Presentation given by Pablo Yanguas at the University of Sheffield, 3 February 2017.

1. The Banality of Certainty
Organizational, ethical and cognitive
pathologies in the era of aid calculation
Pablo Yanguas
Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre
University of Manchester
[ Sheffield – 3 February 2017 ]

2. 1
The Politics of Certainty

3. Opportunism & policy change
• Financial crisis: Not a budgetary impact, but a political one
• Value-for-Money: “the optimal use of resources to achieve
the intended outcomes” (NAO Toolkit)
• DFID 2010 BAR: “All new projects will be subject to a
rigorous investment appraisal process prior to approval
which will test the evidence underlying the intervention and
its value for money more thoroughly” (2011 Technical
Report)
• DFAT, Julie Bishop 2014: “Funding will be directed to
projects that make a real and measurable difference”

4. VfM, risk and uncertainty
Risk vs Uncertainty
(Objective probability vs Subjective probability)
F. Knight (1921)
“The practical difference between the two categories, risk and uncertainty, is that
in the former the distribution of the outcome in a group of instances is known
(either through calculation a priori or from statistics of past experience), while in
the case of uncertainty this is not true, the reason being in general that it is
impossible to form a group of instances, because the situation dealt with is in
a high degree unique.”
VfM assumes calculable risk
Development unfolds under uncertainty

5. 2
Organizational Pathologies

6. The demands of counter-bureaucracy
• 2011 DFID “Approach to Value for Money”
• “3Es Framework”: economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and cost-
effectiveness
• Aim: better results on the basis of stronger evidence and a more
open and competitive process of public procurement
• Counter-bureaucracy tools supplanted strategic tools
• Business case, Operational plan, Anti-corruption strategies

7. Falsified development
• 2011-15 DFID Sierra Leone Operational Plan
• Poor quality and limited data
• Rapidly changing environment
• Weak delivery capacity in GoSL
• Changing costs of doing business
• Weak fiduciary environment
“The incentives - rightly or wrongly - do not lead to honest explanations
for why things are done” - “Few people would like to hear anything that
rocked the boat“ - “The important thing is to make sure that there are
measurable indicators in the results framework“ - “It's all about numbers,
often very spurious numbers.”

8. Falsified development
“The demands of the counter-bureaucracy are now so
intrusive that they have distorted, misdirected, and disfigured
USAID‘s development practice to such a degree that it is
compromising U.S. national security objectives and
challenging established principles of good development
practice.”
Andrew Natsios (2010), former USAID administrator

9. 3
Cognitive Pathologies

10. Aid, fast and slow
• Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2012)
• System 1 thinking: quick, intuitive, effortless
• System 2 thinking: slow, analytical, costly
• The counter-bureaucracy provokes two reactions:
• Cognitive dissonance: reconciling uncertainty with calculability…
• Cognitive overload: multiple demands, multiple layers, multiple
principals, complex consequences…
System 2 thinking becomes either inefficient (thus
outsourced) or subversive, limiting reflection and learning

11. Judgment under uncertainty
Tversky & Kahneman’s 3 heuristics:
• Representativeness
• What do successful projects do?
• VfM shortcut: demonstrate measurable impact (which is hard)
• Availability
• Is there a recent example of success?
• VfM shortcut: case narratives (which are scarce)
• Anchoring
• What is the baseline for success?
• VfM shortcut: service delivery (which is simplistic)
An overreliance on heuristics leads to a biased
estimation of what aid can/should do

12. 4
Ethical Pathologies

13. Sketchy ethical calculation
VfM is an utilitarian theory of development assistance, leading to
a moral teleology of aid whereby measurable impact = value.
But…
"In placing all conclusions at the beck and call of claims about the value of
outcomes and about the vastly complex causal connections that
determine outcomes, [utilitarian approaches] gain a spurious precision.
Such reasoning may seem to anchor moral requirements in empirical
calculation, but when evidence, data and calculations (not to mention
units of account) are all hazy, those requirements will be elastic, if not
indeterminate.“
(O’Neill, in Chatterjee 2004)

14. Ethics of uncertainty
• Absent data or calculability, we are left with principles and
ideology – deontology replaces teleology
• Value judgment becomes the essence of ethical choice:
Balancing the value implications of different courses of
action given their intended, unintended and foreseen
outcomes (Kamm)
But what moral compass does VfM provide?
Can values be explored without system 2 thinking?

15. VfM in Jerusalem
“Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his
personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence
in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have
murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put
the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. …
“That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can
wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which,
perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could
learn in Jerusalem.”
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

16. 5
The Banality of Value-for-Money

17. The banality of VfM
“The counterbureaucracy ignores a central principle of
development theory—that those development programmes
that are most precisely and easily measured are the least
transformational, and those programmes that are the most
transformational are the least measured”
Andrew Natsios (2010)

18. The banality of VfM
There is a risk that the political search for certainty
may not lead to better developmental outcomes, but to
aid interventions that are ultimately more superficial,
mindless, and amoral.