Accounting for International Development Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

摘要

The two essays in this dissertation help us to better understand the types, functions, and effects of management and accounting requirements within non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the way they are implicated in the process of constructing and managing international development in Guatemala and El Salvador. Specifically, the first essay studies the management and accounting requirements that activist (rights- and volunteer-based) organizations and development NGOs adopt in order to be eligible for grants. I describe the funding requirements and explore how they are implicated in constituting the international development assemblage. This is explained through Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) "state-form": a mode of governance whereby the "state apparatus of capture" hierarchically stratifies, gives a certain form and stability, to the international development assemblage. There is however contestation, as strategies are employed by NGOs to leak financial and political resources to organizations that would otherwise not be eligible for funding. This study seeks to extend the work that has critically examined the way accounting is implicated in arranging a field of governance and starts to address calls for more research on the way accounting requirements alter NGOs' advocacy and mission.;In the second essay I study the transformation and mobilization of the Logical Framework, a project planning and performance assessment tool that is widely used in international development. A feature of the Logical Framework is that, as an inscription, it is used to summarize projects into visually separate components through a "simple" matrix. Another feature is that it shape changes. To explain this I consider how other inscriptions and practices are implicated in the Logical Framework: how they plug (mobilize) components into each other how the Logical Framework's boundaries are made "fluid": blurring (transforming) its, but also each others', descriptive and functional boundaries. I argue that the Logical Framework is enacted in multiple ways: an inscription for project design becomes a tool for strategic, operational, and budgetary control. These findings contribute to our understanding of management and accounting controls in international development organizations and the transformation and mobilization of accounting inscriptions.