The Bureaucratization of Anthropology in AID

Abstract

In an AID conferences paper prepared over three years ago ("Social Analysts & Analysis in the Near East Bureau"), there were eventual limits to the successful institutionalization of a social science concern within AID. Since that date, a number of changes affecting the way in which the Agency conducts its business have, I believe, posed new challenges to a relatively nascent social science enterprise. Many changes are a result of external pressures of fiscal austerity which have led to the attrition of needed technical personnel as well as increased difficulties in recruiting qualified talent to maintain an in-house" development capability. Other changes relate to the embeddedness of the foreign aid program within official political foreign policy, a relationship in which one can readily see the primacy of achieving the objectives of promoting short term economic and political stability. This hitter presents an intellectual challenge to the systematic process of analyzing societal change and in designing well-targeted interventions to affect the welfare of the poor. The former poses a familiar problem of how to do more with less—a process which is changing the role of the social scientist from analyst to that of a broker soliciting external skills.