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Exactly a year ago, on the 21st of January of 2018, Paul Romer, then chief economist of the World Bank,

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stepped down over scandals flaring up from his interview with The Wall Street Journal a few days earlier.

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In that interview, he suggested that the political leanings of bank staff may have manipulated the bank's high profile annual doing business rankings,

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specifically in the case of Chile, who had dropped down from 34th to 55th in the ranking.

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During the socialist Michelle Bachelet administration,

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the steep decline had been due to methodological changes rather than any actual deterioration in the country's business environment.

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Paul Romer's announcement was interesting in two ways.

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One, The acknowledgement that the World Bank repeatedly changed the methodology of one of its flagship economic reports over several years,

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which unsurprisingly produced different results.

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And to that, these changes were often unfair and misleading to the point he claims of a politicised methodology that compromised the rankings.

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The first contention pointed to the fact that the introduction of new metrics could be responsible for drastic changes in rankings,

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rather than any meaningful change that actually happens in the fields.

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And the second contention pointed to the fact that ideology, rather than data was driving, was driving key World Bank assessments.

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In Chile's case in particular, the bank's methodology appears to be in direct correlation with the country's politics.

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For a moment, various developing countries panicked. India, for instance, had just made it to the one hundredth place of the ranking.

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A result that was actually an explicit policy policy goal by Modi's government.

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Nigeria had been congratulated for being amongst the top 10 most improved economies in the world, having moved up 24 places in 2017.

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Naturally, neither wanted to see any changes to the report, which appeared to represent,

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let's say, an empathetic endorsement of the country's reforms.

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So amidst rumours which risks the bank's credibility, Paul Romer quits,

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quit and then quickly retracted and clarified that he was not aware of a single instance in which someone at the bank published fabricated data.

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The bank ramped up the explanation for its methodology on the website in a quite defensive manner,

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I have to say, in order to answer any sort of suspicions of irregularities and then moved on.

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And one of the most important interesting parts of this story was not that it reveals that the World Bank was possibly biased.

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Shocking, I know, but that's the scandal was itself unfair,

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since changes in methodology were actually a reflection of the concern over a

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serious and bullet-proof process of gathering and analysing objective data.

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So controversy explained, the public could absolutely go back to trusting the institution's figures and rankings.

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And so I know you're wondering why am I talking about Chile in an African studies

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seminar or Nigeria when the case studies announced our Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau?

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The reason for this Khaled's introduction is that the anniversary of this episode surrounding the

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World Bank reveals something that I've repeatedly found in the Mozambican and the Guinean cases,

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and that illustrates the main argument of the book that donor assessments of

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success and failure of improvement or deterioration of progress or setback,

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and the representations of recipient countries that come to prevail within the donor realm are

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not simply objective appreciations of their performances by neutral and objective observers,

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practitioners and analysts, as it's claimed. Rather,

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they are subjective appreciations of recipients trajectory with very concrete

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implications for the way these countries are known to us and then acted upon.

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So with this introduction, I'm going to develop my arguments by answering four research questions the the what question.

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So reality is mediated and interpreted. So which particular account is conveyed by a given representation?

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The why question? So what purpose does such an account play?

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The how? How are these accounts produced and reproduced, contested, affirmed, etc. and the so what?

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So what are the implications of these particular representations?

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I'll try to address these questions from a poor structuralist perspective and using the examples of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau more or less.

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To illustrate the argument, I won't be able to go into much detail because there's not that much space.

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But first, I'd like to start.

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What I find to be an interesting paradox that is at the centre of the research of my, of my research of the relationship between donor and recipients.

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So the Western aid industry labours under the assumption that its policies are the outcome of a rationalist

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analysis of recipients performances where quantification plays a predominant role since the end of the Cold War.

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Since then, there has been great emphasis placed on progress assessment,

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bringing to the forefront of the of the AIDS rom, a focus on aid, effectiveness, performance standards,

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good governance and subsequently there has been a lot of monitoring and evaluation processes that produce measurable results,

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which in turn either incite or restrain renewed tranches of aid.

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So the new aid approach entails a significant focus on quantitative indicators in

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order to guide overall assessments of recipient countries and their trajectories.

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Now, quantification intends to produce knowledge independent of the researcher and by kind of

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minimising the need for some sort of intimate knowledge personal connexions of the field.

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In other words, the distance and personality of the scientific methods of data collection and analysis.

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It's what makes it objective. And it's not objectivity in turn, which conveys the authority of expert pronouncements.

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And it's also key to making claims for universality and in this case, comparability, right?

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Which is at the heart of rankings. And that's also why it has gained international acceptance.

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Indeed, this this actually accounts for a lot of the prestige and power of quantitative methods in the modern age world.

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Yet numbers, graphs, tables, rankings are ultimately forms of social communication,

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so they're intimately bound to the community they relate to and the social identity of both researchers and subjects of research.

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They're therefore subjective and dependent on the context in which they are created.

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This does not mean that there is no validity in relation to the reality they describe.

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It means, however, that these are not accurate or indisputable descriptions of the outside world.

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It's the process of social construction. So what matters is not so much reality per se, but how that reality is apprehended.

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So a first point here is that this is actually quite unreliable in plenty of these local contexts.

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So a certain degree of scepticism regarding data collection and methodology is undoubtedly warranted.

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But more important is not just about the fact that data might not be accessible,

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it's also the question regarding who produces and how such data is produced.

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So here my contention, and hence the paradox, is that this sort of data collection, despite its mask of quantification and universality,

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is often and in particular in the donor realm, very personal and even intimate the opposite of what is intended or the mask that it carries.

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So, for instance,

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data collection can often depend on the friends of the aid worker who owns a local company who gets hired to produce a particular report.

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It's not the impersonal, universal or technocratic United Nations that comes up with these results.

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A country's assessment might be kind of finalised by a single desk officer being parachuted from the

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headquarters to talk to specific local people who were previously selected by a particular donor agent.

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You see what I'm what I'm getting at.

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So ultimately, these supposedly quantified measurements and assessments exist to convey in what has become a familiar and standardised format,

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a particular account. So from a structural perspective, eight facts do not speak for themselves there be spoken and spoken for,

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and reality is not objective and needs to be interpreted.

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So don't donor discourses are crucial in a articulating the way in which a recipient's reality is to be exposed.

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A closer look at any possible trajectory points to distinct realities,

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with both negative and positive indicators often even contradictory, which needs to be interpreted.

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There are competing accounts of performance. So donor discourses will pick and choose, concentrate or ignore,

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emphasise or downplay donors criteria as much as recipients indicators in order to construct, construct the story they wish to convey.

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So the ultimate picture portrayed by these statistics is inevitably partial and often distorted,

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as the story in Chile showed, so they're biased towards the outcome the actor actually wants to value.

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There are always alternative interpretations and solutions. Some may be reconsidered, including those that was previously rejected,

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and this betrayal is ultimately produce dominant discourses of success or failure,

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be it in particular sectors or kind of regarding the overall representation of a recipient country,

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as happens with narratives, mainstream narratives on Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

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So. And in the book manuscript, I look at the cases of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from earlier on,

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so I argue that the levels of success and failure attached to Mozambique in Guinea-Bissau precedes the 90s.

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But for the sake of time, the 90s are the moments where this kind of quantification of assessments becomes prevalent from the 1980s onwards,

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accompanying a re-emergence of the people centred orientation in these priorities.

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The criteria for measuring national economic progress were expanded to encompass not simply measures of economic growth rates,

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which were long the privileged metric for assessing development,

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but also a range of indicators selected and shaped to facilitate monitoring and evaluation.

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So countries became increasingly evaluated, according to new indicators.

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Amongst these stands out, for instance, the UNDP celebrated Human Development Index,

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which supposedly conveyed a broader and more comprehensive picture of the well-being or lack thereof of recipient countries,

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and evaluations of success and failure in the accomplishment of aid.

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Goals became central to the daily work of donor agencies since the 90s.

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In this context, and in particular between 1992 and 2012,

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Mozambique's development record was hailed by the Western donor community as a success story.

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While Guinea-Bissau remains inextricably linked to the label of failure,

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these dominant discourses of success and failure associated with the two countries were broadly shared by the most prominent Western donors lenders,

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advisors from the academic and policy worlds, as well as practitioners from top level managers,

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field officers and intergovernmental western led inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations.

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So there was obviously the the discourse is never completely homogeneous, but we can point to a dominant hegemonic discourse.

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So in what concerns? There are apparently divergent paths towards development.

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Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were widely perceived to represent the epitome of what was ultimately right and wrong with Africa.

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There was praise and blame, optimism and pessimism tolerance with deviations from the prescribed model or harsh criticisms,

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and they characterised Western aids opposing discourses regarding the two states doing more or less those two decades.

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And yet, Mozambican Guinea-Bissau have maintained throughout the post-Cold War era strikingly

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similar positions as measured in terms of those new indicators that came about in the 90s,

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namely the Human Development Index. So this is obviously a zooming in to these countries,

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but just pay attention to the fact that neither left the bottom 10 percent of countries in the Human Development Index since it was first created.

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So clearly there and in several of the years, Guinea-Bissau actually fared better than Mozambique.

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The same when we're looking at trends since 98 up until 2005 and the same with the Human Poverty Index

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ranked rankings where they both fared quite badly compared to other countries and between the two,

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Guinea-Bissau actually fared better in some of these years. So indeed,

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the realities in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau in these professed and celebrated indicators of the nineties

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were never as strikingly dissimilar or divergent to the extent suggested by the mainstream narratives.

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But they did have an impact in terms of transfers. So the the chances of it tended to accompany the labels of success and failure.

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I can't really go into that debate now, but obviously with this graph,

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it is actually striking how more and more aids in Mozambique does not appear to make a difference in terms of these same indicators, right?

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But so they're kind of two puzzles here, like the first one is on Mozambique.

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It's Mozambique itself is a puzzle to Mozambique's performance versus the level of success.

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And the second puzzle has to do with the comparison between the two and the fact that they have some similar socioeconomic indicators of development.

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Yet they have opposite labels and perceptions from the West, the donor community.

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So this leads to the main question, right?

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So what then drives the Western donor community's labelling of a recipient country's trajectory as a success or failure?

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And what are the implications of these labels?

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In other words, how do they come about, how they have been sustained or contested and what are they performative effects?

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So how productive are these labels? These discrepancies in terms of discrepancies in terms of the labels and the socioeconomic indicators,

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namely in the case of Mozambique, which is a more studied case, are present in the critical literature.

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But the more critical issues are still remains within a positive appraisal of the country's performances so it can test statistics.

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It points to inaccurate portrayals on the part of donors.

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And my argument here is not to insist whether Mozambique is or is not a success or whether Guinea-Bissau is or is not a failure.

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But to emphasise the existence of competing accounts and understands particular donors biases and subjective choices.

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So why is Mozambique consistently described as a success when an alternative story could plausibly be told in which you discuss as more of a

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failure or and so what is interesting is not so much the fact that we can identify failures as well as successes in the Mozambican trajectory,

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but rather why and how the dominant narrative mainstream narrative came to focus

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predominantly on the successes and minimised or accommodated the failures.

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The other point is, obviously, why is the fact that Guinea-Bissau is human development ranked consistently

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close enough to higher than that of Mozambique ignored by the donor community?

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So donors play a significant role here in determining how the story is to be told and what representation prevails,

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and within this post positivist approach that I propose that you might not agree with.

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I think it's quite interesting to understand how this is quite dialectic.

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So how are those that the discourse is shaped by the relationship and also constitute these relationships and return?

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The discourses of success and failure should be understood as shorthand for the representations for which they stand.

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And they should be interpreted. And that's one of the points that in a macro level analysis,

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this should be interpreted as basically a binary categories that translate the

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positions of particular countries in the international power population context.

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What I mean by that is that success and failure are new emergences of categories that we saw before that,

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as in donor recipient or we saw before that as developed developing north south.

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So one way of looking at this in terms of the labels is to understand success and failure as

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something that is attached to the recipient by the donor in the context of a power relation.

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So at the macro level, one needs to understand,

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in particular case studies why it's important to attach the label of success to a particular country where the label of failure.

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So what's what's happening in terms of this context of power relations and that I don't feel that this is enough.

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So there is another level of explanation that it is more of a macro level explanation.

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It has to do with the institutional and personal relations that are established between the donor and the recipient country.

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So there seems to be very clearly a an organisational imperative for both success and failure.

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So the organisational imperative for success is relatively clear.

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There is a particular paradigm of a paradigm that is proposed by donor countries.

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They want to make sure that that AIDS paradigm is validated by what's happening in the field.

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And and so claiming success stories here and there validates the model validates

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Western donor hegemony in terms of the relationship with the recipient.

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But it's also important to have failed failed states or cases of failure because

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they also help in this what waits calls the art of paradigm maintenance.

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So the paradigm that this actually needs success and failure, and it works more or less in this kind of particular way.

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So in the case of success stories, the donor attaches himself to the success.

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So you will go into, let's say, see this website, the Swedish Development Agency, and you will find more or less when it's talking about Mozambique.

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Sweden has been in Mozambique and has been a donor for Mozambique over.

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I don't know how many decades basically since.

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Deliberating the liberation war, and so it has a vested interest in showing its commitment to Mozambique,

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hence Mozambique's success reflects on Sweden as a donor in terms of its success.

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It works differently in terms of the failed. Of the failure cases in which the donor community repeatedly endorses this way of

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dealing with recipient countries are called failed states or poor performers,

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etc., which is to internalise blame and externalise the solution.

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So basically, it detaches itself from the failure by saying that for whichever reasons that are internal to the countries,

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these countries are failing, namely because they're not following the prescribed model or because their internal elites are intractable.

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But it detaches itself from the failure.

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But it also is important in this aspect of the art of paradigm maintenance because donors are always looking for an opportunity to go back in.

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So even in the cases of failure, it needs to try and validate the model as well.

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And so these relationships might be more unstable and unreliable in terms of the connexion with the recipient,

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but they are never completely scratched. There's there's always some sort of repetition.

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So for the case of Mozambique, most reports between 2000 and 1992 after the end of the war,

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the Civil War and 2012 because in 2013, the Mozambican case became more problematic for the level of success.

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I'm sure you'll want to ask me if I said in the Q&A.

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But Mozambique showed up as the example of an institutional of the organisational imperative for success.

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So from Kofi Annan's quote,

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the best possible antidote to the sceptics and cynics about Africa The Independent's headline Mozambique The Nation that proves aid works,

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or The Wall Street Journal of the Mozambique Miracle, obviously referring to the neoliberal transition or this one beating the odds.

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So in the context of a complicated continent. Here's Mozambique beating the odds and sustaining inclusion in Mozambique's growing economy.

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Guinea-Bissau has. This is also reflected in terms of Mozambique as a typical donor darling.

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So Mozambique has been amongst the top 20 recipients for the last four, basically three decades,

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which is quite striking because Mozambique isn't a politically important like Afghanistan,

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for instance, although it has some some geopolitical importance. It's not comparable in terms of the geopolitics agenda of major powers.

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And so it does the note some sort of investment in the success of the country.

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Guinea-Bissau, on the other hand, was labelled as difficult partnership country poor performance.

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The Reuters hadn't had led a very interesting headline in news, saying donors have less chance to save the south from chaos.

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But then at the same time, every time there is some sort of change in Guinea-Bissau,

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then and in donors want to go back and they'll say something like supporting Guinea-Bissau, a fresh start to a more prosperous future.

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Or Guinea-Bissau is ready to move forward with the support of the EU.

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So this relations up relationships are unstable because they fluctuate a lot.

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But there is no complete destruction of the ties, right?

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The other part of the of the arguments at the micro-level is in terms of personal relationships.

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So there their specific ties between donor agents and local actors that play a role in the discourse of success or failure.

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Foreign aid, I hear, is more personal than the literature accounts for.

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It's not difficult to have to be on an interview with a donor agent and after one year, if not an interview, and it's just in the social context.

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They will be saying things like, I like the XBMC. They can say things like Mozambicans are less aggressive than South Africans.

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I like it here. So there's there is a certain personal relationship with the with recipients

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that is important and this contributes to a certain bias and preconceptions.

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So and in some of my interviews, the the donor agents in Mozambique had chosen Mozambique.

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They wanted to go to Mozambique because it was a success story.

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It was they didn't end up there like happens a lot in Guinea-Bissau or it doesn't happen as often

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in Mozambique as it happens in Guinea-Bissau to have job openings that are never actually filled.

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So there's something personal about how these donor agents relate to the people in the field.

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It's also quite important in terms of network, so there's a clearer kind of network of donor agents of donors and not donor agents of corporates,

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as they call them in Mozambique, that has lasted since basically the 80s up until now.

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So what I mean by this is that the idea that donor institutions are spaces of personal interaction and we tend in

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the literature to disregard this aspect of the constitution of relationships and how they can then be acted upon.

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There's also another aspect here, which is a lot of these relationships do tend to become quite patrimonial.

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We see that very often in terms of the elite in these countries and how they relates to donors, but also other levels.

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It's important because obviously the the aid industry functions as from the

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perspective of extroversion first works as a site for access for power and finance,

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right?

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There's also another quite interesting aspect of these personal relationships, which is how donors can actually be managed by recipient countries.

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So some recipient countries are extraordinarily skilful and strategic at mobilising the level of success and failure.

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So Mozambique, for instance, Frelimo has used several times for the movie The Party in Power since Independence in Zambia.

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Frelimo used the label of success attached to it by donors to claim internal success in terms of elections, et cetera,

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and to basically cause a certain fear amongst internal voters that changing

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to a different elite could cause problems with the international community.

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On the other hand, Mozambique Guinea-Bissau has used the label of failure quite productively as well.

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When it says, we, you know, we this time this is a fresh start and we need to move away from this failed state and we really need your help.

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So and we need funding for that. So they've mobilised this as well.

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So there's both institutional and personal relationships tend to work in a way that reinforces these labels and act dialectical.

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So I don't have time to go into Guinea-Bissau,

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but I wanted to talk a bit about Mozambique's kind of tipping points and where the level of success comes from.

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So like I said, it actually starts quite before the '90s because it starts with the liberation war,

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which was considered an important moment for Mozambique's relation with the international community.

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And then it moves on to Mozambique as one of the important states in the

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anti-apartheid movements being basically subject to aggression by southern Africa.

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And so there was a particular relationship with the donor community that led to Mozambique being seen

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as being on the right side of history and the right side of history meant funding and aid coming in.

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The next moment is the end of the Civil War in 1982, where basically Mozambique becomes a project of the international community's intervention.

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So the mediation of the Civil War is quite internationalised.

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And so the the social community has a role to play in Mozambique's success from the beginning from the end of the Civil War.

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And that is then reflected on the international community being committed to making sure that the

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peace agreement is sustainable and that is translated into a peacekeeping mission in Mozambique.

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There are all sorts of praises of that U.N. peacekeeping mission,

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and it becomes also later a model for the international financial institutions with

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incredible growth rates which don't actually translate into human development.

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But incredible growth rates are shown to basically as Mozambique as an ideological success.

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Mozambique is also involved in democratic transition in the 90s.

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That is basically that's why the whole continent of Africa and Mozambique does not remain a side.

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And this is continuously translated into an increase in the number of donors and then and

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also the more coordinated efforts on the part of donors to be invested in this story.

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So the idea here is that there is what I show in more detail in the book is that there is

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basically a success success being constructed because the label works in a very productive way.

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So when there's successful mediation by, in this case, an Italian NGO, Mozambique becomes a success case for a second track mediation.

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So look at how it worked so well here. Lessons learnt. Let's look at Mozambique.

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Then it's also successful conflict resolution to the end of the Civil War.

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The peace agreement is is shown to be an important example and also the UN, the UN peacekeeping success.

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So in all of these moments, Mozambique is being showcased and the more it is showcased,

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the more donors come in and the more donors are invested in maintaining the success post-conflict reconstruction is,

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suppose supposedly goes quite well in terms of the mainstream narratives.

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Up until 2013, when there renewed hostilities, which the international community had a difficulty trying to kind of accommodate.

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But all these impressive economic growth,

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multiparty democracy just basically meant that Mozambique and headlines on Mozambique and most reports were an outlier in terms of what were,

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generally speaking, quite depressing accounts of other African countries.

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So it kept being showcased, sent and unseen, but always as something that was Western sponsored.

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That donor community that the donor community had a vested interest in this prevailing representation

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of success has basically originated a particular favourable predisposition on the way.

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Mozambique is treated and was treated, namely during this period, and this also helps explaining why the level of success was so sticky,

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even as there was growing criticism of this mainstream narrative.

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There is some what I call coping strategies on the part of donors when the dominant, the dominant narrative is faced with contestation.

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So one strategy is to basically just kind of ignore that there is something that is not a success.

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And these are strategies that I saw from reading endless reports by donor agents or interviews.

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So another one is to replace. So if this figure isn't particularly favourable to Mozambique, maybe this one is.

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And so let's highlight this one instead accommodates in the sense of justifying failures that need to be acknowledged.

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They can't be hidden, not materialising in the sense of marginalising criticism.

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So criticism that was seen to be too harsh,

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they were marginalised from the dominant discourse or ultimately even hiding facts that were contradictory with the dominant narrative.

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These strategies basically reveal donors biases and preconceptions, and I'll just give you a couple of examples.

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So one of the thing that was striking to me in reading lots of the reports during this time was that even though we had this overall discourse of

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how human and everyone here knows what's the Human Development Index because it was celebrated as an incredible indicator of country's well-being.

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And so parallel to that discourse that said that this is such an important indicator,

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it kept not being mentioned in reports because the basically as we as we saw in the earlier slides.

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Mozambique never really left the bottom 10 percent of countries in terms of Human Development Index.

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And so it was a problematic statistic. And so for a long time.

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Same with Human Poverty Index. And so it was Human Poverty Index. I can't even remember when it was mentioned.

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It was just kind of not not mentioned at all and ignored.

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On the other hand, if you read reports on Mozambique, they tend to emphasise it on Guinea-Bissau.

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They tend to emphasise particular aspects. So, for instance, this one assumes that automatically.

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According to the Human Development Index, the country is ranked 178 out of 188 countries and remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

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Over two-thirds of the population survives on less than one point nine dollars a day.

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This is like the introduction to one of the World Bank reports. There is no hiding here.

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Another of the strategy was replacing,

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so some figures are contested because there are others that relates more or less to the same topic that have different figures.

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So for instance, Sweden does this. Sweden has been an active development partner with Mozambique since independence in 1975 and is

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currently one of the largest bilateral donors in the country see how it attaches itself to Mozambique.

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Its present portfolio includes a long term support to the province of Niassa,

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and Yasa has historically been one of the poorest and most isolated provinces in the country.

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But it has also seen one of the largest and most consistent drops in its poverty rate from sixty

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nine point four percent to forty one forty four fifty four point one to thirty one point nine.

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This was in 2008 2009, when there was a lot of criticism on the fact that Human Poverty Index in Mozambique wasn't actually showing much results.

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There were lots of critical reports saying that some advancement in terms of particular categories

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of people that had risen above the poverty line were basically replaced by other people.

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And so there was some stagnation in terms of the fight against poverty.

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What Sweden does is choose a particular province where there was a decrease in poverty,

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as opposed to looking at the overall figure, which was contesting the dominant narrative and more unfavourable.

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The IMF in 2009 chooses a different survey that shows reduction of poverty in Mozambique from 69 percent to 53 percent.

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This is a contest of statistics, but that's the one they're using. In this way, IMF report.

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On the other hand, Guinea-Bissau gets like the full picture and more.

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So Guinea-Bissau has suffered from decades of political instability and remains a fragile state since its independence in 1974.

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There have been four coup d'etats, along with many additional coup attempt.

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The highest number in the world. There is absolutely no need to emphasise this part of the highest number in the world.

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But the comparison shows here as a way of basically introducing the country.

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Another example of accommodation so Mozambique is this is in 2013, the war ended in 92.

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Mozambique is still recovering from the effects of a protracted civil war that ended 16 years ago and destroyed

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much of the country's key infrastructure while delaying investment and development of basic services.

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And the report goes on to show the improvements in comparison with this introduction or the NDP.

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Mozambique's reconstruction and recovery have been remarkable, and they are widely recognised as a success story.

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Notwithstanding this, there are some major development challenges facing the country.

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So see how in Guinea-Bissau they start off with.

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This is the poorest country in one of the poorest country in the world has a huge amount of commodities where Mozambique is.

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This is going well. Of course, there are some challenges, so the language attributed to one or the other is quite striking in terms of difference.

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There's also quite a peace and a peaceable when it comes to Guinea-Bissau.

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So this desk officer for Guinea-Bissau that I interviewed said in a really

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kind of frustrated there was a there was a lot of attitude in his interview,

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and he was clearly frustrated when he said enough about the civil war he was 10 years ago to move on,

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stop using it as an excuse to compare to the reports on Mozambique, where they're like Mozambique is still suffering from civil war.

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There's a big difference in interpretation. This is one of my favourite quotes from interviews on Mozambique.

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This is from a defence staff member when I was asking him precisely about the critics of the dominant narrative on Mozambique.

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He stepped back and he said, Well, you know, we need to shield Mozambique from what he called extreme criticism.

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And I took that to mean unfair criticism.

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So if you take and he explained, what if you take into account the fact that Mozambique was one of the poorest

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countries in the world not that long ago and that it had a big civil war,

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et cetera, you can't just be too harsh on the criticism.

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On the other hand, for Guinea-Bissau, there is this this is the last opportunity for Guinea-Bissau after this, no more, which obviously never happens.

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But even like scepticism is always kind of prevalent in the discourse.

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So this this this news from Reuters quoting a Western diplomats anonymously.

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But this election, Bissau is trying to play the part of a democratic state.

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The big question is, will they just be going through the motions or will it be for real?

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So there's a lot of get the scepticism kind of flowing through here.

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Another strategy that donors use was actually to completely. Height problems with the Mozambican with Mozambique.

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So when there were elections in Mozambique where there were accusations of fraud,

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the the discourse on Mozambique was that there were some irregularities, but everything was fine.

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But then, thanks to WikiLeaks WikiLeaks cables, we find that the US Embassy in Maputo is sending cables to the State Department,

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where he says that the US Election Observer Missions report is very displeased.

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Diplomats from several EU member countries criticise the kid gloves approach in failing to apportion blame on the ruling Filemon Party for

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the flawed election cycle and the US Embassy fears that this country is more likely to slip further away from a multiparty democracy,

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something that was not said out loud publicly about the elections at the time, but then it was kind of hidden in these cables.

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Guinea-Bissau, on the other hand, gets the other type of treatment.

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When we're discussing the problem of drug trafficking Guinea-Bissau, it's called the first narco states in the world.

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And this US Drug Enforcement Agency official that's quoted in The Guardian says basically that

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Guinea-Bissau is a failed state and drug trafficking is like moving into an empty house.

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So it's just everything is kind of out there from that perspective. This has very clear political implications.

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I'm just mentioning one example that I find quite interesting.

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So Mozambique becomes eligible for funding for the Millennium Challenge account in 2005,

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even though it didn't meet the criteria and they justify like this.

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Mozambique was one of the three countries of the Millennium Challenge account, the Millennium Challenge Corporation,

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determined to be eligible for NCAA funding, even though they did not fully meet the selection criteria.

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The MTC board determines that although Mozambique is racing against NCAA criteria was at or below the median in relation to other candidate countries,

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and the italics are mine. Mozambique's progress and achievements were not adequately reflected in the indicators.

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So even when the indicators excluded Mozambique from being part of the Millennium Challenge account,

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someone overruled indicators and said, Well, generally speaking, the progress is subjective.

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Progress of Mozambique merits its being eligible to for this funding.

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On the other hand, Guinea-Bissau has had conditionality on conditionality being imposed.

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There's a serious problem in terms of lack of disbursement of aid pledges,

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so donors will say we'll make pledges over the next two months and then very rarely they actually fulfil it.

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There's instances of aid suspension for two three years for large periods of time.

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This is a country that so more or less foreign assistance is represents 80 percent of Guinea-Bissau national budget.

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So it's entirely dependent on the exterior aid. Suspension is a big thing, and there has been donor withdrawals.

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So people like Sweden literally closing up and leaving, so just to finish up and as tentative conclusions.

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I think the two cases show that there is biases and preconceptions,

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all sorts of values and even emotions at the core of the decision and policymaking processes,

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even though they're supposed to be counter to the decision and policymaking processes.

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But they're actually at the centre of it. And donors active role have an active role in interpreting these facts, supposedly facts on the ground.

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The discourse here available and the discourse of success and failure are particularly

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performative because they become intrinsic to the processes of knowledge,

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knowledge production and policymaking.

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So if there is a discourse of success, facts on the ground are going to be interpreted according to that main narrative,

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or they're going to be considered outliers and neither explained or eventually contests the dominant narrative.

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But there is a dominant narrative that gets constructed.

394
00:43:17,600 --> 00:43:25,010
The other point that I find important is that there is nothing inevitable or natural about the construction of Mozambique as a success,

395
00:43:25,010 --> 00:43:26,930
or Guinea-Bissau was a failure.

396
00:43:26,930 --> 00:43:35,930
It has a lot to do with a particular context in time in which Mozambique played a particular role in shaping and validating Western global hegemony,

397
00:43:35,930 --> 00:43:44,270
namely when in the 90s, the U.N. and other donors were prepared to enter a new phase of internal interventionism,

398
00:43:44,270 --> 00:43:51,560
and Mozambique kept validating all the prescriptions, or was seen as validating all the prescription, the prescribed models.

399
00:43:51,560 --> 00:43:55,790
And so at that moment in time, it played a crucial role.

400
00:43:55,790 --> 00:44:00,440
And then it was a matter of kind of reinforcing this discourse.

401
00:44:00,440 --> 00:44:01,610
And then at the micro-level,

402
00:44:01,610 --> 00:44:12,290
I think it's quite striking the type of relations that are established between donor institutions and personal donor arrangements with the local.

403
00:44:12,290 --> 00:44:20,090
Actors in producing and reproducing these labels, I also find that there was like this with this example of the Millennium Challenge account,

404
00:44:20,090 --> 00:44:28,160
that there is a sort of feedback loop so the label becomes constitutive of donor relations and then it helps to maintain the label.

405
00:44:28,160 --> 00:44:33,680
So if Mozambique had been excluded from the Millennium Challenge account, you would have had less funding.

406
00:44:33,680 --> 00:44:43,250
And if that was happening in several other instances, it might not have been the success story that was labelled between those those years.

407
00:44:43,250 --> 00:44:50,540
So narratives of success and failure, they get attached and then then they allow us to act upon it in a particular manner.

408
00:44:50,540 --> 00:44:59,990
It also in wider I mean, the more wider understanding these labels temporarily freeze donor recipient identities.

409
00:44:59,990 --> 00:45:05,060
So it's very hard for Guinea-Bissau to get out of the label of failure.

410
00:45:05,060 --> 00:45:14,270
It's basically constructed as a problematic case, and it's very hard to remove itself from that constraint.

411
00:45:14,270 --> 00:45:24,080
Another just to conclude, obviously, another important awareness here is that labelling is in itself a technique of exercising power.

412
00:45:24,080 --> 00:45:26,750
You have the label low and the labels.

413
00:45:26,750 --> 00:45:36,380
Even if the label can manipulate the label a bit to its advantage, it's still in a very imbalanced power relations that this happens.

414
00:45:36,380 --> 00:45:40,310
And another point is that labels can actually become obstacles to peace and development.

415
00:45:40,310 --> 00:45:47,120
And I think the Mozambican case and the fact that for a long time the dominant narrative of success heads a

416
00:45:47,120 --> 00:45:54,050
lot of the problems with that trajectory show that these labels can actually become obstacles in the end.

417
00:45:54,050 --> 00:45:58,478
Thank you very much.