A Strange Kind of Science: Making Sense of the Millennium Villages Project

Abstract

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are often critiqued as a strategy of social engineering. This analysis would seem to be supported by the case of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), the world's leading programme for the achievement of the MDGs. At the level of its discursive articulation, the MVP appears as a scientific ‘proof of concept’ for the comprehensive engineering of neoliberal social orders. But its evaluation methodology has been widely criticised for a lack of scientific rigour, and field research that I conducted in the Ruhiira Millennium Village in Uganda in 2013 revealed serious problems of implementation. I argue that the MVP is better understood not as a strategy of social engineering but as the staging of a social fantasy in which the constitutive antagonisms of capitalist development are concealed. In this fantasy space, the MDGs function to fill the gap between the promise of development and the impossibility of capitalism without poverty.

Extracto – Las Metas de Desarrollo del Milenio (“MDG” por sus siglas en inglés) son con frecuencia criticadas como estrategia de ingeniería social. Este análisis parecería contar con el respaldo del caso del Proyecto de Villas del Milenio (“MVP” por sus siglas en inglés), el mayor programa mundial para el logro de las MDGs. A nivel de su articulación discursiva, el MVP aparenta ser una “prueba de concepto” científica de la completa ingeniería del orden social neoliberal. Pero su metodología de evaluación ha sido ampliamente criticada por su falta de rigor científico y la investigación de campo adelantada por el autor en la Villa Milenio de Ruhira en Uganda en 2013 reveló serios problemas de implementación. Se argumenta que el MVP es mejor entendido no como estrategia de ingeniería social sino como la dramatización de una fantasía social en la que se esconden los antagonismos constitutivos del desarrollo capitalista. En este espacio de fantasía, es la función de los MDG cubrir la brecha entre la promesa de desarrollo y la imposibilidad de un capitalismo sin pobreza.

Keywords:

• millennium villages project
• millennium development goals
• social engineering
• fantasy
• Žižek

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Similar experiments were undertaken by several post-colonial African regimes, in some cases under the rubric of ‘African Socialism’ (Scott, 1998, pp. 223–252). Scott (1998) attributes this continuity to the ‘authoritarian high modernism’ characteristic of the modern state (p. 24). Elsewhere I have argued that its enduring appeal has more to do with the trajectory of capitalist development towards the colonisation of everyday life, (including in its putatively ‘socialist’ forms) (Wilson, 2014a).

2 My fieldwork included 35 household interviews, with 5 of these conducted in each of 7 of the 8 Millennium Villages in the Ruhiira cluster. My research assistant and I collaborated with local government officials and a savings and credit cooperative to target households representative of a broad range of living standards. I also conducted nine interviews with implementers of the Project in the fields of health, education, and agriculture, and four telephone interviews with ex-administrators of the Project in Ruhiira. This methodology makes no claim to ‘scientific rigour’ of the kind made by the MVP. However, without ‘proving’ anything, my findings raise serious concerns regarding the Project's claims to success.

3 According to the MVP website, maize yields in Ruhiira have increased from 1.8 to 3.9 tonnes per hectare, the number of children receiving free school meals has increased by 69%, malaria prevalence is approaching zero, and the proportion of people using an improved water source has quadrupled (http://millenniumvillages.org/the-villages/ruhiira-uganda/, accessed July 24, 2014).

4 Ruhiira household interview #29 Cluster: Ntungu, 16 February 2013.

5 Ruhiira household interview #15, Cluster: Kanyawameizi, 10 February 2013.

6 Ruhiira household interview #11 Cluster: Migyera, 9 February 2013.

7 MVP agricultural extension worker, author interview, Kabuyanda, Uganda, 16 February 2013.

8 Jeffrey Sachs, in the ‘Health’ video on the Tommy Hilfiger Promise Collection website, http://uk.tommy.com/hilfiger/millennium-promise,en_GB,pg.html (accessed November 20, 2013).

9 The video can be seen on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbTffV-cEBI (accessed June 14, 2013).

10 MVP health worker, author interview, Kabuyanda, Uganda, 12 February 2013.

Additional information

Japhy Wilson is Research Coordinator at the National Strategic Centre for the Right to Territory (CENEDET) in Quito, Ecuador. His research explores the relationship between space, power and ideology in the politics of development. He is the author of Jeffrey Sachs: The strange case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid (Verso, 2014), and co-editor with Erik Swyngedouw of The post-political and its discontents: Spaces of depoliticization, spectres of radical politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).