Counting chickens before they hatch: transformational accounting in a development cash transfer program

Abstract

This article investigates the role of narratives in international development through an ethnographic analysis of a cash transfer program. Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net makes small. Regular payments to some of the poorest households in the country. Implementation centers on public activities accompanying payouts where beneficiaries recount changes they have been able to make through their productive use of program money. Narratives are fundamental to cash transfer programs where agencies have to show that the very small payments poor households receive lead to the substantial changes made in policy claims. Development programs invoke distinct rhetorical forms in order to make hyperbolic claims about the changes people needing development are expected to achieve, despite limited resources. Transformational accounting adopts the dramaturgical conventions of ‘relational accounting’ to situate aid recipients in tales of self-generated transformation that provide the basis for ongoing improvement. The systematic overstatement of impacts from interventions perpetuates longstanding discourses about personal and financial responsibility, sustaining political economies of aid and its organizational arrangements which benefit vested interests.