors and recipients occur on (and between) several levels and over time. In conducting an ethnography of foreign aid across levels and processes, I worked in multiple settings and charted the interactions among parties to the aid process. I employed a technique that some anthropologists have called “studying through.” As Cris Shore and Susan Wright explain it, studying through “entails multi-site ethnographies which trace policy connections between different organizational and everyday worlds even where actors in different sites do not know each other or share a moral universe.”1
Studying through has enabled me to examine interactions among aid discourses, actors, and institutions across place and time. It has enabled me to follow donors’ discourses, policies, and projects all the way through to recipients’ responses to them, and, in turn, back to donors’ responses, and so on. It has enabled me to chart the “chemical reactions” that are produced in the interface among parties to the aid process and that shape aid outcomes. Ultimately, studying through has enabled me to track interactions not only between actors on the ground (donor and recipient representatives and other parties to the aid process), but also between the larger systems they represent. (See introduction, section titled “Chemical Reactions.”)
Studying through builds on a longtime development in anthropology. Some 30 years ago, Laura Nader appealed to the discipline to “study up”—that is, to analyze powerful institutions and elites of complex societies—as an antidote to the traditional focus on poor, colonized, and marginalized peoples. “A reinvented anthropology,” Nader wrote, “should study powerful institutions and bureaucratic organizations in the United States, for such institutions and their network systems affect our lives and also affect the lives of people that anthropologists have traditionally studied all around the world.”2 Likewise, Eric Wolf urged anthropologists to “spell out the processes of power which created the present-day cultural systems and the linkages between them.”3 A growing number of anthropologists are doing so.4
Today, given the ever greater influence of international financial and policy institutions, global elites, and globalization processes, such studies are even more compelling. No approaches or methods are better suited to studying these issues than ethnographic research across levels and processes and studying through. Such ethnographies should enable us to capture political and economic policies and globalization processes on the level(s) where they are experienced—whether a community, company, social network, cluster of networks, “clan,” family, city, social strata, or public opinion.
Although many of those units are taken to be the “local” level and anthropological tradition lies in studying that level (often on-the-ground communities), an ongoing discussion in anthropology questions the nature of the local. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson suggest that “the idea of locality is not well thought out” and call for its reexamination.5 Sherry Ortner observes that “we can no longer take communities to be localized, on-the-ground entities, or at least that their local, on-the-ground form is only one moment and site of their existence.”6 And Jean and John Comaroff conclude that “‘Locality’ is not everywhere, nor for every purpose, the same thing; sometimes it is a family, sometimes a town, sometimes a nation, sometimes a flow or a field, sometimes a continent or even the world; often it lies at the point of articulation among two or more of these things.”7 Indeed, as we see in the cases presented in chapters 2 through 5, the aid story provides examples of diverse points of articulation.
FIELD RESEARCH
It is difficult to capture the process of conducting an intensive fieldwork project over ten years in multiple locations (including Washington, D.C., Brussels, London, Bonn, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Moscow, and Kiev) and so many more specific sites. To follow issues in which actors in multiple locations and sites are involved has required frequent shifts between donor and recipient societies. Moreover, the aid story unfolded over many years. For these reasons, the process of studying it was far from linear.
If a back-and-forth feel characterized the research process, the foci of my fieldwork were, by contrast, enduring. My field research focused mainly on interviewing and observation at four organizational levels: (1) at donor agencies, with individuals responsible for establishing policy guidelines and administering projects (for instance, U.S., EU, German, and UK officials located at donor headquarters as well as in donor offices in recipient countries); (2) at recipient institutions, with key officials directly involved in aid programs, including officials at the core institutions of aid coordination (for example, the [Polish] Council of Ministers; the [Hungarian] Assistance Coordination Secretariat of the Ministry of International Economic Relations; the [Czech] Centre for Foreign Assistance of the Ministry of the Economy; and the [Slovak] Department of Foreign Assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs); (3) at meetings where donors and recipients came together; and (4) at selected institutions that received consultants and/or funds, including enterprises, consulting firms, nongovernmental organizations, and such recipient ministries as privatization, industry, finance, and environment.
With multiple donors, multiple recipients, and myriad projects, the subject might indeed appear overwhelming, and indeed, at times it felt so. The study was ambitious, but I was able to narrow its scope. It helped, for example, that a limited universe of relevant agencies and individuals was involved in efforts on the recipient side. In the privatization ministries of Central Europe, for example, typically two, at most three, officials in each particular aid effort principally worked directly with the privatizing enterprises and the foreign consultants sent to advise them. It was possible therefore to talk with each of them.
To select projects for close study from among hundreds of potential sites, I conducted an exploratory survey of priority projects in the priority countries, as seen by the donors. I began my empirical research in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, which were viewed as most likely to succeed among the transitional countries and which received the most donor attention and funding, at least initially.8 Later, as donors moved into Russia, I worked there as well. (See introduction, section titled “In the Field.”)
In scouting around potential projects, I cast a wide net. Many of the cases I then chose to examine in depth were considered by donors to be “model projects,” with several or many donors concentrating resources on them. These projects included the Ursus tractor factory near Warsaw, the Regional Environmental Center in (later, near) Budapest, and the Russian Privatization Center in Moscow. Extensive study of these projects provided much information about the overall results of the particular aid strategies they represented.
I found that the economic, political, and social impacts of grant aid could be accurately assessed on a broad scale only after studying specific cases of aid implementation. For example, the economic impact of privatization assistance would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish without first evaluating individual cases. Many variables enter into privatization, including the political environment and the political and economic interests of parties to the privatization process, such as ministry officials, factory managers, and workers. Establishing a sound causal relationship between aid and a specified economic outcome (by looking, for example, at the number of technical advisers or the number of privatized companies), is highly problematic. Further, equating economic success or “development” simply with the number of factories privatized also is highly problematic. My approach, therefore, was to assess the effects of aid in individual cases.
To gather firsthand information, I have employed two methods in particular: The first is the long-tested “extended case method” detailed by anthropologist J. Van Velsen, which “requires the ethnographer’s close acquaintance with individuals over a lengthy period of time and a knowledge of their personal histories and their networks of relationships.”9 I found this technique particularly appropriate to studying the unfolding aid story. It enabled me to follow individuals and groups through a series of decisions, events, and problems and was especially useful as a tool for studying relationships among individuals and groups representing donor and recipient sides. Although the individuals and groups involved in a particular “case” sometimes were located in different sites, they always were connected by the policy or aid implementation process and/or by actual social networks.
I conducted many open-ended interviews and compared and assessed people’s responses to the same questions over time.10 The open-ended format allowed people to define their own issues and to explain in their own terms. I asked people about their own activities, perspectives, and networks, as well as about those of others in their circle or organization. In following particular circles and organizations, I also talked with those outside them, but having direct experience with them.
The information I sought (for example, Western perspectives on Central and Eastern European problems, and Central and Eastern European views of Western projects) could best, and in many cases only, be gleaned through in-depth fieldwork and related interviewing and observation. The networks and interrelationships I explored (for example, among a group of Western consultants, a Russian clan, and certain donor officials) could be obtained only through access to and trust among a variety of informants familiar with the same project. By traveling to the region at regular intervals and following up interviews conducted earlier as much as possible, I was able to track changes in policy implementation and in responses on the Central and Eastern European side.
The second method I employed to gather firsthand information, though less established as a method used by anthropologists, appears to be particularly called for in an ethnography across levels and processes. My research entailed hundreds of interviews and informal conversations with officials, notably aid principals in donor countries. This required using methods and ethics from journalism, which involve techniques such as formal interviewing. It also required cross-checking critical information and confirming key points with multiple sources. Again, it was necessary to move back and forth among field sites to cross-check and verify, if sometimes only by telephone or e-mail once contact had been established.
Because anthropologists increasingly study the powerful, I believe that the anthropological ethic ordaining that “our first responsibility is to those whose lives and cultures we study” ought to be reexamined. The dilemma is about how to proceed when a study examines both those controlling the funding and defining the problems (donors) and those with typically much less influence and recourse (recipients). What of the anthropologist’s responsibility to the more powerful (donor) end? Does an anthropologist have the same responsibility to an agency that employs a public relations staff as it does to a tribe facing extinction? I have concluded that studying powerful institutions and actors binds anthropologists to the ethical code and practices of journalism with regard to treatment of “sources.” Therefore, I protect the confidentiality of sources when they have so requested.11 Anthropologists engaged in research in government agencies on sensitive issues may find it difficult to proceed without employing ethics from journalism because it will be expected of them by their sources.12
In addition to firsthand interviewing and observation, I have consulted reports and internal memoranda of donors and recipients, project documents, studies by other scholars and analysts, investigative reports and reporters, materials obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and evaluations carried out by donors and independent organizations. The U.S. General Accounting Office and the EU Court of Auditors conducted a number of valuable investigations that served to confirm and broaden my findings. More and more, anthropologists are consulting such works. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson write: “Talking to and living with the members of a community are increasingly taking their place alongside reading newspapers, analyzing government documents, observing the activities of governing elites, and tracking the internal logic of transnational development agencies and corporations.”13
FURTHER THOUGHTS
As I have learned, studying programs and policies in which powerful institutions and actors are involved can spur much-needed public debate. It also can generate attack from individuals whose troubling conduct has come to light as a result of the research. For example, after publication of the first edition of this book and articles on the subject, two advisers involved in the aid story sought to discredit my work and to portray me as a conspiracy theorist “going after leading advocates of radical market reform.”14 Confirmation of my findings from sources such as investigatory bodies helped to firmly establish the credibility of the study.
In the course of this study, I have found common ground not only with fellow anthropologists but also with political scientists, economists, lawyers, investigators, and journalists working on pieces of the same issues. The world of the anthropologist, especially one studying across levels and processes, may no longer be so isolated. Perhaps this is an indication that cross-fertilization of approaches and methods increasingly may be called for in anthropological studies of global issues and interactions. By bringing to bear anthropological approaches and methods such as studying through, anthropologists can take the lead.