Sparks and Fizzles: Divergent Performances and Patterns of Cambodian Development Projects

Abstract

Starting from a development pilot project that aimed to introduce new water accounting procedures to Cambodia, this article examines interactions between technical experts from abroad and government officials. Drawing on STS, performativity theory, and the anthropology of development, the article shows that the dynamics at the project interface are characterized by parallel and incongruent performances. Visiting technical experts work on the assumption that they are operating at a science-policy interface. Meanwhile, officials align with the demands of technical rationality, aware of its discrepancy with the performance of politics outside the project frame. Two versions of project realities and their relation to broader Cambodian realities are thus performed simultaneously, but awareness of this is not evenly distributed, with significant consequences for the aspiration of development organizations to transfer knowledge. The case study feeds into a subsequent characterization of a more general pattern of sparks and fizzles, in which projects continuously start up, while efforts to bootstrap technology transfer peter out as they end. This pattern may be endemic to development projects that operate on the assumption of a science-policy interface that is not really there.

• development projects
• knowledge translation
• performativity
• Cambodia
• water management

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Atsuro Morita and Geoff Bowker for their ideas for improvement of the argument, and would like to thank the anonymous EASTS reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

¹ There is significant variation in how such interfaces are constructed and operate across American, European, and East Asian contexts (Jasanoff 2005; Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Yet, there are further qualitative differences between the countries in these regions and many developing Asian or African ones in which the very idea of such interfaces is foreign.

² The situation is not unique to Cambodia. For example, the anthropologist Richard Rottenburg 2009 wrote about an African country anonymized as “Ruritania” that: “Personnel and finances . . . were hardly sufficient to execute the ministries’ responsibilities properly” (15) so that “whenever a problem arises, people immediately insist that a solution cannot be found due to a lack of funds” (25).

³ Compare with Rottenburg (2009: 36), regarding the anonymized “Ruritania”: “The main weakness of the organizations to be developed . . . is generally the fact that the data . . . is largely unusable . . . either missing or unreliable, which is why the consultant was sent for in the first place.”

⁴ As Rappleye and Un (2018: 12) note, several universities do not have PhDs on their faculty, and holding a doctoral degree often means swift promotion to dean or vice-rector.

⁵ Cambodia’s GDP has seen increases in the range of 5 and 13 percent annually since 1994, with the exception of 2009. See “GDP Growth (Annual %): Cambodia.” World Bank. data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=KH (accessed 23 November 2017). In 2015, the country was upgraded to the category of lower-middle-income country by the World Bank.

⁶ The notion of a lack of political will thus operates more or less analogously to the early knowledge transfer literature’s explanation of peoples’ unwillingness to adapt new technologies in terms of “resistance to change,” which has been roundly criticized in STS.

⁷ For example, after noting the fruitlessness of trying to impose: “a degree of technical rigour not . . . matched by political will” on Cambodian water resources management, the recommendation of Robyn Johnston and Matti Kummu (2012: 442) is simply to keep educating “policy makers and the public in understanding the relations between environmental and social systems . . . and keep the debate within the political arena” (446).

⁸ The political theorist Quentin Skinner (1981) saw Geertz as illuminating “an alternative conception of the meaning of political authority and the exercise of power” that, according to O. W. Wolters (1999: 89n5), challenged “parochial assumptions in Western political theory.” Others have criticized Geertz for ignoring Balinese categories (e.g., Hobart 1987: 31, 36). The latter critiques provide further impetus for the examination of encounters between different kinds of political performance.

⁹ This dynamic is now changing rapidly due to a massive influx of Chinese investments and a decline of Western funds in response to what is regarded as the increasingly antidemocratic tendencies of the government.

¹⁰ Ian Baird (2016) loosely refers to Butler’s performativity in an analysis of exiled Lao royalty.

¹¹ Geertz (1980: 104) briefly gestured at the ontological dimensions of political theater, characterizing it as “designed to express a view of the ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing conditions of life to be consonant with that reality; that is, theater to present an ontology and, by presenting it, to make it happen—make it actual.” Butler (1990: 213), in turn, emphasized that the legitimacy of performances depends on reiteration. For a particular reality to get hold, it is necessary to reenact the same kind of political scene, enabling its gradual naturalization by participants.

¹² See ”Water Accounting,” www.wateraccounting.org, accessed 23 November 2017.

¹³ From 1910 to the early 1970s, data for hydrological and meteorological stations were recorded daily at 50 hydrological stations, but after the war only 20 have been repaired. In 2015, the country had 13 stations that measured water quality data, “38 meteorological stations that record rainfall, 23 that record evaporation, and 14 stations that record wind speed.” Data collection is done manually and “instrumentation is limited” (GSSD 2015: 74).

¹⁴ Green water designates the “rainfall distribution across a composite terrain with mixed land use, geological formations, soil types, slopes, elevations, and natural drainage to streams,” while blue water “represents the portion of the net inflow that is not evaporated and is available for downstream use and withdrawals” (Karimi, Bastiaanssen, and Molden 2013: 2464).

¹⁵ Cambodian officials are, of course, not in internal agreement. Serious infighting about turf and access to funds takes place between different ministries and government offices. Such disagreements are not voiced at the project interface.

¹⁶ While short-term visiting researchers often take project performances as indicative of a more or less shared reality, experts and development workers who work in Cambodia for longer periods become more or less knowledgeable about these performance incongruences. Long-term residents and visitors with experiences from other development contexts delight in comparing the situation with African or Latin American countries. Regardless, they still have little choice but to work within the project form.

¹⁷ I do not think there is any inherent theoretical reason for this, but, empirically, analyses often proceed as if it were the case.

¹⁸ I am not aware of any follow-up after the second phase of the project ended. Water accounting is not mentioned on the homepage of the Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology website, which does describe a different ADB-funded project on uplands irrigation and water resource management. See www.mowram.gov.kh, accessed 23 November 2017.

¹⁹ Although derived from specificities pertaining to the Cambodian development scene, I venture that this broader pattern may be encountered, with variations, in many contexts where technical development projects are conducted while a science-policy interface is missing and conceptions of politics and objectives vary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casper Bruun Jensen

Casper Bruun Jensen is the author of Ontologies for Developing Things (2010); coauthor of Monitoring Movements in Development Aid, with Brit Ross Winthereik (2013); and coeditor of Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, with Kjetil Rödje (2009), and Infrastructures and Social Complexity, with Penny Harvey and Atsuro Morita (2016). His present work focuses on knowledge, infrastructure, and practical ontologies in the Mekong River basin.