The Normativity of Numbers: World Bank and IMF Conditionality¹

Abstract

Good governance reforms aim at transforming African state bureaucracies into efficient, transparent, and accountable institutions. These policies are inserted into the national administrative apparatus by means of conditions attached to the financial support of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the conditions exactly match the priorities of these international financial institutions (IFIs), they are not set by them; paradoxically they are (in theory) set by the government requesting a loan. This paradox, the article argues, has to be understood primarily in legal terms. A close reading of a number of loan documents signed by the representatives of the IFIs and the government of Malawi demonstrates how responsibility for good governance reforms is ascribed to the government of Malawi, which "owns" the reforms. The article further shows that the elaborate conditionality attached to loans fuses legal logic and economics in a characteristic "normativity of numbers." By normativity of numbers I refer to the use of economic data, and the introduction of systems of personnel management and expenditure monitoring, as conditions in the loan documents.

Analyzing the Impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on Restructuring of Public Service in Nigeria.

“…Public service restructuring emerges because of conditionality attached with loans given to the developing countries by Bretton woods institutions of international monetary fund (IMF) and World Bank. To some section of the society, public service restructuring is regarded as downsizing, whereas others view it as civil service reforms (Anders, 2008). In developing countries some authors view it as human resources development or capacity building.…”

A Review of the Anthropological Literature on the Civil Service

“…This shapes the way bureaucracies are conceived of by scholars, prompting them to see bureaucrats as interesting only for the extent to which they either do or do not obey rules-and why. For example, while bureaucrats might be said to "provide services" and researchers might seek to explore whether or how they do so, bureaucrats themselves might envision their workday as a series of tasks or a logging of hours (Anders 2010). While institutions are indeed charged with carrying out tasks, they are also a life-world populated by actual buildings, specific objects and people with anxieties and dreams.…”

“…In sum, bureaucrats are people (Lea 2008) and beyond revealing the inadequacy of their stereotypes, we should accept it as a basic premise. Bureaucrats themselves are members of that society: they are mothers and brothers and football players (Anders 2010), and they might move throughout their day from quintessentially "bureaucratic" tasks, such as filling a form, to "non-bureaucratic" ones, such as driving to the field or heading to lunch. Consider the "young professionals" described by Mathur (2014) who are part-time employees officially hired by NGOs to which government work has been outsourced.…”

“…On the one hand, debates over the nature of the state have led anthropologists to call for an examination of the everyday practices of state functionaries (Bear and Mathur 2014;Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014;Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2008;Gupta and Ferguson 2002;Hansen and Stepputat 2001;Heyman 1995Heyman , 2004Trouillot 2003), rather than focus on narratives about the state from ordinary people (Das and Poole 2004;Gupta 1995;Taussig 1997) and those produced by the state (Mitchell 1999;Scott 1998), or to accept the "vulgar" Marxist notion that the state is merely a tool for maintaining relations of production. 1 The ascendancy of development and aid institutions as objects of anthropological concern has also encouraged anthropologists to make a similar transition, in this case from an examination of the institutional discourses that were found to obscure the political underpinnings of development aid and their effects in local communities (Escobar 1993;Ferguson 1990), to an examination of the everyday practices and selfrepresentational work of the donor and recipient institutions themselves (Anders 2005;James 2015;Lea 2008;Li 2007;Mosse 2005;Rottenburg 2009). Third, the rise of "audit cultures" (Strathern 2000) in the neoliberal academy has prompted anthropologists to reflect critically on the institutional practices in which they themselves participate (Brenneis 1994(Brenneis , 1999Lederman 2006).…”

The normativity of numbers in practice: technologies of counting, accounting and auditing in Malawi's civil service reform

“…These reforms were characterised by a distinct normativity of numbers; that is, the use of numbers as norms for measuring a developing country's progress in implementing policy reforms and introducing systems to collect and process numbers in a standardised fashion (Anders ). This article tracks how civil servants have been affected by the normativity of numbers in practice and how they tried to subvert and manipulate its effects in the context of the civil service reform in Malawi.…”