Contenu du sommaire : La mesure du développement

Measuring Development : A Suitable Field for Methodological Innovation. Statistical production in developing countries has led to methodological innovations. Structures that are less institutionalized than in the North have led to original research, involving exposures to knowledge in demography, economics, anthropology, history, sociology, and political sciences. In Northern countries, task specialization has turned statistical work into routines by confining it within standard methodologies. Developing countries have turned out to be places of significant inventiveness. Three examples are mentioned in the paper : the genesis of an original accounting system, the discussion of population and social surveys in Africa, and the dissemination of controlled randomized experiments.

The Political Determinants of the Measure of Development Assistance. The international standard for development funding has remained at 0,7% of the GNI of the member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of OECD since the early sixties. This standard has never been questioned in its foundations, while its calculation corresponds to the situation of more than fifty years ago. The international conditions have changed, as well as the theoretical analyses on growth and development. Even worse, most of the donors try to inflate their figures on aid by interpreting the definitions given by DAC/OECD. All the actors stick to this sacrosanct objective to be achieved, supporting the statement that a volume of aid corresponding to this objective will trigger development. Why such a “path dependency” with regard to this international standard ?

Technical, Ethical and Political Issues in Measuring Overindebtedness of Low Income Countries. Trying to measure over-indebtedness can be seen as an attempt to legitimate decisions like debt rescheduling, debt relief or debt cancellation. The HIPC initiatives introduced such measures in 1996. The choice of thresholds has been made in a specific logic (debt overhang) very different from other rationales like altruism based on ethical grounds. Debt reductions were nevertheless presented as being aimed at reducing poverty. This approach has been completely overthrown by the MDRI (multilateral debt relief initiative), but is surprisingly making a come-back under the IDA-IMF Debt Sustainability Framework.

Measuring Development : NGOs Between Performance and Communication. NGOs and institutional funders currently use quantitative tools to measure poverty and the impact of their development programmes. Such a statistical evaluation started with economists and the military at the end of the Second World War, but it became a paradigm in the 1980s, when the operators of international aid had to follow a liberal model to demonstrate their performance. This article thus introduces a general discussion on the standardisation and the (mis) use of numbers to evaluate NGOs in a context where humanitarian rhetoric is often confused with marketing and fundraising.

Measuring State Fragility in Developing Countries in a Post-Resource-Conflict Situation. Civil conflicts induced or maintained by the abundance of natural resources in developing countries are often analyzed in terms of State failure. In order to help these countries in a post-conflict situation and to prevent further armed conflicts, international institutions refer to State fragility. Our contribution aims at discussing and questioning the political dimensions of State fragility as a concept. We also question the issue of measuring fragility.

Is the Measurement of Development an Expression of Power ? Application to the Field of Education. The international community generally agrees on the essential role of training and education in the development process. This role is all the more important in the new information and knowledge economy. In fact, this is a field where conflicts arise, for example, in terms of values and knowledge transmitted, tensions between universalism and singularities, differentiated access to school according to socio-economic groups or differentiation within States. This is reflected both in statistical and empirical studies and in theoretical analysis. At the heart of this paradox, we find the question of measurement and the role of power. This article will first deal with the general measurement of development, and secondly with the specific measurement of the micro and macro economics of education with the limits of the measurement of the multidimensional effects of education on development.

From Vulnerable People to Vulnerability Syndromes : Which Measurements ? To improve the characterization of populations exposed to social, economic or environmental risks in order to adapt prevention and adaptation policies : such is the new challenge for research in various disciplines that work in this field, each with its own conceptual approaches and specific methods. However, taking into consideration the complexity of events makes vulnerability a transdisciplinary object only described through multiscalar and multitemporal integrated approaches. On the basis of field cases in developing countries, the authors show how it might be possible to link the vulnerability of individuals or households to that of the ecosociosystems in which they are embedded.

Measuring Development to Govern Indigenous People. Fifteen years after the first development indicators, faced with continuing inequalities in the world and increasing demand for recognition of social, political and cultural specificities, “indicators with identity” for indigenous peoples have been drawn up in Mexico. The production of these indicators invites us to examine the technicization of public policies through the use of expert knowledge. The dual purpose of this article is to explore the use of expert knowledge as a means of legitimizing public policies, which, in turn, contributes to technicizing the indigenous issue ; it additionally serves as a way of imposing representation of the latter – thus separating and dismissing the register of political arguments from the indigenous issue.

Evaluating and Measuring of Microfinance Impacts : How to Break the Double Deadlock ? After a historical presentation of impact evaluation methodologies, the contribution presents the “double deadlock” of quantitative and qualitative approaches in this matter. The analysis then discusses hypotheses that combine these two methodologies with the aim of designing impact evaluation methodologies better suited to the complexity of the sector.

Randomized Control Trials Tested in the Field : The Example of the Sky Micro-Insurance Project in Cambodia. Drawing on a case study – the randomized evaluation of the impact of Sky, a micro-insurance program in Cambodia – this article examines the practical arrangements of collaboration and compromise between the constraints of academic “rigor” and those of practitioners and between various forms of knowledge production (quantitative/qualitative). The analysis examines the sets of protagonists in order to highlight the multiple challenges of these two forms of articulation in the case of randomized control trials. Compared with other quantitative methods, this double articulation is unavoidable but also particularly complex, for the following reasons : the narrowness of the research questions, the very strong constraints of the survey protocol and the necessary collaboration of field practitioners in its implementation.