Lessons in a bottle: The outsized impacts of soda in development practice

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate how soda, an ostensibly inconsequential component of development implementation, can have wide‐ranging impacts in shaping programmatic outcomes. Drawing upon 6 months of participant observation alongside an international nongovernmental organization (NGO), I demonstrate how sodas contributed to new ways of valuing time, altered intracommunity and intercommunity relations, and offered unique insight into programme efficacy. In so doing, I argue that refocusing attention beyond the larger discourses of development to the everyday objects, mundane practices, and the interstitial spaces that populate implementation enables critical insights that would otherwise be overlooked.