Exactly a year ago, on the 21st of January of 2018, Paul Romer, then chief economist of the World Bank,
stepped down over scandals flaring up from his interview with The Wall Street Journal a few days earlier.
In that interview, he suggested that the political leanings of bank staff may have manipulated the bank's high profile annual doing business rankings,
specifically in the case of Chile, who had dropped down from 34th to 55th in the ranking.
During the socialist Michelle Bachelet administration,
the steep decline had been due to methodological changes rather than any actual deterioration in the country's business environment.
Paul Romer's announcement was interesting in two ways.
One, The acknowledgement that the World Bank repeatedly changed the methodology of one of its flagship economic reports over several years,
which unsurprisingly produced different results.
And to that, these changes were often unfair and misleading to the point he claims of a politicised methodology that compromised the rankings.
The first contention pointed to the fact that the introduction of new metrics could be responsible for drastic changes in rankings,
rather than any meaningful change that actually happens in the fields.
And the second contention pointed to the fact that ideology, rather than data was driving, was driving key World Bank assessments.
In Chile's case in particular, the bank's methodology appears to be in direct correlation with the country's politics.
For a moment, various developing countries panicked. India, for instance, had just made it to the one hundredth place of the ranking.
A result that was actually an explicit policy policy goal by Modi's government.
Nigeria had been congratulated for being amongst the top 10 most improved economies in the world, having moved up 24 places in 2017.
Naturally, neither wanted to see any changes to the report, which appeared to represent,
let's say, an empathetic endorsement of the country's reforms.
So amidst rumours which risks the bank's credibility, Paul Romer quits,
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.
The bank ramped up the explanation for its methodology on the website in a quite defensive manner,
I have to say, in order to answer any sort of suspicions of irregularities and then moved on.
And one of the most important interesting parts of this story was not that it reveals that the World Bank was possibly biased.
Shocking, I know, but that's the scandal was itself unfair,
since changes in methodology were actually a reflection of the concern over a
serious and bullet-proof process of gathering and analysing objective data.
So controversy explained, the public could absolutely go back to trusting the institution's figures and rankings.
And so I know you're wondering why am I talking about Chile in an African studies
seminar or Nigeria when the case studies announced our Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau?
The reason for this Khaled's introduction is that the anniversary of this episode surrounding the
World Bank reveals something that I've repeatedly found in the Mozambican and the Guinean cases,
and that illustrates the main argument of the book that donor assessments of
success and failure of improvement or deterioration of progress or setback,
and the representations of recipient countries that come to prevail within the donor realm are
not simply objective appreciations of their performances by neutral and objective observers,
practitioners and analysts, as it's claimed. Rather,
they are subjective appreciations of recipients trajectory with very concrete
implications for the way these countries are known to us and then acted upon.
So with this introduction, I'm going to develop my arguments by answering four research questions the the what question.
So reality is mediated and interpreted. So which particular account is conveyed by a given representation?
The why question? So what purpose does such an account play?
The how? How are these accounts produced and reproduced, contested, affirmed, etc. and the so what?
So what are the implications of these particular representations?
I'll try to address these questions from a poor structuralist perspective and using the examples of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau more or less.
To illustrate the argument, I won't be able to go into much detail because there's not that much space.
But first, I'd like to start.
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.
So the Western aid industry labours under the assumption that its policies are the outcome of a rationalist
analysis of recipients performances where quantification plays a predominant role since the end of the Cold War.
Since then, there has been great emphasis placed on progress assessment,
bringing to the forefront of the of the AIDS rom, a focus on aid, effectiveness, performance standards,
good governance and subsequently there has been a lot of monitoring and evaluation processes that produce measurable results,
which in turn either incite or restrain renewed tranches of aid.
So the new aid approach entails a significant focus on quantitative indicators in
order to guide overall assessments of recipient countries and their trajectories.
Now, quantification intends to produce knowledge independent of the researcher and by kind of
minimising the need for some sort of intimate knowledge personal connexions of the field.
In other words, the distance and personality of the scientific methods of data collection and analysis.
It's what makes it objective. And it's not objectivity in turn, which conveys the authority of expert pronouncements.
And it's also key to making claims for universality and in this case, comparability, right?
Which is at the heart of rankings. And that's also why it has gained international acceptance.
Indeed, this this actually accounts for a lot of the prestige and power of quantitative methods in the modern age world.
Yet numbers, graphs, tables, rankings are ultimately forms of social communication,
so they're intimately bound to the community they relate to and the social identity of both researchers and subjects of research.
They're therefore subjective and dependent on the context in which they are created.
This does not mean that there is no validity in relation to the reality they describe.
It means, however, that these are not accurate or indisputable descriptions of the outside world.
It's the process of social construction. So what matters is not so much reality per se, but how that reality is apprehended.
So a first point here is that this is actually quite unreliable in plenty of these local contexts.
So a certain degree of scepticism regarding data collection and methodology is undoubtedly warranted.
But more important is not just about the fact that data might not be accessible,
it's also the question regarding who produces and how such data is produced.
So here my contention, and hence the paradox, is that this sort of data collection, despite its mask of quantification and universality,
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.
So, for instance,
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.
It's not the impersonal, universal or technocratic United Nations that comes up with these results.
A country's assessment might be kind of finalised by a single desk officer being parachuted from the
headquarters to talk to specific local people who were previously selected by a particular donor agent.
You see what I'm what I'm getting at.
So ultimately, these supposedly quantified measurements and assessments exist to convey in what has become a familiar and standardised format,
a particular account. So from a structural perspective, eight facts do not speak for themselves there be spoken and spoken for,
and reality is not objective and needs to be interpreted.
So don't donor discourses are crucial in a articulating the way in which a recipient's reality is to be exposed.
A closer look at any possible trajectory points to distinct realities,
with both negative and positive indicators often even contradictory, which needs to be interpreted.
There are competing accounts of performance. So donor discourses will pick and choose, concentrate or ignore,
emphasise or downplay donors criteria as much as recipients indicators in order to construct, construct the story they wish to convey.
So the ultimate picture portrayed by these statistics is inevitably partial and often distorted,
as the story in Chile showed, so they're biased towards the outcome the actor actually wants to value.
There are always alternative interpretations and solutions. Some may be reconsidered, including those that was previously rejected,
and this betrayal is ultimately produce dominant discourses of success or failure,
be it in particular sectors or kind of regarding the overall representation of a recipient country,
as happens with narratives, mainstream narratives on Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.
So. And in the book manuscript, I look at the cases of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from earlier on,
so I argue that the levels of success and failure attached to Mozambique in Guinea-Bissau precedes the 90s.
But for the sake of time, the 90s are the moments where this kind of quantification of assessments becomes prevalent from the 1980s onwards,
accompanying a re-emergence of the people centred orientation in these priorities.
The criteria for measuring national economic progress were expanded to encompass not simply measures of economic growth rates,
which were long the privileged metric for assessing development,
but also a range of indicators selected and shaped to facilitate monitoring and evaluation.
So countries became increasingly evaluated, according to new indicators.
Amongst these stands out, for instance, the UNDP celebrated Human Development Index,
which supposedly conveyed a broader and more comprehensive picture of the well-being or lack thereof of recipient countries,
and evaluations of success and failure in the accomplishment of aid.
Goals became central to the daily work of donor agencies since the 90s.
In this context, and in particular between 1992 and 2012,
Mozambique's development record was hailed by the Western donor community as a success story.
While Guinea-Bissau remains inextricably linked to the label of failure,
these dominant discourses of success and failure associated with the two countries were broadly shared by the most prominent Western donors lenders,
advisors from the academic and policy worlds, as well as practitioners from top level managers,
field officers and intergovernmental western led inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations.
So there was obviously the the discourse is never completely homogeneous, but we can point to a dominant hegemonic discourse.
So in what concerns? There are apparently divergent paths towards development.
Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau were widely perceived to represent the epitome of what was ultimately right and wrong with Africa.
There was praise and blame, optimism and pessimism tolerance with deviations from the prescribed model or harsh criticisms,
and they characterised Western aids opposing discourses regarding the two states doing more or less those two decades.
And yet, Mozambican Guinea-Bissau have maintained throughout the post-Cold War era strikingly
similar positions as measured in terms of those new indicators that came about in the 90s,
namely the Human Development Index. So this is obviously a zooming in to these countries,
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.
So clearly there and in several of the years, Guinea-Bissau actually fared better than Mozambique.
The same when we're looking at trends since 98 up until 2005 and the same with the Human Poverty Index
ranked rankings where they both fared quite badly compared to other countries and between the two,
Guinea-Bissau actually fared better in some of these years. So indeed,
the realities in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau in these professed and celebrated indicators of the nineties
were never as strikingly dissimilar or divergent to the extent suggested by the mainstream narratives.
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.
I can't really go into that debate now, but obviously with this graph,
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?
But so they're kind of two puzzles here, like the first one is on Mozambique.
It's Mozambique itself is a puzzle to Mozambique's performance versus the level of success.
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.
Yet they have opposite labels and perceptions from the West, the donor community.
So this leads to the main question, right?
So what then drives the Western donor community's labelling of a recipient country's trajectory as a success or failure?
And what are the implications of these labels?
In other words, how do they come about, how they have been sustained or contested and what are they performative effects?
So how productive are these labels? These discrepancies in terms of discrepancies in terms of the labels and the socioeconomic indicators,
namely in the case of Mozambique, which is a more studied case, are present in the critical literature.
But the more critical issues are still remains within a positive appraisal of the country's performances so it can test statistics.
It points to inaccurate portrayals on the part of donors.
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.
But to emphasise the existence of competing accounts and understands particular donors biases and subjective choices.
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
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,
but rather why and how the dominant narrative mainstream narrative came to focus
predominantly on the successes and minimised or accommodated the failures.
The other point is, obviously, why is the fact that Guinea-Bissau is human development ranked consistently
close enough to higher than that of Mozambique ignored by the donor community?
So donors play a significant role here in determining how the story is to be told and what representation prevails,
and within this post positivist approach that I propose that you might not agree with.
I think it's quite interesting to understand how this is quite dialectic.
So how are those that the discourse is shaped by the relationship and also constitute these relationships and return?
The discourses of success and failure should be understood as shorthand for the representations for which they stand.
And they should be interpreted. And that's one of the points that in a macro level analysis,
this should be interpreted as basically a binary categories that translate the
positions of particular countries in the international power population context.
What I mean by that is that success and failure are new emergences of categories that we saw before that,
as in donor recipient or we saw before that as developed developing north south.
So one way of looking at this in terms of the labels is to understand success and failure as
something that is attached to the recipient by the donor in the context of a power relation.
So at the macro level, one needs to understand,
in particular case studies why it's important to attach the label of success to a particular country where the label of failure.
So what's what's happening in terms of this context of power relations and that I don't feel that this is enough.
So there is another level of explanation that it is more of a macro level explanation.
It has to do with the institutional and personal relations that are established between the donor and the recipient country.
So there seems to be very clearly a an organisational imperative for both success and failure.
So the organisational imperative for success is relatively clear.
There is a particular paradigm of a paradigm that is proposed by donor countries.
They want to make sure that that AIDS paradigm is validated by what's happening in the field.
And and so claiming success stories here and there validates the model validates
Western donor hegemony in terms of the relationship with the recipient.
But it's also important to have failed failed states or cases of failure because
they also help in this what waits calls the art of paradigm maintenance.
So the paradigm that this actually needs success and failure, and it works more or less in this kind of particular way.
So in the case of success stories, the donor attaches himself to the success.
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.
Sweden has been in Mozambique and has been a donor for Mozambique over.
I don't know how many decades basically since.
Deliberating the liberation war, and so it has a vested interest in showing its commitment to Mozambique,
hence Mozambique's success reflects on Sweden as a donor in terms of its success.
It works differently in terms of the failed. Of the failure cases in which the donor community repeatedly endorses this way of
dealing with recipient countries are called failed states or poor performers,
etc., which is to internalise blame and externalise the solution.
So basically, it detaches itself from the failure by saying that for whichever reasons that are internal to the countries,
these countries are failing, namely because they're not following the prescribed model or because their internal elites are intractable.
But it detaches itself from the failure.
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.
So even in the cases of failure, it needs to try and validate the model as well.
And so these relationships might be more unstable and unreliable in terms of the connexion with the recipient,
but they are never completely scratched. There's there's always some sort of repetition.
So for the case of Mozambique, most reports between 2000 and 1992 after the end of the war,
the Civil War and 2012 because in 2013, the Mozambican case became more problematic for the level of success.
I'm sure you'll want to ask me if I said in the Q&A.
But Mozambique showed up as the example of an institutional of the organisational imperative for success.
So from Kofi Annan's quote,
the best possible antidote to the sceptics and cynics about Africa The Independent's headline Mozambique The Nation that proves aid works,
or The Wall Street Journal of the Mozambique Miracle, obviously referring to the neoliberal transition or this one beating the odds.
So in the context of a complicated continent. Here's Mozambique beating the odds and sustaining inclusion in Mozambique's growing economy.
Guinea-Bissau has. This is also reflected in terms of Mozambique as a typical donor darling.
So Mozambique has been amongst the top 20 recipients for the last four, basically three decades,
which is quite striking because Mozambique isn't a politically important like Afghanistan,
for instance, although it has some some geopolitical importance. It's not comparable in terms of the geopolitics agenda of major powers.
And so it does the note some sort of investment in the success of the country.
Guinea-Bissau, on the other hand, was labelled as difficult partnership country poor performance.
The Reuters hadn't had led a very interesting headline in news, saying donors have less chance to save the south from chaos.
But then at the same time, every time there is some sort of change in Guinea-Bissau,
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.
Or Guinea-Bissau is ready to move forward with the support of the EU.
So this relations up relationships are unstable because they fluctuate a lot.
But there is no complete destruction of the ties, right?
The other part of the of the arguments at the micro-level is in terms of personal relationships.
So there their specific ties between donor agents and local actors that play a role in the discourse of success or failure.
Foreign aid, I hear, is more personal than the literature accounts for.
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.
They will be saying things like, I like the XBMC. They can say things like Mozambicans are less aggressive than South Africans.
I like it here. So there's there is a certain personal relationship with the with recipients
that is important and this contributes to a certain bias and preconceptions.
So and in some of my interviews, the the donor agents in Mozambique had chosen Mozambique.
They wanted to go to Mozambique because it was a success story.
It was they didn't end up there like happens a lot in Guinea-Bissau or it doesn't happen as often
in Mozambique as it happens in Guinea-Bissau to have job openings that are never actually filled.
So there's something personal about how these donor agents relate to the people in the field.
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,
as they call them in Mozambique, that has lasted since basically the 80s up until now.
So what I mean by this is that the idea that donor institutions are spaces of personal interaction and we tend in
the literature to disregard this aspect of the constitution of relationships and how they can then be acted upon.
There's also another aspect here, which is a lot of these relationships do tend to become quite patrimonial.
We see that very often in terms of the elite in these countries and how they relates to donors, but also other levels.
It's important because obviously the the aid industry functions as from the
perspective of extroversion first works as a site for access for power and finance,
right?
There's also another quite interesting aspect of these personal relationships, which is how donors can actually be managed by recipient countries.
So some recipient countries are extraordinarily skilful and strategic at mobilising the level of success and failure.
So Mozambique, for instance, Frelimo has used several times for the movie The Party in Power since Independence in Zambia.
Frelimo used the label of success attached to it by donors to claim internal success in terms of elections, et cetera,
and to basically cause a certain fear amongst internal voters that changing
to a different elite could cause problems with the international community.
On the other hand, Mozambique Guinea-Bissau has used the label of failure quite productively as well.
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.
So and we need funding for that. So they've mobilised this as well.
So there's both institutional and personal relationships tend to work in a way that reinforces these labels and act dialectical.
So I don't have time to go into Guinea-Bissau,
but I wanted to talk a bit about Mozambique's kind of tipping points and where the level of success comes from.
So like I said, it actually starts quite before the '90s because it starts with the liberation war,
which was considered an important moment for Mozambique's relation with the international community.
And then it moves on to Mozambique as one of the important states in the
anti-apartheid movements being basically subject to aggression by southern Africa.
And so there was a particular relationship with the donor community that led to Mozambique being seen
as being on the right side of history and the right side of history meant funding and aid coming in.
The next moment is the end of the Civil War in 1982, where basically Mozambique becomes a project of the international community's intervention.
So the mediation of the Civil War is quite internationalised.
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.
And that is then reflected on the international community being committed to making sure that the
peace agreement is sustainable and that is translated into a peacekeeping mission in Mozambique.
There are all sorts of praises of that U.N. peacekeeping mission,
and it becomes also later a model for the international financial institutions with
incredible growth rates which don't actually translate into human development.
But incredible growth rates are shown to basically as Mozambique as an ideological success.
Mozambique is also involved in democratic transition in the 90s.
That is basically that's why the whole continent of Africa and Mozambique does not remain a side.
And this is continuously translated into an increase in the number of donors and then and
also the more coordinated efforts on the part of donors to be invested in this story.
So the idea here is that there is what I show in more detail in the book is that there is
basically a success success being constructed because the label works in a very productive way.
So when there's successful mediation by, in this case, an Italian NGO, Mozambique becomes a success case for a second track mediation.
So look at how it worked so well here. Lessons learnt. Let's look at Mozambique.
Then it's also successful conflict resolution to the end of the Civil War.
The peace agreement is is shown to be an important example and also the UN, the UN peacekeeping success.
So in all of these moments, Mozambique is being showcased and the more it is showcased,
the more donors come in and the more donors are invested in maintaining the success post-conflict reconstruction is,
suppose supposedly goes quite well in terms of the mainstream narratives.
Up until 2013, when there renewed hostilities, which the international community had a difficulty trying to kind of accommodate.
But all these impressive economic growth,
multiparty democracy just basically meant that Mozambique and headlines on Mozambique and most reports were an outlier in terms of what were,
generally speaking, quite depressing accounts of other African countries.
So it kept being showcased, sent and unseen, but always as something that was Western sponsored.
That donor community that the donor community had a vested interest in this prevailing representation
of success has basically originated a particular favourable predisposition on the way.
Mozambique is treated and was treated, namely during this period, and this also helps explaining why the level of success was so sticky,
even as there was growing criticism of this mainstream narrative.
There is some what I call coping strategies on the part of donors when the dominant, the dominant narrative is faced with contestation.
So one strategy is to basically just kind of ignore that there is something that is not a success.
And these are strategies that I saw from reading endless reports by donor agents or interviews.
So another one is to replace. So if this figure isn't particularly favourable to Mozambique, maybe this one is.
And so let's highlight this one instead accommodates in the sense of justifying failures that need to be acknowledged.
They can't be hidden, not materialising in the sense of marginalising criticism.
So criticism that was seen to be too harsh,
they were marginalised from the dominant discourse or ultimately even hiding facts that were contradictory with the dominant narrative.
These strategies basically reveal donors biases and preconceptions, and I'll just give you a couple of examples.
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
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.
And so parallel to that discourse that said that this is such an important indicator,
it kept not being mentioned in reports because the basically as we as we saw in the earlier slides.
Mozambique never really left the bottom 10 percent of countries in terms of Human Development Index.
And so it was a problematic statistic. And so for a long time.
Same with Human Poverty Index. And so it was Human Poverty Index. I can't even remember when it was mentioned.
It was just kind of not not mentioned at all and ignored.
On the other hand, if you read reports on Mozambique, they tend to emphasise it on Guinea-Bissau.
They tend to emphasise particular aspects. So, for instance, this one assumes that automatically.
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.
Over two-thirds of the population survives on less than one point nine dollars a day.
This is like the introduction to one of the World Bank reports. There is no hiding here.
Another of the strategy was replacing,
so some figures are contested because there are others that relates more or less to the same topic that have different figures.
So for instance, Sweden does this. Sweden has been an active development partner with Mozambique since independence in 1975 and is
currently one of the largest bilateral donors in the country see how it attaches itself to Mozambique.
Its present portfolio includes a long term support to the province of Niassa,
and Yasa has historically been one of the poorest and most isolated provinces in the country.
But it has also seen one of the largest and most consistent drops in its poverty rate from sixty
nine point four percent to forty one forty four fifty four point one to thirty one point nine.
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.
There were lots of critical reports saying that some advancement in terms of particular categories
of people that had risen above the poverty line were basically replaced by other people.
And so there was some stagnation in terms of the fight against poverty.
What Sweden does is choose a particular province where there was a decrease in poverty,
as opposed to looking at the overall figure, which was contesting the dominant narrative and more unfavourable.
The IMF in 2009 chooses a different survey that shows reduction of poverty in Mozambique from 69 percent to 53 percent.
This is a contest of statistics, but that's the one they're using. In this way, IMF report.
On the other hand, Guinea-Bissau gets like the full picture and more.
So Guinea-Bissau has suffered from decades of political instability and remains a fragile state since its independence in 1974.
There have been four coup d'etats, along with many additional coup attempt.
The highest number in the world. There is absolutely no need to emphasise this part of the highest number in the world.
But the comparison shows here as a way of basically introducing the country.
Another example of accommodation so Mozambique is this is in 2013, the war ended in 92.
Mozambique is still recovering from the effects of a protracted civil war that ended 16 years ago and destroyed
much of the country's key infrastructure while delaying investment and development of basic services.
And the report goes on to show the improvements in comparison with this introduction or the NDP.
Mozambique's reconstruction and recovery have been remarkable, and they are widely recognised as a success story.
Notwithstanding this, there are some major development challenges facing the country.
So see how in Guinea-Bissau they start off with.
This is the poorest country in one of the poorest country in the world has a huge amount of commodities where Mozambique is.
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.
There's also quite a peace and a peaceable when it comes to Guinea-Bissau.
So this desk officer for Guinea-Bissau that I interviewed said in a really
kind of frustrated there was a there was a lot of attitude in his interview,
and he was clearly frustrated when he said enough about the civil war he was 10 years ago to move on,
stop using it as an excuse to compare to the reports on Mozambique, where they're like Mozambique is still suffering from civil war.
There's a big difference in interpretation. This is one of my favourite quotes from interviews on Mozambique.
This is from a defence staff member when I was asking him precisely about the critics of the dominant narrative on Mozambique.
He stepped back and he said, Well, you know, we need to shield Mozambique from what he called extreme criticism.
And I took that to mean unfair criticism.
So if you take and he explained, what if you take into account the fact that Mozambique was one of the poorest
countries in the world not that long ago and that it had a big civil war,
et cetera, you can't just be too harsh on the criticism.
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.
But even like scepticism is always kind of prevalent in the discourse.
So this this this news from Reuters quoting a Western diplomats anonymously.
But this election, Bissau is trying to play the part of a democratic state.
The big question is, will they just be going through the motions or will it be for real?
So there's a lot of get the scepticism kind of flowing through here.
Another strategy that donors use was actually to completely. Height problems with the Mozambican with Mozambique.
So when there were elections in Mozambique where there were accusations of fraud,
the the discourse on Mozambique was that there were some irregularities, but everything was fine.
But then, thanks to WikiLeaks WikiLeaks cables, we find that the US Embassy in Maputo is sending cables to the State Department,
where he says that the US Election Observer Missions report is very displeased.
Diplomats from several EU member countries criticise the kid gloves approach in failing to apportion blame on the ruling Filemon Party for
the flawed election cycle and the US Embassy fears that this country is more likely to slip further away from a multiparty democracy,
something that was not said out loud publicly about the elections at the time, but then it was kind of hidden in these cables.
Guinea-Bissau, on the other hand, gets the other type of treatment.
When we're discussing the problem of drug trafficking Guinea-Bissau, it's called the first narco states in the world.
And this US Drug Enforcement Agency official that's quoted in The Guardian says basically that
Guinea-Bissau is a failed state and drug trafficking is like moving into an empty house.
So it's just everything is kind of out there from that perspective. This has very clear political implications.
I'm just mentioning one example that I find quite interesting.
So Mozambique becomes eligible for funding for the Millennium Challenge account in 2005,
even though it didn't meet the criteria and they justify like this.
Mozambique was one of the three countries of the Millennium Challenge account, the Millennium Challenge Corporation,
determined to be eligible for NCAA funding, even though they did not fully meet the selection criteria.
The MTC board determines that although Mozambique is racing against NCAA criteria was at or below the median in relation to other candidate countries,
and the italics are mine. Mozambique's progress and achievements were not adequately reflected in the indicators.
So even when the indicators excluded Mozambique from being part of the Millennium Challenge account,
someone overruled indicators and said, Well, generally speaking, the progress is subjective.
Progress of Mozambique merits its being eligible to for this funding.
On the other hand, Guinea-Bissau has had conditionality on conditionality being imposed.
There's a serious problem in terms of lack of disbursement of aid pledges,
so donors will say we'll make pledges over the next two months and then very rarely they actually fulfil it.
There's instances of aid suspension for two three years for large periods of time.
This is a country that so more or less foreign assistance is represents 80 percent of Guinea-Bissau national budget.
So it's entirely dependent on the exterior aid. Suspension is a big thing, and there has been donor withdrawals.
So people like Sweden literally closing up and leaving, so just to finish up and as tentative conclusions.
I think the two cases show that there is biases and preconceptions,
all sorts of values and even emotions at the core of the decision and policymaking processes,
even though they're supposed to be counter to the decision and policymaking processes.
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.
The discourse here available and the discourse of success and failure are particularly
performative because they become intrinsic to the processes of knowledge,
knowledge production and policymaking.
So if there is a discourse of success, facts on the ground are going to be interpreted according to that main narrative,
or they're going to be considered outliers and neither explained or eventually contests the dominant narrative.
But there is a dominant narrative that gets constructed.
The other point that I find important is that there is nothing inevitable or natural about the construction of Mozambique as a success,
or Guinea-Bissau was a failure.
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,
namely when in the 90s, the U.N. and other donors were prepared to enter a new phase of internal interventionism,
and Mozambique kept validating all the prescriptions, or was seen as validating all the prescription, the prescribed models.
And so at that moment in time, it played a crucial role.
And then it was a matter of kind of reinforcing this discourse.
And then at the micro-level,
I think it's quite striking the type of relations that are established between donor institutions and personal donor arrangements with the local.
Actors in producing and reproducing these labels, I also find that there was like this with this example of the Millennium Challenge account,
that there is a sort of feedback loop so the label becomes constitutive of donor relations and then it helps to maintain the label.
So if Mozambique had been excluded from the Millennium Challenge account, you would have had less funding.
And if that was happening in several other instances, it might not have been the success story that was labelled between those those years.
So narratives of success and failure, they get attached and then then they allow us to act upon it in a particular manner.
It also in wider I mean, the more wider understanding these labels temporarily freeze donor recipient identities.
So it's very hard for Guinea-Bissau to get out of the label of failure.
It's basically constructed as a problematic case, and it's very hard to remove itself from that constraint.
Another just to conclude, obviously, another important awareness here is that labelling is in itself a technique of exercising power.
You have the label low and the labels.
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.
And another point is that labels can actually become obstacles to peace and development.
And I think the Mozambican case and the fact that for a long time the dominant narrative of success heads a
lot of the problems with that trajectory show that these labels can actually become obstacles in the end.
Thank you very much.