Bureaucratizing Science: an Ethnography of Agri-Environmental Research and Development in Southwest China

BUREAUCRATIZING SCIENCE: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHWEST CHINA

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by Timothy George McLellan August 2018

BUREAUCRATIZING SCIENCE:

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND

DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHWEST CHINA

Timothy George McLellan, Ph. D.

Cornell University 2018

It is ironic that an era in which scientists are hyper aware of an imperative to impact communities beyond the ivory towers of science and academia is simultaneously an era in which the day-to-day bureaucratic and administrative burdens of professional science are so bloated that time to look beyond the institutions we inhabit seems ever more elusive. This coalescence is perhaps not entirely coincidental. Many of the bureaucratic forms that permeate contemporary scientific practice are themselves concerned with the problem of the sciences’ relationship to and impact upon the world beyond it. In this dissertation, I use ethnography of a China-based agri-environmental research organization, the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF), as the basis for analyzing the bureaucratization of science and the frustrated desires of scientists to make a positive difference to the world. I demonstrate how emerging bureaucratic planning and audit regimes impose temporal structures that are incongruous with scientists’ conceptualizations of scientific practice. As, for example, in the incongruity between a planning and audit technology called ‘theory of change’ that orientates scientists towards a utopian vision of the future that they want to bring into being and

an IFF scientist’s vague hope that her research might be put to use in ways that she cannot anticipate. I show, furthermore, that while the intention of theory of change is to help scientists generate momentum towards impact, scientists more often experience imperatives to employ technologies like theory of change as an unwelcome interruption to scientific practice. Through ethnography of the diverse forms of momentum and interruption that animate scientific and bureaucratic practice, I develop an analytic framework for responding to the dual challenges of bureaucratization and of making science make a difference. I argue that rather than responding to the imposition of audit by battling for scientific autonomy, we should expend our energies seeking new opportunities for science to interrupt and for science to be interrupted.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Timothy George McLellan received his B.A. in Law and Chinese from The School of

Oriental and African Studies in 2009 and an M.Sc. in Law, Anthropology and Society from The London School of Economics in 2010.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a huge number of personal and intellectual debts to the friends and colleagues with whom I conducted my research in southwest China. To maintain the anonymity of those who participated in my research, I will not name these friends and colleagues here, but I nevertheless extend my gratitude to each of them.

I am also indebted to the guidance, feedback and encouragement of my PhD committee. Annelise Riles so often provoked me to discover things in my ethnography that I would not otherwise have seen. She has always known when and how to push me to be more ambitious. Paul Nadasdy instilled in me an appreciation for what is at stake in a concept and encouraged me to interrogate anthropologists’ claims to have

‘taken something seriously’. Hiro Miyazaki taught me how to read a text in a manner that is at once sympathetic and critical. Yu Xingzhong helped me to appreciate the challenge of communicating across disciplinary boundaries while always giving me the confidence to persevere. I am grateful to them all for their support and enthusiasm over the past seven years.

During my time at Cornell, I have benefitted from the wisdom of a great number of students and faculty. I especially want to thank Laura Cocora, Perri Gerard-

Little, Toby Goldbach, Darragh Hare, Vinnie Ialenti, Emily Levitt, Lucinda Ramberg,

Mariana Saavedra Espinosa, Steve Sangren, Scott Sorrell, Emiko Stock and Namgyal

Tsepak. During the 2016-17 academic year, I had the privilege of being an unofficial guest in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. My thanks to Ben Eyre, Maia Green, Soumhya Venkatesan, Chika Watanabe and all the

students and faculty who made my time in Manchester so productive. I am grateful to

Sheila Jasanoff, Charlie Peevers, Peter Redfield and many others for feedback provided during various conferences and workshops at which I presented parts of this dissertation. My thanks also to Andrea Pia for invaluable advice and feedback throughout the project.

My field research was funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral

Dissertation Improvement Grant, No. 1357194. Several grants from Cornell East Asia

Program supported this project: a Lam Family Travel Grant, a C.V. Starr Fellowship and a Lee Ting-Hui Fellowship. Further support was provided by a Cornell Society for the Humanities Sustainability in the Humanities Grant and by three international travel grants from Cornell Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Most of all I am indebted to my family. To my parents and grandparents, without whose support I would never have been in the position to embark upon a PhD program. And to my wife Natsinee, for enduring the often miserable winters of both

Ithaca and southwest China and for the constant reminder that there is so much more to life than a PhD.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Comparing Theories of Change ...... 31

Chapter 2: Bureaucracy as Interruption ...... 62

Chapter 3: Trust and Vulnerability in Chinese Bureaucracy ...... 100

Chapter 4: Agroforestry Temporalities ...... 138

Chapter 5: Beyond Professionalism: Embracing and Evading Vulnerability ...... 162

Conclusion ...... 203

References ...... 218

INTRODUCTION

‘What is your research about?’ the groom’s brother asked me during a lull in conversation at a wedding lunch. The bride – a scientist at The Institute for Farms and

Forests (IFF) where I was conducting participant observation – turned to answer on my behalf. Laughing, Jiaolong said, ‘IFF is useless’. Making fun of what she saw as the failure of her and her colleagues to fulfil their goal of helping to improve rural livelihoods and ecosystems, ‘IFF is useless’ was how Jiaolong summarized my inevitable research findings. Jiaolong was not alone in this downbeat assessment. On a separate occasion, Matt, one of Jialong’s colleagues, lamented that in his five years at

IFF they ‘haven’t really planted any trees’. As he saw it, one of the organization’s core objectives was to research and promote agroforestry – the integration of trees into agricultural landscapes. But, he told me, the only trees he had seen planted since his arrival at IFF’s southwest China office were a few alder trees for a small experiment his team had conducted and more recently ‘a few badly planted trees by the roadside’ in part of what was in his view a poorly executed landscape restoration project.

Though IFF scientists often experience their failure in terms of the absence of a positive impact upon the world, there is equally a sense in which IFF scientists’ day- to-day activities are occupied less with the work of addressing this failure than with the challenge of navigating the bureaucracies of various domestic and international institutions. Ruyue, for example, bemoaned that despite her nominal position as a research fellow at IFF, she spends much more time compiling project reports and other paperwork for funding agencies than she does on research. Similarly, during the

two years I worked alongside Matt at IFF, his efforts to ‘plant some trees’ seemed increasingly frustrated by proliferating bureaucratic and institutional headaches.

Discussing these challenges, he once remarked somewhat forlornly, ‘I remember when

I used to get to think about research’.

It is ironic that an era in which scientists (anthropologists included) are hyper aware of an imperative to impact communities beyond the ivory towers of science and academia is simultaneously an era in which the day-to-day bureaucratic and administrative burdens of professional science are so bloated that time to look beyond the institutions we inhabit seems ever more elusive. This coalescence is perhaps not entirely coincidental. Many of the bureaucratic forms that permeate contemporary scientific practice are themselves concerned with the problem of the sciences’ relationship to and impact upon the world beyond it. Indeed, in Matt’s case, a major bureaucratic headache was a donor monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework that was ostensibly designed as a technology for increasing the impact of IFF’s research.

This coalescence of phenomena is not unique to IFF. The UK’s notorious Research

Excellence Framework (REF), for example, is a framework for encouraging universities to generate and demonstrate the ‘impact’ of their research: their research’s

“effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (HEFCE n.d.).

Despite such intentions, audit mechanisms like the REF or the M&E framework that preoccupied Matt seem to inevitably end up only drawing the subjects of audit away from the very forms of work that audit is meant not only to evaluate but also to encourage. In the case of bureaucratizing impact, the irony is especially acute. For

research to make an impact it must have a momentum that takes research and its effects beyond the confines of scientific communities. Scientists, however, experience bureaucratic technologies designed to promote impactful research not as engines of momentum, but as the opposite: as interruptions.

This incongruity between the intention of bureaucratic technologies as an engine of momentum and scientists’ experience of them as an interruption is one of many temporal incongruities that I encountered during participant observation at IFF.

This dissertation exploits this and other temporal incongruities as a basis for re- considering the contemporary problems of scientific impact and of the bureaucratization of science. This allows not merely a critique of certain agendas for impactful research, and the bureaucracies that these agendas have spawned, but also for reappreciating the forms of momentum and interruption that can and should animate scientific practice. And allows us to appreciate the multiplicity of meanings – and temporal entailments – that impact does and could take in the sciences. In this respect, the overwhelming tendency in contemporary academic and scientific institutions has been towards a model of impact that privileges the production of commodifiable knowledge (Jemielniak and Greenwood 2015; Shore and Wright 1999;

Wright and Greenwood 2017b; see also Chomsky 1997). As Margaret Thornton

(2010) highlights, this is an institutional model that marginalizes feminist, critical and humanistic knowledge. More explicitly programmatic responses to these trends have also undertaken the work of investigating the institutional and bureaucratic structures that would be necessary for rebuilding more public and more democratic universities

(e.g. Mountz et al. 2015; Wright and Greenwood 2017a). This dissertation extends this

concern with crafting an alternative model for scientific institutions by exploring not only the limits of contemporary institutional and bureaucratic forms but also the positive potentials that these forms and IFF scientists’ responses to them might hold.

This involves drawing attention both to the moments of scientific and bureaucratic practices at IFF that exceed the oppressive demands of contemporary scientific professionalism and to the diversity of effects that bureaucrat forms can themselves generate.

Science Under Threat

Underlying critical responses to the bureaucratization of research and teaching institutions and of scientific practice more broadly is a sense that the existence and value of the sciences are under threat. In the months immediately following the completion of my fieldwork, this sense has taken on a slightly different but no less acute dimension with the rise of populist politics exemplified by the election of

President Trump. In response, scientists have organized themselves to “march for science” (Slawson 2017), while Bruno Latour has declared a “second science war”

(Vrieze 2017), and the American Anthropological Association invited late breaking submissions to its 2017 annual meeting on the theme “science under attack”.

In China, state support for the sciences looks somewhat more dependable, with the government adopting numerous programs to promote research and innovation.

Impressive figures and statistics attest to the rapid growth of science funding in China, and have spurred speculation that China might emerge as a new “scientific superpower” (Cao 2014; Murray and Spar 2006; Shelton and Fol 2009; Wilsdon

2007). Indeed, in the wake of declining Western investment in international agricultural research and development, IFF increasingly look towards these Chinese initiatives to fund their work. A number of IFF’s domestic and international staff, for example, are supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) research grants and fellowships. And a significant portion of IFF-China’s mycological research is supported by a grant from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).

The emergence of China as a scientific superpower is, however, often imagined to pose a kind of threat of its own: a threat to the well-established norms and ethics of scientific practice.

A growing literature investigates scientific corruption and misconduct in contemporary China – a literature that I will return to in the dissertation’s conclusion

(e.g. Cyranoski 2017; Hvistendahl 2013; Lin 2013; Suttmeier 1985; R. Yang 2005).

The kind of scientific scandals described in this literature are a common topic of casual conversation at IFF. Such as when the journal Molecular Biology Reports retracted twenty-seven articles, all of which authored by Chinese scientists, after the journal editors discovered that the peer review process had been compromised. In each of these twenty-seven cases, the authors had proposed fake reviewers and submitted specially created email addresses for these fake reviewers. In those instances where the editors complied with the authors’ reviewer suggestions, the authors wrote ‘peer’ reviews for their own papers. While few at IFF believed this and similar forms of misconduct could be entirely limited to China, IFF colleagues often imagined science in China, or even Asia more broadly, to elicit its own distinctive forms of misconduct.

One practice, for example, is the attribution of co-authorship to government officials

who had assisted in access to a research site, government data and/or government research funds. IFF staff would often suggest that this reflected a divergence in practices between Western notions of authorship based on credit, and a Chinese practice of authorship based on social relationships (guanxi).1 The same distinction was frequently used to explain why junior scientists at IFF felt obliged to list their nominal academic supervisors as co-authors even where this person had contributed little or nothing to the research in question. In many instances, IFF scientists described this distinction with a distinctly moralistic valance. As, for example, one research fellow’s comparison of ‘Chinese’ focus on relationships as against ‘modern’ practices based on peer review and merit. In this view, as much as China is catching up with the

West in terms of funding, the progress of Chinese science is impaired by failure to institutionalize appropriate norms of scientific conduct (Chen and Macfarlane 2016;

Peng 2011; The Lancet 2010; W. Yang 2013; Zeng and Resnik 2010).

Another publication practice that formed the focus of conversations at IFF was a well-known journal that had managed to inflate its impact factor by means many IFF scientists considered to be unethical. Ordinarily the recording of a new species would constitute a single journal article publication. While scientists value descriptions of new species, they are a form of publication that is unlikely to garner many citations.

Because journals are often evaluated by their impact factor – a measurement based on the number of citations per article – species descriptions are therefore not attractive to

1 As Mario Biagioli reminds us, methods and rationales for attributing authorship in Europe and North America are anything but settled. As well as highlighting numerous recent controversies surrounding the appropriate attribution of authorship, and the connected distribution of rewards and responsibilities, Biagioli demonstrates significant divergences in how authorship is managed across different scientific disciplines (Biagioli 1998, 2003, 2006; also Galison 2003; cf. McSherry 2001; Wray 2006).

high profile journals. What the editor of the journal in question does, however, is collate a large number of new species, many of which had been submitted to his journal separately, into a single article. In doing so, he has massively boosts the journal’s impact factor. Mubai, an IFF student, described this as a typically ‘Asian’ trick. When I objected that the editor was in fact European, Mubai laughed and told me that the editor had been working in Asia so long that he now did things ‘the Asian way’. Here, Asianness is imagined as a corrupting influence on the norms of scientific practice.

The core of this dissertation is concerned with elucidating the diverse modes of momentum and interruption, as well as the forms of vulnerability and autonomy, that scientific and bureaucratic practice precipitate. Highlighting the value that vulnerability can play in scientific practice, this dissertation points to the inadequacy of the fantasies of autonomy that responses to ‘attack’ often entail. And in so doing, shows the potential for scientists to adopt a stance that does not resort to military metaphors that are so discomfortingly in keeping with the distinctly macho style of contemporary politics (cf. Cohn 1987; Haraway 1996; Martin 1987). Returning to the sense that science is under threat – from bureaucracy, from populism and from the corrupting influence of Asia – in the Conclusion, moreover, I argue that the models of temporality encountered at IFF can be used to cast conventional responses to these perceived threats in a productive new light. This includes by questioning an idea implicit in many critical analyses of audit cultures and of scientific misconduct: that we already have an adequate model of scientific practice, and that the challenge is merely to address a corrupting influence.

Ethnography, Science and Development

The challenge that post-truth, Trumpism and anti-expert populism might pose to the sciences has precipitated reevaluations of the relationship between science and technology studies (STS) on the one hand and the sciences on the other. Harry Collins,

Robert Evans and Martin Weinel (2017, 584; cf. Jasanoff 2017; Lynch 2017;

Sismondo 2017a, 2017b), for example, argue that in the post-truth era it is more vital than ever that STS work to “justify expertise in general and scientific expertise in particular” (see also H. M. Collins and Evans 2002; cf. Jasanoff 2003a; Wynne 2003).

This echoes longer-standing internal questioning of anthropology and STS’s established modes of critique. Indeed, the notion that we are in a moment that demands the re-alignment of STS as an ally of the sciences and of expertise more broadly has already been with us for well over a decade. In a lecture he delivered in

2003, Bruno Latour (2004b) called time on deconstruction and debunking as a mode of critique. Arguing that the distrust that this model of critique generates has become a weapon in the hands of climate change deniers and other undesirables. Latour argued that we needed a new form of critique: “[a] powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care” (232). At around the same time, Mike Fortun (2005; also K.

Fortun and M. Fortun 2005) argued that STS needs a new ethical relationship with the sciences. Rather than an ethic that “revolve[s] around suspicion, antagonism, opposition, conflict, distrust, and similar terms, tropes, and affects”, Fortun calls for

“[a]n ethics of promising and friendship” (170). Here science studies scholars would open themselves up in their encounters with scientists to the same uncertainties and

contingencies that Fortun suggests scientists open themselves up to in their own work.

Calls for a similar shift have animated various anthropological subfields. In the anthropology of development, for example, contributors to the volume Differentiating

Development (Venkatesan and Yarrow 2012; also Mosse 2006; Winthereik and Jensen

2017) distance themselves from ethnographies that engage development professionals and development practice only as objects of chastisement and critique (e.g. Escobar

1995; Ferguson 1994; T. M. Li 2007). Thomas Yarrow and Soumhya Venkatesan

(2012, 4) highlight how anthropologists’ unmasking of the politics that underlie surface representations is premised on an assumed position of “superior empirical knowledge …. [and] greater theoretical sophistication”. A key limitation to this assumed superiority, argue Yarrow and Venkatesan, is that “[i]n attempting to use anthropological insights to highlight development shortcomings, anthropologists have largely neglected to reflect upon what [our] encounters [with development practice] might teach us” (6).

Yarrow and Venkatesan here evoke a classical model of ethnography as an art and technique that entails “allowing others to work upon the ethnographer” (Riles

2006, 5). It is such a model that has given anthropology analytic concepts from obviation (Wagner 1986) and dividuals (Strathern 1988) to arbitrage (Miyazaki 2013) and thinking forests (Kohn 2013). What is significant about this model of ethnography is that it treats the subjects and objects of ethnographic investigation not only as things to theorize, but as subjects that can inflect our theoretical insights and analytic methods. As, for example, in How Forests Think where Eduardo Kohn’s (2013)

theoretical and empirical insights into how forests think emerge fundamentally from his ethnographic encounter with the Runa. According to Kohn, his claims are “not exactly … ethnographic … in the sense that [they are] not circumscribed by an ethnographic context”. But, Kohn continues, these claims “gro[w] out of [his] attention to Runa relations with nonhuman beings as these reveal themselves ethnographically” (94). In contrast to Kohn, I would argue that his claims are exactly ethnographic. Ethnography in the sense I am interested in here is not about circumscribing one’s claims to a narrow context and it does not stand in opposition to theory or generality: it is about a mode of constructing theory and analysis that emerges out of an encounter with ethnographic interlocutors.

As Yarrow and Vantekesan (2012, 6) highlight, assumptions of

“anthropology’s theoretical, epistemological and empirical superiority have tended to militate against” this form of analysis. An ethnographer cannot be open to what she may learn from her research subjects, if she already knows that she knows best. The methodological injunction against a presumption of superiority, however, should not confused with the rendering of a level-footing or equality between the knowledges of the research and the subject as the end point of analysis. If anthropology often has the effect of levelling divergent forms of knowledge, it does not mean that the ultimate achievement of this effect should serve as our benchmark of success: to do so would be to turn the effect of ethnography into its aim (Strathern 1995, 25; cf. Ingold 2000,

16, 25–26; Holbraad 2012; Willerslev 2007). What makes How Forests Think a successful ethnography is not that Kohn achieves equality between anthropology and the Runa – something that he makes no attempt to claim – but that his ethnographic

encounter with the Runa allows Kohn to craft analytic tools and to make claims that he could not have imagined on his own. From this point of view, the question for an anthropology that seeks to engage scientists, as well as experts and elites more generally, as ethnographic interlocutors rather than as targets for debunking is not

‘how can we say something nice about these people?’, but rather ‘what might we gain if we allow these people to work ethnographically upon us?’

This suggests a very different approach to Bruno Latour. Though disguised as a self-critique, Latour’s 2003 re-framing of critique as constructive rather than deconstructive was itself merely the reiteration of a position he had already adopted at least a decade previously (see e.g. Latour 1993). His characterization of science studies up to that point as typified by debunking crafts an unduly singular picture of science studies that belies even Latour’s own previous work. From the point of view of anthropology, however, the problem with Latour and actor-network theory’s (ANT) version of ethnography is not that it debunks. The problem, rather, is the manner in which ANT continues a sociological tradition dedicated to the construction of an analytic framework that can precede the task of empirical investigation.2 That ANT is orientated towards the construction rather than the deconstruction of facts – to

2 This is not necessarily to say that ethnography has contributed nothing to the development of ANT as a theory and as a method of analysis. In his early laboratory studies, Bruno Latour (1987, 87) insists upon ignoring “what scientists say about what they do”, but his development of actor-network theory nevertheless depends fundamentally on ethnographic attention to his research subjects’ practices. Similarly, in shifting ANT towards concern with ontological multiplicity, Annemarie Mol (2002, 162) attributes one of her central arguments – “that different practicalities of research, diagnosis, and/or treatment each address a slightly different ‘atherosclerosis’” – to her research subjects. As Mol puts it, “[t]his idea is not alien to the hospital: I may even have learned it there”. That ANT happened to emerge out of ethnography, however, does not negate the implication of ANT as a theory and method that can and should precede ethnography. Once refined, these same theory and methods are easily translated to new contexts. Moving from a laboratory to a legal system (Latour 2010), for example, requires only a minor shift in gear: the new setting offers a ground for deploying existing analytic tools much more so than an opportunity for developing new ones.

protection rather than debunking – does not negate the fact that it reproduces the presumption of the ethnographer beginning from a position of “superior empirical knowledge …. [and] greater theoretical sophistication”.

This is of course contrary to ANT’s claim to provide a “symmetrical anthropology”. The claim, however, cannot be taken at face value, and should not be detached from the specific challenges in the sociology of science from which it emerged – challenges that differ in important ways from the political and intellectual problems that animate contemporary anthropology. In We Have Never Been Modern,

Latour (1993, 102–6) critiques various versions of anthropological universalism/relativism, highlighting the elevated vantage point that each of these positions imply. By 1993 there was of course nothing controversial in such a critique.

Latour’s innovation, however, was to propose a “symmetrical anthropology” that entails seeing all collectives – including our own – as a proliferation of networks. Here the actor-network is presented as the essential characteristic of all collectives, and therefore as a neutral and potentially universal analytic (Descola 2013; Lowe 2006;

Verran 2001). In order to justify his claim to have achieved such analytic neutrality,

Latour (1993, 112; also Blaser 2010) imputes upon the nonmoderns a universal wisdom that has been lost by us moderns: “Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such”. The supposed symmetry of ANT applied to nonmoderns thus depends critically on an enlightened savage argument. While for ANT it is necessary to say that the moderns are mistaken, by Latour's own professed standards, claiming a privileged perspective over indigenous philosophy makes for poor anthropology. In this respect, Latour's (1993,

105) criticism of Levi-Strauss's “particular universalism” is illuminating. According to

Latour, the first half of Levi-Strauss's argument “allows for a modest relativism (we are just one interpretation among others), but the second permits the surreptitious arrogant universalism”. This arrogant universalism refers to Levi-Strauss's implied claim to a privileged access to “Nature itself”. The only basis upon which Latour is not taking a similarly privileged position, however, is that the natives themselves also view the world in terms of actor-networks (102). If this dubious claim cannot be maintained, then Latour's universalism is surely no less surreptitious and arrogant than

Levi-Strauss's.

To be sure, this is not the only dimension to ANT's idea of symmetry. As a symmetrical science ANT provides a method for refusing to take either nature, society or the division between humans and nonhumans as given. This has allowed STS to develop alternatives to the social explanations of science and to David Bloor’s strong program. Moreover, as Mol (2002) suggests, ANT has allowed social scientists to analyze natural phenomena such as disease that social scientists might otherwise consider the privileged domain of natural scientists. But as compelling as ANT is as a solution to the limitations of the strong program, it is of course far from alone in refusing the givenness of nature/culture/society. And it could hardly be said that anthropologists have ever been constrained by an injunction against analyzing objects that fall in the privileged domains of others.

This is not to say that anthropology has nothing to learn from science studies about how to engage its research subjects, or that the methodological challenges of studying scientists in 2018 are already answered by Melanesian anthropology of the

1970s and 1980s. Indeed, underlying the development of the ethnographic approach described above was an understanding that anthropology “can only be of interest to

‘ourselves’” (Strathern 1988, 10; also Viveiros de Castro 1998; Wagner 1981).

Marilyn Strathern’s ethnographic encounter with Melanesian culture allows her to re- invent feminist and anthropological knowledge-making, but these are not innovations of any interest to the Melanesians with whom Strathern conducted ethnography.

Contemporary anthropologists, by contrast, are increasingly preoccupied with the challenge of ethnographic practice that might be similarly transformative for the anthropologists’ ethnographic counterpart. In this respect, Hirokazu Miyazaki’s (2013) analytic category “arbitrage” is an ethnographic invention in the same way that

“dividual” is in The Gender of the Gift. Miyazaki’s innovation on the classic mode of ethnography, however, is that he seeks to invent arbitrage in a way that is very much of interest to his interlocutors in the world of finance. As anthropologists turn to conduct ethnographies in communities and institutions that they have political and ethical interests in transforming, the relationship between anthropologist and ethnographic counterpart has necessarily shifted.

The challenges of this awkward relationship are not new. For the study of the sciences, navigating this relationship has also meant confronting the fact that science studies and anthropology are, no less than their objects of study, scientific disciplines.

As alluded to above, the architecture of ANT promises an escape from the limitations of our existing scientific language and with it a vantage-point from outside modernist science. Feminist science studies scholars have, however, tended to confront this challenge in a different and more ambivalent manner. They have, moreover, often

done so in a manner that forefronts the challenge not merely of describing and critiquing the sciences, but of imagining what science could and should look like.

Evelyn Fox Keller (1985, 12), for example, argues that the challenge for feminist science studies is to reclaim scientific knowledge as a universal goal. While Sandra

Harding (1991, 4) applauds feminists for transforming scientific rationality for feminism’s own purposes. Here the reimagination and transformation of scientific practice is something that relies intrinsically on engagement with the tools of science itself. Similarly, a central theme in the scholarship of Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) has been her drawing on the inspirational vision of the biologist Barbara McClintock. Here we have models of science studies that have long known how to treat their research subjects with more than just “suspicion” and that have long been about much more than “deconstruction” (cf. H. M. Collins and Evans 2002; M. Fortun 2005; Latour

2004b).

Feminist science studies also brings into view the temporal dimension to the relationship between science and science studies. Responding to Elizabeth Fee’s argument that we must “reserve[e] the term ‘feminist science’ for a possible future science”, Harding argues that feminist science is “already being developed”, that it

“already exists” (Harding 1991, 301, 302, 306). Harding’s point here is not that we have reached some sort of feminist science end-state. Rather, her rejection of Fee’s limitation on feminist science studies as a “critique of existing science” points towards the ongoing nature of the challenge of reinventing the sciences. Here science studies is orientated to the future. To be sure, a future-orientation does not in and of itself distinguish feminist science studies from ANT. Latterly, Latour has transformed ANT

into a model not only for a sociology of the sciences, but for practicing science, politics, law, religion etc. But drawing on ethnographic resources that I develop in the intervening chapters, the Conclusion to this dissertation will draw out the distinction between science studies’ divergent forms of futurity. And will demonstrate the significance of these divergences for how we imagine and practice the challenge of reinventing the sciences.

Problems, Resources and Bureaucracy

This dissertation’s concern with the remaking of scientific practice places it within a broader STS project of exploring the potential for more democrat and humanistic models of scientific knowledge and practice. This intellectual work of imagining the sciences democratized often entails recourse to theoretical and philosophical resources beyond the sciences. Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons (2001), for example, take to the Greek Agora as a model for a new mode of scientific practice.

And Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennet (2012) locate in continental and pragmatist philosophy a concern with flourishing that might transform the life sciences.

Practitioners and scholars of rural development have similarly taken inspiration from both anthropology and STS in their efforts to democratize agricultural science and development practice (see especially Chambers 1983, 1997; cf. Cooke and Kothari

2001; T. M. Li 2007). As described in the previous section of this introduction, however, as well as seeking transformative resources from beyond the sciences, feminist scholars have looked within the sciences for resources that might allow us to remake both science and feminism. Elisabeth Grosz’s (2005, 28) re-reading of The

Origin of the Species, for example, provokes us to consider, “the possible ramifications that Darwin’s understanding of evolution may have for the reevaluation

(transvaluation?) of feminist discourses and methods”. Similarly, in the cyborg, Donna

Haraway (1991) finds a half scientific, half fictional model for feminist science. By building its central analytic concepts of temporality and vulnerability out of the knowledge, practices and experiences of scientific colleagues at IFF, this dissertation furthers this project of finding the transformative resources from within rather than without scientific, and also bureaucratic, practice.

This approach of finding theoretical resources within the object of study has parallels in the anthropology of China. In her analysis of gift exchange in contemporary China, Mayfair Yang (1994, 34) sets out an agenda for an anthropology that “incorporat[es] native critiques in anthropological endeavors”. For Yang, this is a project that involves demonstrating how native discourses of “guanxixue” constitute a form of opposition or resistance to the biopolitical configurations that Yang identifies in contemporary China. Yan Hairong (2008) similarly sets out to engage the migrant workers with whom she conducted her research as co-critics and as conscious co- activists. In doing so, Yan shows how her interlocutor, Hua Min, “demonstrates a possibility for critique and self-critique, and for the imagining of a new collective identity in the open-ended process of struggle” (249). The position from which Yan and Yang engage their interlocutors is, however, a position in which the problems to which their ethnographic subjects are expected to respond are overdetermined by the anthropologist’s prior Foucauldian diagnosis of the ills of neoliberalism. Yang (1994,

176–77) is quite explicit in this approach. She argues that “native notions of privilege

and corruption” can account for “official power”, but cannot account for “state power”. As such, Yang must proceed with her own Foucauldian diagnosis of this problem before returning to her research subjects for its solution: the oppositional discourse of guanxixue. Similarly, while Yan demonstrates the critical potential of her interlocutors’ practices, the problematization to which these critical possibilities respond is derived from Yan’s own analysis of popular media and mainstream Chinese academia. In this dissertation, I follow Yang and Yan in engaging my interlocutors as co-critics or co-analysts. Rather than discovering solutions or responses to problems identified through the application of continental philosophy (also Anagnost 2004;

Farquhar & Zhang 2005; Pun 2005; Rofel 2007), however, I am interested in how the practices and aspirations of my interlocutors might allow us to see new problems or to view old problems in a new light.

A central example of this is how the dissertation reframes the problems of impact and bureaucracy in terms of temporality. A central question in studies of academic audit has been, “what audits and rankings bring into focus and what they render invisible or unsayable” (Shore and Wright 2015b, 422). Similarly, in the field of development, David Mosse (2005) analyzes development projects as a “system of representations”. While Richard Rottenburg (2009) describes development project evaluations as a production of “immutable mobiles” for subsequent recombination into representations that serve the hegemonic interests of Western donors. This is an analytic focus that has allowed anthropologists to draw insight out of the incongruity between what audit and bureaucracy makes visible or legible on the one hand, and the alternative representations that anthropologists or their research subjects might make

of the situation (Cavanaugh 2016, 698; Giri 2000; Gupta 2012, 141–90; T. M. Li

2005; Rottenburg 2009; Shore and Wright 2015b; cf. Welker 2014, 183–213).

Ethnography with scientists at IFF encountering novel bureaucracies of impact, however, reveals an incongruity not between competing views of reality or modes of representation, but between competing structures of time and between experiences of momentum and interruption. In Chapter 1, for example, I highlight the contrast between the future that scientists at IFF imagine for their research, and the futures that a funding organization asks IFF scientists to outline using a technology for planning and auditing impactful research called ‘theory of change’. Attention to the temporal incongruity that IFF scientists experience coming to terms with various iterations of theory of change illuminates the radical transformations that bureaucratic regimes of planning and audit imply for the temporality of scientific practice. What is at stake in this imposition of bureaucratic planning and audit technologies, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, is the imposition of temporalities that fundamentally shape the kind of actions and relationships it is possible to imagine and to practice (Meyerhoff, Johnson, and Braun 2015; Mountz et al. 2015; Nadasdy 2017, 253–98; Scherz 2013).

Technologies such as theory of change are part of an “ensemble” that Paul

Rabinow, following Foucault, would call “an emergent problematization” (Rabinow

2009, 306–7, 2005, 43–45; also Caduff 2012; Collier and Lakoff 2008; Fearnley 2008;

McCarthy and Kelty 2010). Theory of change and its cognate logics and practices are enmeshed in historically contingent imperatives for impact: imperatives for designing and auditing scientific work that hinge on new “forms of future orientation” (Lakoff

2008, 401). Approached from a Foucauldian perspective, we might ask: what

conditions – economic, scientific, political, historical etc. – made it possible, even obligatory, for scientists to take up the problematic of ‘impact’, and for them to make the kinds of claims upon the future that theory of change demands? This line of inquiry would involve investigating, among other things: the historical emergence of concepts such as impact and value for money as dominant frameworks for assessing research and development; the squeeze that the 2007-2008 financial crisis placed upon research and development funding; the emergence of technologies such as theory of change in NGO and development sectors; and the later migration of these technologies to research sectors. These are themes that this dissertation touches upon. This direction of analysis is, however, not comprehensive, and nor is describing the vectors and contours of contemporary problematizations the end point of this ethnography.

More so than providing a comprehensive account of the problematizations, logics and framings that loom large at IFF, ethnography, in the sense already set earlier in this introduction, is an opportunity for developing novel modes of analysis.

Applied to IFF and the bureaucracies that IFF staff encounter, this ethnographic method allows for bureaucratic technologies to serve as a basis for reimagining the challenges of contemporary scientific and anthropological practice. In this respect, while anthropologists have long highlighted the propensity for scientific and bureaucratic practices to obscure (e.g. Ferguson 1994; Lakoff 2008; T. M. Li 2011;

Rottenburg 2009; Scott 1998; Shore and Wright 2015b), taking science and bureaucracy as ethnographic objects requires engaging scientific and bureaucratic practices as opportunities for bringing into view problems, ideas and potentials that would otherwise seem unremarkable, or even unimaginable. This means that, as well

as providing a description of what theory of change implies for scientific practice, ethnography of theory of change exploits this bureaucratic technology as a conceptual framework – a framework that allows us to explicate and reflect upon the temporal orientations of contemporary scientific practice.

The Institute for Farms and Forests

This dissertation is based on twenty-five months of participant observation at IFF’s

China office in Songlin City conducted primarily between 2014 and 2016. IFF is a global research for development organization with its headquarters in Africa. IFF was first established in Songlin around fifteen years ago as a country office, but by the time of my research had expanded to take on a regional role encompassing projects elsewhere in East, Central, Southeast and South Asia. At the time I did my principal fieldwork, IFF was officially registered as an international organization operating out of the capital Beijing, where it operates a small administrative office. This is similar to the arrangements of numerous international agricultural research organizations operating in China. More unusually, the office is also legally constituted as the

Highland Ecosystem Center (HEC), a research center within the Chinese public research institute the Songlin Academy of Plant Science (SAPS). The same office therefore exists both as an international organization and as a domestic public research institute. This dual identity allows a number of advantages – including access to both international and domestic research funding – but, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, having feet in two institutions can also proliferate bureaucratic headaches. Though the institutional distinction between IFF, HEC and SAPS is often administratively

significant, colleagues usually use these names – or some amalgam of them – interchangeably. Speaking to an international audience, colleagues mostly refer to the office simply as IFF. For the sake of clarity, I use the name IFF or IFF-China and only refer to HEC and SAPS in those instances where these institutional distinctions are the object of analysis.

IFF-China has around twenty research staff, ten administrative staff and forty affiliated graduate students. Approximately half of staff and students are Chinese, with large contingents from elsewhere in Asia, as well as Africa, Europe and North

America. The focus of IFF research is varied, including fungal diversity studies, social studies of natural resource management, ethnobotanical surveys, global climate modelling, on-farm agroforestry trials and phenological research. The office’s funding comes not only from IFF’s Africa-based headquarters but also directly from international donors and domestic Chinese research grants. Broadly speaking, IFF’s institutional mission is to generate knowledge and advance policies in a manner that benefits the poor and the environment. But the question of what IFF does, and why it does it, is a large part of what is at stake in the divergent ideas of science and impact that I explore in subsequent chapters. So, for example, imagining what IFF’s institutional mission implies for practice is central to the work of a theory of change described in Chapter 1.

IFF’s projects at the time of my field research included Eco-Friendly Rubber, a project to develop sustainable and environmentally friendly cultivation practices for rubber cultivation in southwest China and neighboring Southeast Asia. This project often operated in tandem with the Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder Platform, an

initiative set up in Lengshan Prefecture, southwest China as part of a broader global project to facilitate multi-sector collaboration in tropical agriculture. Following the project launch, however, most of this project’s activities became subsumed with the

Eco-Friendly Rubber project which already sought to engage farmers and government officials in its research. Another project, Agroforestry for Myanmar, investigated new agroforestry systems in upland Myanmar. This project was funded by an international donor, The Food Security Fund, who imposed what was, in the view of many IFF colleagues, a particularly onerous framework for planning and evaluating the project. The Qingshan Agroforestry project had similar aspirations to promote upland agroforestry, but did so in Qingshan, a small township in southwest China. In stark contrast to Agroforestry for Myanmar, IFF’s involvement in this project had an extremely informal funding arrangement. IFF had a lucrative contract with a Western cosmetics company, Metelli, to manage research on medicinal plants being conducted in another SAPs laboratory. As a gesture of good will, IFF agreed to provide technical assistance to the project in Qingshan – a project which Metelli had been sponsoring for several years as part of its corporate social responsibility program. A broader

Fungal Diversity project involved numerous sub-projects from taxonomic macrofungal surveys to social science research on mushroom harvesting. This project had diverse sources of funding but relied heavily on a grant from the Chinese Ministry of

Science and Technology. At various points in the dissertation, I will return to each of these projects in greater detail.

During my field research, I worked for IFF as a research assistant. This meant that, in addition to numerous interviews and informal conversations, I was a direct

participant in a number of IFF projects. In the Eco-Friendly Rubber project and the

Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder Platform, I participated in planning meetings and attended stakeholder meetings as a representative of IFF. I also organized a team of survey enumerators to implement a household survey that IFF’s African headquarters had designed for the Eco-Friendly Rubber project. In the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, I shared responsibility with another junior member of staff for drafting many of the documents demanded of us by the donor – including the theory of change described in Chapter 1. The Qingshan Agroforestry project was led by two international scientists. I was brought into the project to help design workshops and to deliver them in Chinese. For the Fungal Diversity project, my role was to complement

IFF’s ongoing biophysical research by designing and implementing a household survey on local mushroom harvesting practices. This is something I did in collaboration with a North American anthropologist who IFF was hosting as a visiting researcher for the purposes of her own PhD research with matsutake harvesters. I was a more fleeting participant in various other projects and workshops, often as a notetaker or as an English-language editor for publications.

Throughout the opening paragraphs of this introduction, I have related IFF’s experiences to bureaucracies and impact agendas in European and North American universities. The office I conducted my research in, however, is neither based in

Europe or North America, nor is it a university: it is a China-based research organization that bridges scientific and development professions. There are, nevertheless, significant resonances between the impact agendas and audit cultures of contemporary European and North American universities and what I observed at IFF.

This is likely no coincidence: impact and value for money have surely not emerged as imperatives for agricultural research and development in isolation from impact and value for money as imperatives for university governance. Indeed, versions of the theory of change technology described in Chapter 1 can be found in UK and US universities. This dissertation, however, does not attempt to empirically map the interconnections of these contemporary trends or the emergence of novel impact- driven technologies across time or space. The comparisons I make between, for example, REF and outcomes thinking at IFF do not imply a claim to empirical equivalence or connectivity. The connection I draw between studies of universities, research and development organizations elsewhere in the world is primarily an analytic one. In adopting this approach, I follow an anthropological tradition in which empirical equivalence is neither a prerequisite to nor necessary implication of productive comparison. As Clifford Geertz (1983, 11) put it:

“The question is not whether art (or anything else) is universal; it is whether one can talk about West African carving, New Guinea palm-leaf painting, quattrocentro picture making, and Moroccan versifying in such a way as to shed some sort of light upon one another.”

The attention to temporality that I draw out of IFF colleagues’ experience of incongruity and interruption can be brought to bear on analyses of and responses to, among other things, audit cultures in UK universities. This approach allows us to view bureaucracies like REF in a different light to analyses focused on audit as a technology of representation and visibility. This line of inquiry emerges fundamentally out of my ethnographic research at IFF, but it does not depend upon establishing empirical connections between REF and IFF that are independent of my analysis.

Dissertation Outline

Chapter 1 introduces theory of change – a technology that promises to fulfil the now ubiquitous demand for research and development to make an impact. Drawing on the temporal incongruities IFF colleagues experience coming to terms with diverse iterations of theory of change, I show how emerging bureaucracies of impact impose temporalities that fundamentally shape the kind of actions and relationships it is possible to imagine and to practice. Ethnography of theory of change thus illuminates the radical transformations that bureaucratic regimes of planning and audit imply for the temporality of scientific practice. As this chapter demonstrates, however, theory of change also provides an opportunity for making explicit the temporalizations of causes and effects – the implicit theories of change – that animate scientific practice. This is an opportunity that provides a foundation for the remaining chapters’ analyses of the distinctive temporal orientations of diverse scientific and bureaucratic practices.

Whereas a major focus of Chapter 1 is the distinctive forms of momentum that bureaucratic technologies such as theory of change are intended to generate, Chapter 2 shifts attention to the experience of bureaucracy as an interruption. Flattening distinctions between diverse bureaucratic regimes – from international donors and

Chinese public bodies to IFF’s own international headquarters – IFF colleagues approach the challenges of navigating all such regimes as ‘headaches’ (mafan): as meaningless interruptions that will delay project progress but make no difference to its future path. Though IFF colleagues conceptualize the navigation of bureaucracy as radically distinct from scientific practice, I nevertheless demonstrate that scientific activities such as peer review, PhD defenses and participatory workshops are likewise

forms of interruption. Unlike headaches, however, these are interruptions that promise to positively transform the direction of a project. On occasion, this distinction collapses: IFF colleagues come to experience certain instances of scientific activities such as peer review and PhD defenses as nothing more than headaches – as interruptions with no potential to positively transform the future path of a project. This attention to the quality of interruptions that bureaucratic and scientific practices make to a research project allows for the reframing of the problem of audit and academic bureaucracy from one of visibility and representation (Rottenburg 2009; Shore and

Wright 2015b) to a question of the quality of the interruptions that bureaucracies generate. This is suggestive of a disentanglement of the problem of trust in the sciences from the goal of scientific autonomy and forces us to reconsider what we mean by the ‘trust’ that we as scientists seek.

Chapter 3 returns to the question of trust through the lens of IFF colleagues’ interactions with Chinese government officials and bureaucrats. Drawing on the frustration that IFF administrative staff experience with administrators and bureaucrats who refuse to trust them, this chapter develops a notion of trust that is tied to a willingness to render oneself vulnerable. Drawing upon anthropological attention to how transacting gifts generate remainders that project into the future, I demonstrate how informal social connections (guanxi) and bureaucratic proceduralism operate as alternative means of distributing vulnerability into the future. In this analysis, the boundaries between formal and informal transactions remain vital, but neither because

– as in conventional socio-legal analysis (e.g. Liu 2006; S. Zhu 2016; X. Zhu 2008) – these boundaries divide epistemological or cultural domains across which it is difficult

to translate or mediate; nor because – as in anthropological studies of corruption (e.g.

Gupta 1995; Jauregui 2014; Steinmüller 2010) – the lines between formal and informal constitute moral boundaries. Instead, this ethnography draws attention to how formal and informal modes of interaction are used to carefully manage the future entailments and remainders that relationships inevitably generate.

IFF colleagues’ frustrations with bureaucrats’ careful management of proceduralist relationships resonate with the dehumanizing effects that Michael

Herzfeld (1992) identifies in bureaucratic practice. Chapter 3, however, also draws attention to instances in which IFF colleagues humanize their counterparts in Chinese public bodies. Here sensitivity to the entailments that transactions with IFF might generate for public officials often serves as a precursor to collaborative work.

Moreover, the contrast between the diverse examples of IFF staff’s interactions with public bodies reveals how the promise of collaboration with public officials can hinge on the possibility that one’s interlocutors are open to the forms of vulnerability, and therefore trust, that bureaucracy often seems to preclude.

Chapter 4 explores a concern that connects agroforestry science and scholarship in the environmental humanities: that the dominant temporal forms of contemporary economic, social and political life cannot provide a pathway to environmental sustainability. This chapter argues, furthermore, that agroforestry science and environmental humanities scholars share with advocates of theory of change an aspiration to impose new, more adequate temporal frameworks upon human engagements with the environment. Focusing on agroforestry scientists’ efforts to harness existing ecological, social and political forms in their designs for sustainable

land-use, this chapter highlights some of the blind-spots and limiting assumptions both of agroforestry science at IFF and of environmental humanities scholarship. Having argued for the extensibility of the agroforestry imperative to harness existing forms, the chapter concludes by pointing towards the institutional and professional constraints that IFF scientists would inevitably face in any effort to deepen engagement with their human and non-human interlocutors.

Chapter 5 starts where Chapter 4 finishes: with the institutional logics and constraints that structure professional agri-environmental research and development.

Building on Anna Tsing’s (2015, 285) call for the creation of “scenes that exceed or escape ‘professionalization’”, Chapter 5 describes numerous instances and activities at

IFF that stood outside of professional logics such as scalability, measurability, rapidness, and hubris. Echoing Tsing’s call, scientists at IFF seek spaces for activities that stand outside of quantifiable impacts and suffocating global protocols. As, for example, in a village-level agroforestry project where two soil scientists eschewed the usual protocols of rapid, measurable and scalable development practice for off-the- cuff improvisation. Or when an ecologist disrupted the impersonal authority of scientific knowledge by attempting to make art a medium for public engagement in a sustainable rubber initiative. Though all-too-often cut short by professionalizing imperatives, in these instances IFF scientists generated spaces in which their scientific expertise was made willfully vulnerable. I demonstrate, moreover, that this vulnerability created opportunities for forms of collaboration and interpersonal commitments with rural communities that professionalism ordinarily precludes.

The allure that IFF scientists see in spaces outside of professionalism is often tied not only to the promise of otherwise impossible engagements with communities and ecosystems, but also to the fantasy of escape from accountability to their donors.

Much like academics in European and North American universities gaming audit systems, agri-environmental scientists at IFF treat donor monitoring frameworks as box ticking exercises. As, for example, in a project where IFF scientists selected monitoring targets that would give the greatest appearance of quantifiable impact at the minimal cost to the project team’s autonomy. As Chapter 5 demonstrates, this reflects a tension that exists between efforts to create spaces of engagement that exceed oppressive professionalism and simultaneous desires to escape entanglements with those who fund agri-environmental research and development.

This dissertation’s Conclusion places the anthropological literature on audit cultures alongside the literature on scientific corruption and misconduct in China.

Though offering seemingly disparate evaluative frameworks of scientific and bureaucratic practice, I use the temporal frameworks of the preceding chapters not only to draw attention to what these literatures have in common, but also to propose an alternative theory of change for scientific practice in the shadow of audit and bureaucratization. Reiterating the value of interruption and vulnerability to scientific practice, this dissertation concludes by reflecting on the challenge of sustaining vulnerability in an era where the future of the scientific practice seems ever more precarious.

CHAPTER 1

COMPARING THEORIES OF CHANGE

Jiaolong’s joke that ‘IFF is useless’3 reflects a frustrated desire to use her scientific expertise to do good. This failure is a frequent pre-occupation for Jiaolong, and a problem that in her view will require scientists to re-think how they engage the world.

As she put it in one of her blogs, ‘[scientists] often complain that the public don’t understand science and don’t think that popularizing science is important, but the question is, have we helped to foster their interest in science?’ The imperative to foster public interest in scientific work and to generate socially and ecologically positive impacts upon the world is perhaps as familiar to anthropology in Europe and America as it is to agri-environmental science in China. Equally familiar is the proliferation of bureaucratic technologies for bringing about and making visible scientific impact.

Examining one of these technologies – theory of change – alongside the aspirations and expectations that Jiaolong and her colleagues have for their research sheds light on the problem that academic bureaucracies and audit cultures superficially share with

Jiaolong’s joke: how do we make science make a difference?

A ubiquitous presence at IFF, theory of change is a technology for designing impactful research, as well as for evaluating the achievement of planned-for impacts.

It allows, for example, colleagues to imagine a pathway from mycological research to an increase in incomes for mushroom harvesters in the region. Versions of theory of change and cognates such as outcomes thinking and outcomes mapping are found

3 See Introduction.

across diverse fields from NGOs and philanthropy to universities and development organizations. Theory of change’s recent emergence in research institutes such as IFF reflects increasingly pervasive demands for research to generate demonstrable impacts

(Brenneis 2009; Hall and Sanders 2015). The US National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, requires that all funded research has the potential to generate “broader impacts” (NSF n.d.). Similarly, the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) ties public funding to universities’ generation of impact defined as “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (HEFCE n.d.). These demands are, like certain iterations of theory of change, tied to the increasingly invasive discipline of audit (Shore and Wright 2015b; Strathern 2000b).

Jane Guyer (2007, 417) has highlighted the time disciplining function of audit: its tying of activities to “signal events in near future time”. Similarly, Jillian

Cavanaugh’s (2016, 698) ethnography of food audit points to how bureaucracy anchors objects “to a particular time and place”. As Laura Bear (2014) and Nayanika

Mathur (2016, 142–45) highlight, however, anthropologists have frequently overlooked this temporalizing work. Anthropologists have instead focused on bureaucracy and audit as mechanisms of representation. A central question in studies of academic audit has therefore been, “what audits and rankings bring into focus and what they render invisible or unsayable” (Shore and Wright 2015b, 422).

Nadasdy’s (2017, 253–98) account of the competing temporal frameworks of audit, environmental management, and Yukon Indian hunting. As well as China Scherz’s

(2013) description of East African nuns resisting the temporalities of planning and audit by consciously committing themselves to a temporality of faith and of hope in

God. As both Nadasdy and Scherz demonstrate, what is at stake in impositions of bureaucratic planning and audit is the imposition of temporalities that fundamentally shape the kind of actions and relationships it is possible to imagine and to practice.

Attention to the temporal incongruity that IFF scientists experience coming to terms with theory of change, illuminates the radical transformations that bureaucratic regimes of planning and audit imply for the temporality of scientific practice. This resonates with analyses of the “time-starved neoliberal university”: a setting where zealous audit regimes generate pressures to produce research, teach and fulfill administrative duties at increasingly impossible tempos (Mountz et al. 2015, 1247; also Berg 2016; cf. Meyerhoff, Johnson, and Braun 2015). More so than the tempo and rhythm of scientific practice,4 however, this chapter is concerned with the temporal horizons and the structures of the future that bureaucracies impose.

Shifting attention to audit as a temporal problem brings the study of audit cultures into conversation with questions of time in the anthropology of gifts. Insofar as analysis of gift exchange concerns the causes and effects of transactions understood within a broader sequence of exchange, the anthropology of gifts has always been concerned with temporality (e.g. Malinowski 1916; Mauss 1990). Pierre Bourdieu

4 These are, however, themes that I return to at various points in the dissertation. See especially Chapters 4 and 5.

(1977) made this concern explicit with his argument that the temporal gap between gift and counter-gift facilitates the misrecognition of a gift’s violence. Rather than revealing the causes and effects that my research subjects do not see, however, I draw on analyses of exchange that elucidate transactions as forms through which causes and effects are made visible to the people engaged in the transaction. Though they deploy their descriptions of exchange to very different effect, Nancy Munn’s (1986, 58) description of the “complex interplay of the incommensurable spacetimes of different

[Gawan] transactions”, and Marilyn Strathern’s (1988, 305) description of the unfolding of agency, cause and effect in the “temporalized transactions” of

Melanesian exchange are both acutely sensitive to the actions and relationships that their research subjects make visible as the cause of any given transaction, as well as to the effects that these transactions anticipate. They share, moreover, an attention to the way exchange is both structured by and gives effect to temporal forms (also Chu 2010;

Keane 1997; Miyazaki 2004; Nadasdy 2017; Riles 2011; Weiner 1976).

Focus on temporality also brings into view the diversity of theory of change’s

“contingent articulations” (Tsing 2005; also Sivaramakrishnan 1999). The contrast between three iterations of theory of change – as it was conceived by an IFF participation scientist, by an IFF donor, and by an IFF communications consultant – demonstrates how this planning and audit technology precipitates not only a punctuated temporality of dates (Guyer 2007; Scherz 2013) or the “homogenous and empty time of capital” (Meyerhoff, Johnson, and Braun 2015, 485), but diverse forms of futurity (Mathur 2016, 139–64). Contrasting the diverse iterations of theory of change, as well as IFF scientists’ conventional expectations of scientific impact,

highlights the heterogenous temporal frames in which the problem of impact can be and is imagined. And allows an engagement with audit technologies such as theory of change not only as an object of critique, but as a provocation to make explicit and reflect upon the temporalizations of causes and effects – the implicit theories of change – that animate scientific practice. In this respect, while anthropologists have long highlighted the propensity for planning and auditing technologies to obscure (e.g.

Ferguson 1994; Lakoff 2008; T. M. Li 2011; Rottenburg 2009; Scott 1998; Shore and

Wright 2015b), ethnography of theory of change demonstrates that such technologies can also provide opportunities for rendering visible temporal assumptions that are otherwise only implicit or under the surface.

Theory of Change: Generating Prospective Momentum

IFF’s China office holds a monthly seminar series in which the Institute’s scientists present their research to graduate students, and colleagues. At one seminar, Rebecca delivered a presentation summarizing the key findings of her earlier PhD research.

Rebecca began her presentation with an introduction to the use of isotopic signatures as indicators in a wide range of ecological applications – from understanding bird migration patterns to identifying the sources of a fungus’s nutrients. She then outlined the significance of her own application of this indicator to soil N2O production by highlighting that N2O generates a per unit greenhouse effect 300 times greater than

CO2. Next, she proceeded to her research results, which showed that, contrary to prior scientific understandings, net forest soil N2O production will decrease rather than increase under conditions of drought. This challenge to the existing orthodoxy was

possible, Rebecca told her colleagues, because whereas prior studies had only recorded net N2O production at the soil’s surface, she had additionally used soil isotopic signatures to investigate subsoil N2O fluxes. Rebecca’s PhD research was exciting and important because, by comparison to earlier efforts, it achieved a more truthful or complete reference to soil N2O production. Exemplifying anthropological and STS stereotypes of modern knowledge (Latour 1993; Viveiros de Castro 1998),

Rebecca developed a new, more accurate perspective on the natural world.

The intrinsic value that Rebecca saw in this enhanced understanding of N2O was augmented by the potential for real-world application. In her presentation,

Rebecca framed her research in the context of a pressing real-world challenge: global climate change. Here she suggested a somewhat vague hope for research application, evoking a future where an unspecified party might take up research findings to unspecified productive ends. Rebecca imagined her research to be useful – that the improved understanding generated by her research might allow farmers or policy makers to adopt enhanced agricultural practices or policies – but did not necessarily imagine a concrete plan for precisely how it would be used or by whom: such problems were ceded to unspecified others (Riles 2017).

Rebecca’s attitude is characteristic not only of many of her colleagues at IFF’s

China office, but also of an approach that theory of change is intended to supersede.

So that IFF scientists might learn this new mode of research, Lesley, a participation and impact scientist from IFF’s international headquarters, visited Songlin to host a workshop on ‘outcomes thinking’ and ‘theory of change’. Central to Lesley’s workshop was the introduction of a new set of categories with which she asked

scientists to conceptualize an impact pathway and theory of change for their research.

Lesley expended significant energy explaining the differences between ‘outputs’,

‘outcomes’, and ‘impacts’, as well as between ‘next users’ and ‘end users’. In this scheme, an output refers to a deliverable such as a policy paper or a workshop.

According to Lesley, agricultural researchers have too often targeted outputs – especially in the form of scientific publications and policy papers – and then thought no further. Indeed, this was the case for Rebecca’s soil N2O study. Lesley, however, encouraged Rebecca and her colleagues to imagine pathways for their work that extend beyond knowledge production and onto an impact for a specified end user group. Here, end users are the ultimate beneficiary – in the context of agriculture this is usually farmers – while an impact is an on-the-ground change for the identified end user – for example, an increase in farmers’ crop yields. Thus, an impact pathway might map a causal chain from an IFF research project to an increase in crop yields for a specific group of farmers.

Outcomes thinking, however, does not entail IFF seeking to directly effect such impacts. That tobacco farmers are, for example, the end user identified does not mean that IFF staff must necessarily spend more time interacting with tobacco farmers. Instead, IFF’s activities are to generate changes in the ‘knowledge, attitudes and skills’ of next users who might interact with tobacco farmers on a wider scale than

IFF’s relatively small staff. One of the critiques driving outcomes thinking is the idea that earlier generations of development researchers focused excessively on the state – when scientists did imagine audiences beyond the academy, they assumed that policy- makers were the only other audience that mattered. The category of next user allows

outcomes thinking to broaden the imagined audience of research and development activities. Who is a potential next user will necessarily vary from project to project, but for IFF’s work it often includes the state, the media, research organizations,

NGOs, IGOs, and donors. The Food Security Fund – a key donor whom I will discuss further below – stand as an important next user not only in their ability to fund IFF projects, but also to fund the projects of next users that IFF target within its theory of change. Here, the idea of a donor as a next user recognizes the power of financial resources over research and development work. Whereas impacts are changes in end user livelihoods, outcomes are changes one effects in the knowledge, attitudes and skills of next users. Outputs, outcomes and impacts form a causal chain: outputs generate outcomes which generate impacts.

One aspect of outcomes thinking that Lesley emphasized was that scientists cannot undertake the process of generating outcomes after the fact of scientific knowledge creation. In this respect, Lesley insisted that the work of outcomes thinking cannot, as many scientists at IFF seemed to wish, be delegated to others whilst they get on with science as usual. A constant theme in outcomes thinking is that shaping the practices of next users is most effective when scientists engage next users from the beginning of a project. This implies a collaborative agenda, and is closely connected to a contemporary trend for multi-stakeholder platforms (e.g. Jemielniak and Greenwood

2015; Sanyang et al. 2016). Multi-stakeholder platforms bring together stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to work to address a common set of problems. So, for example, IFF was an initiating partner in the establishment of the Lengshan Multi-

Stakeholder Platform – a collaborative project that aimed to address social and

ecological challenges in the tropical Chinese prefecture Lengshan. Rather than decide on their research focus autonomously, platform facilitators asked IFF scientists to attend platform meetings along with stakeholders from business, government, and other research organizations – all of whom are potential next users. From an outcomes thinking perspective, this platform was as a way of allowing scientists to identify key next users, and to shape their research approach to the demands and needs of these next users. By continuing this collaborative engagement throughout the research, moreover, scientists would, so the platform organizers told them, enhance their ability to mobilize the interests of next users, and thereby their prospects for effecting desirable changes in next users’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

In this context, the STS idea that a scientist’s success lies in his ability to interest a multitude of actors (Callon 1986; Latour 1987) is transformed from path- breaking analysis into program for action. The multi-stakeholder collaborative dimension to outcomes thinking turns the STS analytic of co-production into an instrumental strategy (Jasanoff 2004a).5 In this regard, multi-stakeholder platforms for rural China have a close affinity to the “mutual learning” processes adopted in French medical research. As Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon (2004, 158) put it, if

“co-production implies a collective action and mobilization, then the work for organizing it imposes itself as a prominent issue”. This is no accidental coalescence of ideas: Lesley herself pointed the workshop participants to a piece of STS scholarship arguing that scientists must “consciously support the coproduction of knowledge”

5 Sheila Jasanoff describes this as “Miramax co-production”: the adoption of co-production’s terminology without following through on its premises (pers. comm.).

(Cash, Borck, and Patt 2006, 465). The instrumentalization of STS – or at least of a

Machiavellian reading of STS (Mol and Law 1994) – is an explicit tenant of outcomes thinking.

Having explained this new outcomes thinking vocabulary, Lesley introduced a technology for imagining a specific pathway for impactful research: a ‘theory of change’. Organized as a flow chart, activities and outputs are placed at the bottom.

Arrows connect these to outcomes these activities will effect. Outcomes are in turn connected to impacts. At the very top of the theory of change is a ‘vision’ of the world that one wishes to bring into being – the future one imagines as the cumulative effect of one’s outcomes-focused work. Building a theory of change, one begins at the top – with the vision – and then works backwards towards the activities.

The vision that IFF scientists constructed during Lesley’s workshop was:

‘Rural landscapes sustain healthy and culturally diverse ecosystems that ensure food security and provide health, wealth, education, cohesion and equity. Public, private and non-profit institutions supporting policies, investments and interactions that integrate sustainable land management with healthy urban-rural food and ecosystem linkages.’

The utopianism of this vision did not escape IFF staff: one participant joked that once we reach this point we could all go home. Though this utopianism appeared inappropriate to this scientist’s conventional notions of research design, the novelty of theory of change compared to conventional research planning does not lie in convergent degrees of realism. By beginning with this endpoint, Lesley did not suppose that our vision represented a point that we would ever actually reach – there is an as if quality to this theory of change’s vision. The power of this vision lies in the manner that it generates a particular temporal orientation. Hirokazu Miyazaki (2003,

261) has highlighted how the gap between reality and ideal that characterizes utopianism generates a sense of incompleteness that “gives the present moment a future orientation”, and sustains a “prospective momentum”. Similarly, by asking workshop participants to begin by crafting a utopian vision for the world, Lesley gave the subsequent work of designing research activities a distinctive temporal orientation.

With the as if end point of our vision in mind, Lesley asked us to decide what changes in next user knowledge, attitudes, and skills would be required to achieve these changes – the outcomes we wished to generate. One such outcome was:

‘Public policy actors develop sustainable and equitable policies (targeted towards food security, wealth, health, education, cohesion, equity) and direct the necessary human resources and capital towards implementing the policies.’

Finally, Lesley asked the workshop participants to discuss activities and outputs that could bring about these outcomes. By this point, the process of manufacturing a theory of change seems far-detached from the utopianism of crafting a vision. Lesley intended for discussion in this moment to be pragmatic and grounded in what was feasible: how could we get local government to adopt policies promoting sustainable rubber cultivation?; what kind of research would be necessary for stakeholders to know which agricultural systems are most sustainable?; could we set up a multi-stakeholder platform?; who should we invite to participate? Working backwards from our utopian vision, however, meant that workshop participants sustained a prospective momentum: plans for research activities were made with a vision already in mind for the future these activities would bring closer to being.

At the time of the workshop, most of IFF’s ongoing projects in the region had been initiated with no thought to outcomes or impact – at least not as these concepts

are understood in outcomes thinking. Lesley suggested we redesign or retro-fit existing projects so that they could be brought in line with the region’s new theory of change. To fit ongoing projects into Lesley’s theory of change IFF scientists would in effect have to generate a kind of prospective momentum that their projects had thus far lacked. This involved IFF researchers hastily conceiving social science research to complement conventional biophysical research in the hope that this might highlight the relevance of their research to the development of ‘sustainable and equitable policies’; and proposing workshops with stakeholder groups to share research findings in a more proactive manner than the traditional policy paper. Here, scientists were required to imagine a new kind of value in their work: their contribution to bringing into being the vision imagined in the office’s theory of change.

One of the new outcomes-focused activities we devised was an experiment, conducted in collaboration with a county-level forestry bureau and local mushroom harvesters, that would compare a range of indigenous mushroom management practices. We conceived this project as a means to build upon IFF’s Fungal Diversity project and upon IFF colleagues’ extensive mycological expertise in a manner that would satisfy the imperative Lesley had given us to generate outcomes and impacts.

The project’s target impact was for mushroom harvesters to adopt more productive, and therefore more profitable, mushroom harvesting practices. Working backwards from this end user impact, we formulated a next user outcome of forestry extension workers with improved knowledge of mushroom management. We therefore decided to begin by devising an experiment that would produce this new knowledge.

Having completed this experiment, the project team’s analysis showed no significant difference between the efficacies of the management strategies compared in the experiment. Reporting these results to Matt, who led the office’s mushroom research, I suggested that although our research could not say anything of practical use to mushroom harvesters, our data might have the potential to generate a decent scientific paper. Matt laughed at this: by rendering a peer-reviewed paper as the project’s only output, I had forgotten the point of the project. We had originally anticipated that our comparative analysis would allow us to propose a best practice that we could subsequently disseminate to harvesters (the end users) via forestry bureau extension officers (the next users). In many respects, this was a simplistic take on theory of change. In our impatience to satisfy the imperative to generate impacts, the project team had hastily imagined a theory of change that did not, for example, consider a role for researchers as next users. Had we done so, we might have considered how our research (even with null results) might have helped us to persuade scientific colleagues of which further avenues for research would and would not be worth pursuing. And we might have imagined how this shaping of the knowledge and attitudes of scientific colleagues might serve as a causal link in a more complex pathway to our target impact of enhancing sustainable mushroom yields. We had transformed theory of change into something much narrower and less ambitious than what Lesley described in her workshop. Nevertheless, when he laughed at my appeal to publication as the project’s endpoint, Matt had taken on board a fundamental lesson of outcomes thinking. Our goal had been to generate outcomes and impacts, and while

referentially complete research results might play a role in movement towards this goal, they could not, as I had implied, stand in for this goal.

My misunderstanding here highlights the novelty of the temporal structure that

Lesley’s theory of change imposes upon IFF research. The near future endpoint of a peer reviewed article is no longer an acceptable horizon to work towards. Driven by the gap between reality and the utopian future of IFF’s vision for the world, Lesley’s theory of change forced scientists to focus instead on a protracted causal chain in which their activities would effect next user outcomes that would in turn effect end user outcomes.

M&E: Theory of Change in the Future Perfect

Lesley’s workshop focused primarily on theory of change as a planning technology, but a theory of change can also facilitate the measurement of outcomes and impacts.

Scientists at IFF were already familiar with quantitative assessment of research through the quantification of peer-reviewed publications – either by their volume, or by their quality via proxies such as impact factor or h-index. As with the increased emphasis on impacts in the UK’s REF, and the importance the US NSF places on broader impacts, however, outcomes thinking effects a shift from measuring only outputs to measuring real-world outcomes and impacts. The notion that “[t]he subject constitutes/recognizes itself in the objects it produces” (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 470) is replaced by a modality in which scientists constitute/recognize themselves in the effect they have on next users. Here outcomes thinking provides a novel basis for

auditing science, or for what the development community call ‘monitoring and evaluation’ or ‘M&E’.

IFF has begun to use M&E of this kind for the internal assessment of its regional offices. Lesley asked the China office to provide an ‘evidence table’ for IFF’s

2015 global annual meeting. In this table, staff at the China office mapped recent activities and outputs onto the theory of change we had developed in the workshop described above. This, Lesley suggested, would operate as evidence that the office is working towards its target outcomes, impacts, and vision. A more rigorous framework was provided by the Food Security Fund who funded the Agroforestry for Myanmar project. Titled ‘Monitoring and Evaluation for Learning and Accountability (MELA)’, the Food Security Fund’s framework consists of numerous components.

One component is a theory of change similar in style to the one participants had developed at Lesley’s outcomes thinking workshop. Rather than beginning with

IFF’s over-arching institutional vision, however, the MELA framework requires that each project constructs a theory of change directed towards the vision that sits atop the

Food Security Fund’s institutional theory of change. As such, while the theory of change that IFF produced for MELA focused on its own Agroforestry for Myanmar project, at the top of the theory of change flow chart was a vision statement, along with selected outcome statements, lifted from the Food Security Fund’s theory of change. Hierarchically embedded within this larger theory of change, IFF aligned its project with the trajectory of its donor: the theory of change evinced IFF’s commitment to bring the Food Security Fund’s vision into being.

A second component is a measurement template that demands evidence IFF is effecting outcomes in the manner set out in the theory of change. This entails developing an Excel spreadsheet with the outputs, outcomes and impacts from the theory of change listed in the first column, and subsequent columns then detailing indicators and targets. So, for example, to measure the outcome ‘Relevant stakeholders understand better how agroforestry improves livelihoods, resilience and ecological health in the Uplands’, the IFF project team devised the indicator ‘% of knowledge platform members with improved agroforestry knowledge’ and set a target of a ‘20% improvement in agroforestry knowledge by 2018’. As discussed above, IFF scientists based in China had already experienced demand for evidence supporting a theory of change from their own headquarters. What made the MELA framework especially troublesome for IFF scientists is not merely that scrutiny from the Food

Security Fund is more intense, but that it also entails IFF scientists developing precise quantitative performance indicators in advance of activities commencing. This advance determination gave detailed structure and form to a decisive retrospective moment of evaluation that awaits the project’s conclusion. The MELA framework thus invited IFF to think in the future perfect tense: by project completion, we will have caused X to have happened.

The MELA framework has been a source of great frustration for IFF colleagues, who have expended significant energy developing and revising it. One headache for the project team has been the incongruity between the short temporal scope of the monitoring framework – which covers only the 4 years of Food Security

Fund financed work from 2014 to 2018 – compared to goals which the project team

believe will take many years to achieve. To address this, the project team’s initial draft of the MELA framework included the measurement of indicators – including ‘% of knowledge platform members with improved agroforestry knowledge’ – beyond the

2018 conclusion of the project. The Food Security Fund, however, refused this proposal, and insisted that IFF base its measurement framework on what is achievable within the 2014-2018 funding period.

This example of attempting to challenge the temporal framework of MELA was, however, the exception not the rule (cf. Scherz 2013). Rather than altering the framework, for the most part IFF researchers have simply worked within its terms.

The development of the MELA framework has as much as anything been a matter of trying to satisfy what the IFF team imagined the Food Security Fund’s expectations to be, and of setting measurable targets that were as easy to meet as possible. So, for example, indicators related to numbers of publications, reports, and knowledge products generated were designed to measure outputs related to novel scientific research. The wording of these indicators was deliberately vague. The project team saw peer-reviewed publications as an important, even central, project goal, but the purpose of M&E was not completeness of reference to the team’s ambitions for the project (Keane 1995). The vaguer wording of ‘knowledge product’ was chosen for the indicator because it had a better chance of eliciting the desired approval from the donor. Though the project team would aim for peer-reviewed publications, if they missed this target they could simply self-publish working papers, working drafts, or even power-point presentations and still count these as ‘knowledge products’. As with the mushroom experiment inspired by Lesley’s theory of change workshop, peer-

review publication could not serve as an ultimate horizon. But the horizon IFF scientists adopted in response to M&E was different also to Lesley’s theory of change.

Here, the distant-future of theory of change’s utopian vision gave way to focus on the punctuated near future (Guyer 2007, 417) of the donor’s project evaluation.

As described above, IFF scientists experience an incongruity between the short temporal frame of the MELA framework and the project’s long-term goals. IFF colleagues, however, also highlight a more profound absurdity in the temporality of

M&E. Jacob, a veteran of numerous agri-environmental research for development projects, told me that he found not only the MELA framework, but monitoring frameworks in general to be an ‘utter pain in the backside’. At the root of his frustration was the demand to determine the precise course the project would take in advance of its inception. Jacob pointed out that this is an utterly unrealistic demand: one cannot know what to expect of a project before it has even begun and should rather adapt to the situation as it evolves. Then, Jacob told me, once your project is complete, you must waste time justifying why you have not met goals in a monitoring framework that you only set because you were forced to do so. From Jacob’s perspective, the development of M&E metrics in advance of the project demands an inappropriate predetermination of project goals, making a farce of the ultimate retrospective evaluation these goals are used to conduct.

Jacob’s idea of adaptability can be understood in the light of another mode of scientific practice: the research proposal. In another example of my mistaking the appropriate modality to the situation, I suggested in a lunchtime conversation that the value of proposal writing seemed more than anything else to lie in its ability to procure

funds. Backing up this naïve consequentialist account of the proposal, I pointed out that no project ever ended up looking like the grant proposal from which it spawned.

Though a consequentialist logic of this kind did animate IFF scientists’ grant application writing, Chad took me to task on my narrow understanding of the proposal. He argued that even in the absence of a need to procure funding, scientists should write a proposal as it provides a starting point and initial plan for a project. In

Chad’s view, researchers should adapt and re-work this plan as circumstances change and the project develops. Chad agreed that no project ever ends up quite like it looked in the proposal but pointed out that this is the positive outcome of a proposal as a starting point subject to ongoing revision. This is suggestive of a modality that is neither consequentialist – a proposal is not judged merely for its ability to elicit certain actions in others – nor representational – a proposal is not an advance representation of what the project will look like. The proposal is rather a provisional position that must be constantly adapted and revised. A provisional position of this kind enables a retrospective, but it is not of the decisive kind that characterized MELA. A retrospective on a provisional position is not one that generates a judgement of success or failure, but rather one which facilitates the revision of present goals and redesign of future activities.

If provisionalism itself seems foreign to the representational modality of conventional science, this is perhaps because these two modes are appropriate to different stages of a research project (Latour 1987; Pickering 1995, 113–56). The provisional modality that would have guided Rebecca’s research planning and implementation, gave way to the representational modality she adopted in the seminar.

The provisional description of methods in a research proposal – ‘this is what I plan to do (but I am open to revising this)’ – gives way to the retrospective of the methods section of a research paper – ‘this is what I did’. There is a sense therefore in which the retrospective description of methods in the research paper eclipses the provisional nature of methods in the research proposal. This eclipsing, however, comes only after the research project has been completed: the two temporalities can co-exist because they are sequential to one another. By contrast, as Jacob’s frustration with MELA highlights, the decisive retrospective modality of M&E frameworks imposes itself right from the start. By beginning with the MELA framework’s advance determination of project goals as the basis for a future decisive retrospective, MELA erases the provisional status Jacob would have given the project plan.

Though erased right from the start by the MELA framework, the provisional mode of a project plan is not foreign to theory of change. Indeed, during Lesley’s workshop, participants were told to treat their theory of change as a ‘working hypothesis’ – something to be regularly revisited and revised. Even the MELA framework asks project implementers such as IFF to ‘facilitate the use of M&E results to improve the project’, and in discussions of MELA, Food Security Fund project managers would often reassure IFF that they are ‘flexible’ and willing to consider revisions to the project’s MELA framework. Indeed, many versions of outcomes thinking, theories of change, and M&E forefront precisely this kind of provisional thinking. Casper Jensen and Britt Winthereik (2013, 148–49), for example, argue that

“perpetual revisability [is] an important dimension of the monitoring movement”.

IFF’s experience of drawn out interactions with Agroforestry for Myanmar project

managers to approve the initial version of the MELA framework, however, mean that

IFF have little confidence in assertions of flexibility and revisability. As such, IFF staff have approached the MELA framework not as a provisional position, but as a fixed, future perfect image of the project’s end point.

The rendering of MELA as offering a predetermined end point is, however, not merely the outcome of IFF’s lack of faith in Food Security Fund assertions of flexibility. It also reflects a tension inherent in the MELA framework’s marriage of theory of change with a particular form of auditable metrics. As Sam – a London- based outcomes thinking consultant unconnected to IFF – put it in response to my description of IFF’s experience with the MELA framework, the demand for quantifiable evidence to prove impact inevitably leads to the ‘bastardization’ of theory of change as ‘a thought process’. In Sam’s view, the use of theory of change as a way of demonstrating impact or providing definitive assessments of success is incompatible with the conceptualization of theory of change as a reflexive planning process. M&E, he told me, should be used as a learning tool, as something which allowed project managers to learn what is and isn’t working, allowing them to revise activities and objectives as they go. For Sam, this kind of learning is almost inevitably frustrated by M&E frameworks like MELA that focus on quantifying success. At the core of this incongruity is the temporality of MELA’s monitoring metrics. If MELA demands that goals are set in advance so that they can provide the basis for a future decisive retrospective, these same goals cannot simultaneously be provisional. The predetermined, future perfect end point that MELA demands erases the potential for that same framework to operate as an underdetermined, provisional plan. This

temporal erasure is at the heart of Jacob’s frustration with M&E, but it is also something which frustrates people such as Sam and Lesley for whom this erasure undermines fundamental rationales for theory of change and the adaptive learning goals of M&E. Despite its global reach, theory of change is in this respect not singular and immutable form (Tsing 2005; Winthereik and Jensen 2017; cf. Rottenburg 2009).

The prospective momentum of Lesley’s theory of change is very different to the future perfect tense generated by MELA’s.

Theory of Change as Business Plan: A Future of Limitless Growth

Though I have developed an analysis of outcomes thinking out of IFF scientists’ experience of temporal incongruity, this is nevertheless a different kind of response to the one offered by IFF scientists in their engagements with M&E: that of reducing theory of change to box ticking. Applied to the MELA framework, the consequentialist practice of box ticking appears a relatively benign response to audit.

However, a strategy put forward by Alistair, an IFF communications expert, to build a

‘brand’ for agroforestry – an environmentally-friendly approach to land use that integrates agricultural and forest ecosystems, and which is central to many IFF projects – shows how a similar rendering of M&E can be subsumed into a broader strategy for maximizing power and influence.

During a visit to IFF’s China office, Alistair – who like Lesley is based outside of China – expressed his delight that IFF headquarters had recently recruited an M&E team. Alistair celebrated how this team would allow IFF to show their return on investment, and thereby make a better case to policy makers and donors for the

efficacy of agroforestry, as well as for the work that IFF does in researching and promoting agroforestry. For Alistair, the theory of change imperative to change the knowledge, attitudes, and skills of next users is analogous to the work of a business selling a product. According to Alistair, ‘theory of change’ is simply another way of saying ‘business plan’. Alistair therefore wants to use M&E metrics that can evince the efficacy of agroforestry and the impact of agroforestry research as a marketing tool. Here, Alistair takes M&E’s decisive retrospective judgement and turns it into a tool for his business strategy – a strategy which like Lesley’s theory of change seeks to empower IFF to bring about its target outcomes and impacts. Whereas MELA demands that IFF evinces its ability to effect changes within the limited timeframe of a project, branding implies a collective agency that projects itself into an endless future.

This endless quality superficially echoes the momentum generated by the utopian vision atop Lesley’s theory of change – a vision towards which Alistair was likewise working. But branding also implies a distinctive form of momentum. Alistair did not imagine an ideal state for agroforestry’s brand: there was no generative gap between the reality of agroforestry’s brand and an ideal to which Alistair aspired. Rather, an entailment of branding as a commercial strategy is the infinite imperative for growth:

“[b]rand management over time is the permanent pursuit of growth” (Kapferer 2012,

219). This imperative to pursue limitless growth gives the work of nurturing a brand a permanent momentum.

Whereas the IFF team’s concern for the MELA framework focused almost exclusively on the individual project at hand – and to a lesser extent with the potential for future IFF projects funded by the Food Security Fund – Alistair’s idea of branding

implied a much broader and more ambitious understanding of IFF’s relationship to next users. In Alistair’s conception, the brand of agroforestry stands on a different level to the reputation of any individual project. The reputation of a well-developed brand is more than simply the sum of its products, and will sustain itself despite individual instances of project failure – just as, in Alistair’s example, the brand Coca

Cola survived the notorious failure of New Coke. Individual projects can serve as success stories with which next users are persuaded of the benefits of agroforestry, but this must be understood as part of a broader brand management strategy. Projects like the Food Security Fund-funded agroforestry project are subsumed as means to a grander project. Alistair told IFF’s China office that IFF are already reaping the rewards of brand management: it was because of agroforestry’s brand that he could get

IFF’s director-general into an important inter-governmental forum on global security; and that non-IFF actors have succeeded in integrating agroforestry practices into

Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. Thanks to the brand of agroforestry, Alistair boasted, the concept is now ‘percolating policy documents’.

In such a context, we might approach agroforestry as an emerging discourse, and attempt to show the effects of this discourse, as has been done for development discourse (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994). When James Ferguson (1994) describes the

“instrument effect” of development discourse, however, the proliferation of this discourse is something “without a master plan”, something “unintended”. Alistair’s brand may generate its own unintended consequence, but it is also very much built from a plan (Hilgartner 2015). Re-working Escobar (1995, 216), Alistair’s design for agroforestry as a brand is driven by an implicit recognition that “changing the order of

discourse is a political question that entails the collective practice of social actors”.

Brand-building, in this respect, implies an attempt to activate a collective agency, drawing together agroforestry scientists in a manner that maximizes their effect into the future. This imagination of the circulation of knowledge resonates with Michel

Callon’s (1986) notion of “interessement” as “the group of actions by which an entity

(here the three researchers) attempts to impose and stabilize the identity of the other actors it defines through its problematization”. If we follow Callon in focusing on scientists’ desire for closure on their own terms (Latour 1987; Mol and Law 1994; cf. de Laet and Mol 2000; Singleton and Michael 1993), Alistair’s theory of change – his pursuit of limitless, uninterrupted growth for agroforestry’s brand and for IFF’s influence – looks a lot like the apogee of science.

The Endpoints of Research: An Implicit Theory of Change

If the various iterations of outcomes thinking described above each offer a model of scientific practice familiar to certain STS imaginations of science, it is a model that contrasts with the more modest ambition Rebecca displayed when she presented her research on soil N2O flux. As described above, Rebecca’s framing of her research reflected a characteristically vague and undefined hope that the improved understanding generated by her research might allow farmers or policy makers to adopt enhanced agricultural practices or policies. In this vague hope, Rebecca anticipated a future for her research in the hands of others. Unlike the future anticipated by Lesley’s theory of change, the MELA framework or Alistair’s branding, however, Rebecca did not preconfigure a design for this future. And by the same

token, Rebecca’s refutation of existing theories of soil N2O flux was not a “betrayal”

(Latour 1987) of earlier scientific findings; it builds upon the deliberately open-ended nature of prior scientists’ end points. This is not to doubt that closure and fact stabilizing are important problems for agri-environmental scientists, but to highlight that closure – the uninterrupted extension of findings into the future – is not the only impetus for the circulation of knowledge (Keller 1985, 136–37). Agri-environmental scientists also view their publications as open-ended starting points for future work.

This particular form of open-endedness is often apparent in the discussion section of agri-environmental research papers. The results section of a paper presents only the results, often in the form of a statistical analysis of data collected from an experiment or field study. The discussion section that follows will then explore the significance of these results in relation to both past and future research. Orientating itself to the past, a discussion section relates findings to prior studies on the same or similar topics: it makes visible the effects of prior research upon the present paper.

Orientating itself to the future, a discussion section highlights the limits to the paper’s results and the potential questions it raises for future studies: the paper anticipates its own potential effects on future research. Thus, while the results themselves foreground the work of the scientific authors, the past-orientated aspects of a discussion section signal how this work builds on the efforts of others, while the future-oriented aspects can be read as an invitation for others to build upon the work presented. A research paper at once attempts the closure of a certain set of facts, and adopts a position of openness towards how future research might not only further stabilize, but also qualify, modify, or expand its findings (Latour and Woolgar 1986, 86–87). Several

IFF colleagues, for example, contributed to a paper that presented an overview of edible mushrooms in Asia. The paper concluded with a discussion section highlighting, among other things, how little is currently known about mushrooms of the region. As Matt, one of the co-authors, described it to me, the paper’s goal was to

‘provoke activity’ in the area. In this paper, there is closure of a kind: a desire to establish Asian mushrooms as a “matter of concern” (Latour 2004b), but control over how this concern plays out is nevertheless ceded to others (de Laet and Mol 2000;

Riles 2017). Establishing mushrooms as a problem for future scientists is of course no neutral act: no less than Alistair’s branding, this is an act that (if successful) will compel others to action. The temporality of these anticipated effects is, however, fundamentally different. Whereas theory of change begins with a vision of the future

IFF will compel others to build; the provocation of Rebecca’s soil N2O research or

IFF’s mushroom paper did not preconceive the future their work would bring into being.

This temporal incongruity was apparent in a further instance of my making an out of place comment. Like Rebecca, her colleague Ruyue drew a connection in her research between soil biology and global climate change; in this instance by examining the effect of mycorrhizal fungi on soil carbon storage. As Ruyue explained to me, though scientists have tended to focus on above-ground ecological communities, much of a forests’ carbon storage is due to below-ground mycorrhizal fungi. Based on the limited data already available on mycorrhiza and carbon storage,

Ruyue had conducted a meta-analysis. What she found was that despite the popular conception that agroforestry will offer better carbon sequestration compared to

conventional agriculture, this is not always the case. The ability of agroforestry systems to offer superior carbon sequestration, Ruyue told me, depends on the specific tree-mycorrhiza combination. Based on her preliminary research, Ruyue proposes to set up experimental studies that would allow her to analyze specific tree-mycorrhiza symbioses. Ruyue explained that one of the reasons this research interested her was that she wanted to use her background in soil ecology to do applied research.

Describing the potential application, she told me that IFF already had databases capable of aiding a forester’s tree selection but suggested that with her proposed research IFF could generate a complementary database for guidance on mycorrhiza selection. The idea of applied research brought to mind Lesley’s theory of change so I responded to Ruyue by asking exactly how her research might be made to influence policy and on-the-ground practices. I was mistaken, however, to assume that Ruyue’s interest in applied research implied anything resembling Lesley’s theory of change.

Ruyue’s simple and straightforward response was that the first thing was to do the research, and then to worry about policy later. Lesley had described theory of change as beginning with a vision, then working back through impacts, outcomes, and outputs and only then deciding on which activities to pursue. Ruyue, by contrast, thought it inappropriate to make concrete plans beyond the implementation of the research activities. I had asked a question that was temporally inappropriate. She designed research she believed would be useful – that had a potential application – but she did not make designs for how this research would be put to use or by whom. When Ruyue imagined the future of her research, she, like Rebecca and Matt, ceded the problem of its concrete application and ultimate impact on the world to the future.

As argued above, the inflexible determination of a theory of change and associated target outcomes that is found in MELA is not inevitable in outcomes thinking. Theories of change are, like a research proposal, often imagined as merely provisional. The distinction between Ruyue’s applied research and outcomes thinking is therefore not merely that one is open-ended and the other is not: both are potentially open-ended, but they are different forms of open-endedness (Miyazaki 2014; cf. Green

2012). Though both a theory of change and a research proposal can operate as a provisional plan, a key difference is that a research plan has an actual end point: the research will be finished, and the plan will reach its conclusion. As described above, the utopian vision of Lesley’s theory of change provides an as if endpoint: an endpoint that operates not as an actual destination, but as an engine of prospective momentum towards a provisionally given destination. Alistair’s business plan theory of change, meanwhile, derives its permanent momentum from the infinite potential for a brand’s growth. By contrast, Ruyue, Rebecca and Matt imagine an actual end point to their research: Rebecca and Matt’s research was already completed, and Ruyue’s will be.

This is an end point, however, that they hope will itself generate further as-yet- unknown effects: it is at once an end point and the genesis of unanticipated futures.

Theory of Change as Provocation

As described in the introduction to this chapter, in her blog, Jiaolong lamented the failure of scientists to ‘foster public interest’ in their work. Jiaolong does not pretend to have an easy solution to the problem of making science make a difference, but she does demonstrate the possibility for making this a very different kind of problem to

the problems posed by theory of change. In her blog, Jiaolong asks, ‘how many people have read your research?’ She then points out that not only do scientists make little effort to interest the public in their research, their research is not even accessible: most journals are pay-to-access, and many Chinese scientists publish only in English.

Jiaolong’s response to this is to identify an imperative for scientists to ask themselves,

‘can we use different methods to more quickly transmit our research results to our primary and middle school classmates, to our classmates’ classmates, to our kin’s kin?’ With this in mind, we might ask, what did Matt and the co-authors of his mushroom paper do to foster interest amongst publics beyond professional scientists?

This question would draw attention to the fact that when Matt told me he wanted to provoke activity, what he meant was only activity amongst other researchers. If

Jiaolong’s question highlights a failing in Matt’s work, however, it is a very different failing to the failings that theory of change would highlight. Rather than asking what

Matt did to foster public interest, framing his research within a theory of change might lead us to ask: what changes in the knowledge attitudes and skills of next users was his research paper meant to effect?; what vision of the world was his research helping to bring into being?; or what did his research do to enhance agroforestry’s brand? Each of these questions implies a distinctive orientation to the temporal horizons of scientific practice: the temporal structure of impact makes all the difference.

Reflecting on Lesley’s outcomes thinking workshop, Bob, an IFF scientist more sympathetic than many of his colleagues to the value of theory of change, suggested to me that everyone at IFF already had a theory of change of sorts. What the workshop was doing, in Bob’s analysis, was simply forcing scientists to make these

theories of change explicit and to reflect upon them. In a narrow sense, Bob was wrong: his colleagues understood and practiced science in a manner that was temporally incommensurable with Lesley’s theory of change. But in another sense, he was right: his colleagues did imagine future effects for their work, and these effects were understood and pursued according to a temporal structure that was only ever implicit. As well as the imposition of a particular temporal structure, theory of change is therefore also a provocation to do what I have done in this chapter: to make explicit the temporal structure of IFF scientists’ knowledge practices. Comparing the diverse temporalizations of cause and effect in scientific and bureaucratic practices is in this respect a comparison of theories of change. This is a form of analysis upon which the subsequent chapters continue to build.

CHAPTER 2

BUREAUCRACY AS INTERRUPTION

Whereas advocates of bureaucratic technologies such as theory of change promote them as tools for generating momentum towards impactful research, scientists at IFF often experience these technologies as a source of interruption. Rendering the demands of the Food Security Fund’s MELA framework as a ‘mafan’ or ‘headache’,6

IFF scientists place the institutional demands of international research and development in the same bracket as difficulties navigating China’s troublesome domestic bureaucracy. Here, IFF colleagues render an audit framework and, for example, a visa application conceptual equivalents: the challenge is simply to overcome the bureaucratic interruptions as quickly as possible. Building on the previous chapter’s attention to temporality, I draw out the diverse temporal frameworks that animate IFF colleague’s navigations through these headaches.

Whereas IFF colleagues’ concept of a headache flattens the distinction between diverse bureaucratic institutions – from the Food Security Fund and Chinese public bodies to IFF’s own international headquarters – they usually conceive of the interruptions that these institutions impose as radically different from the research and development work that they interrupt. I, nevertheless, extend IFF colleague’s understanding of bureaucracy as an interruption to consider how interruptions are central to scientific practice. I show how activities such as peer review and PhD

6 A dictionary translation of the Chinese ‘mafan’ would be a ‘trouble’, or a ‘nuisance’; but when staff at IFF speak in English, they usually use either ‘mafan’ as a loan word or talk of ‘headaches’.

defenses operate as interruptions; only, unlike headaches, these are interruptions that promise to positively transform the direction of a project. This attention to the quality of interruptions that bureaucratic and scientific practices make to a research project allows for the reframing of the problem of audit and academic bureaucracy from one of visibility and representation (Rottenburg 2009; Shore and Wright 2015b), to a problem that concerns the quality of the interruptions that bureaucracies generates.

Headaches as Meaningless Interruptions

The selection of and access to research sites is often fraught with headaches. In one instance, Feixue, a student surveying macro-fungi as part of the Fungal Diversity project, was moved from her proposed field-site to a second site inside a Chinese government reserve. This move was made as a favor to a reserve official so that he could satisfy the reserve management’s mandate to research the reserve’s ecosystem.

This precipitated difficulty securing accommodation for Feixue’s three months of field work, during which she would make regular surveys of mushrooms at several predetermined plots. Though her presence in the government reserve was in the first place as a favor to one government official, this did not necessarily mean that the official in charge of the reserve station at which Feixue wanted accommodation was predisposed to hosting her. Indeed, she was initially refused accommodation, and a negotiation with the head of this field station ensued. Though ultimately the situation was resolved before this was necessary, Matt and Prof. Yin, Feixue’s academic supervisor and IFF’s director, proposed to force this official to host Feixue by involving a third more senior local official. Here Prof. Yin would use his long-

standing relationship with this high-ranking official to persuade him to coerce the troublesome reserve station manager. In this instance, ultimately securing Feixue access to a field-site was never in doubt. Staff at the IFF had confidence that in any event Prof. Yin’s relationship with the senior local official could be leveraged to achieve a favorable outcome. The work of negotiating this access was nevertheless experienced as a headache; as an unwelcome interruption and waste of energy.

Though a regular part of field research for the IFF – Feixue’s is by no means an unusual case – IFF staff hold headaches to be categorically distinct from the various activities, such as running experiments and writing papers, which scientists hold to be the actual work of science. A headache is merely something to be dealt with and got out of the way so that the work ambiguously delineated as science can be continued.

Another typical headache at IFF is the process of procuring visas for foreign visitors and foreign staff. In the case of foreign staff, this process involves as many as

9 steps involving numerous different offices: 1) obtain an official supporting letter from IFF’s host organization in China: The Songlin Institute of Plant Science (SAPS);

2) apply for a work permit; 3) carry out a medical check; 4) obtain documentation from all countries the applicant has recently lived in certifying that they have no criminal record; 5) where the applicant is travelling with a spouse, have the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then the Chinese embassy in the applicant’s home country notarize the marriage certificate; 6) apply for a letter of invitation from the Provincial

Bureau of Foreign Affairs; 7) go to a Chinese embassy and use this letter of invitation to apply for an entry visa; 8) upon (re)entering China, apply for certification that the applicant satisfies the requirements for ‘foreign expert’ status; and finally 9) go to the

Provincial Public Security Bureau entry/exit administration to apply for a residence permit.

Even if this process goes smoothly, this is a rather long, tedious and expensive process. In the case of my own visa – during the core two years of my field research, I lived in China under a work visa sponsored by SAPS – it did not run smoothly at all and the headaches for the office’s human resources officer proliferated. My application for a letter of invitation from the Bureau of Foreign Affairs was particularly troublesome, with my application being turned down on numerous occasions, and it only being approved after we provided numerous additional supporting documents and after IFF’s director made a person call to the head of the

Provincial Bureau of Foreign Affairs. During this process some colleagues commented that these difficulties were not too surprising given that I am social scientist. Mubai, an IFF PhD student, for example, told me that the government knows that social scientists are likely to criticize the government, and this is why they do not want to let me into the country. Indeed, one of the reasons the Bureau of Foreign Affairs gave for rejecting my application was that I am a social scientist but that the unit sponsoring my application – SAPS – is a natural scientific institute.

The human resources manager, Yumei, managing my application, however, was not interested, as Mubai had been, in analyzing the government’s self-serving attempts to exclude critical social scientists, or in finding any comprehensible logic to the problems the Bureau of Foreign Affairs was giving her. Indeed, when I inquired as to the motives for the Foreign Affairs Bureau to keep me out of China or about the possible interest of the numerous other offices involved in my visa, she said she didn’t

know, and gave the impression that these are neither important nor interesting questions. She did, however, express her repeated frustration at the arbitrariness and unpredictability of the process. For example, after the office had requested additional documents for the second or third time, I asked (somewhat frustrated) if there was not a list of required documents that we could consult to make sure that this time around we were not missing anything. Yumei told me that there was, but that this list only includes the most basic documents, and what exactly they want changes every time she goes to the office: all she can do is get all of the documents she can think of and see what they come up with. She also told me that it depends on which officer deals with her case: one lady who has worked there a long time is especially helpful, but for my letter of invitation she dealt with a new recruit who was especially obstructive.

However, Yumei did not draw this into a broader critique of the state or bureaucracy: this arbitrariness was simply something her job required her deal with.

In this respect, rather than the rationale of the regulations being overcome, IFF administrators’ complaints often focused on volume. When it came to renew my visa for the second year of my research, for example, Yumei complained of the headaches involved in renewing my ‘foreign expert certificate’. This is a government issued document which Yumei must apply for through IFF’s host institute in China, SAPS.

What made this such a headache is that SAPS had just introduced a new online system for this certificate and Yumei was therefore required to re-submit all of the details for all foreign staff from scratch. I asked Yumei why this was happening, but she herself saw no logic in it, and simply stressed how much more headache it was creating for her.

Yumei gave a similar assessment of another new immigration requirement: that IFF report all entries and exits of its staff in and out of China. Again, I asked why this new measure was being introduced. This time, Yumei speculated that perhaps it reflects the government’s desire to monitor foreigners more closely, but she added that this doesn’t make sense as when foreigners exit or enter, immigration officials already record this. And then Yumei quickly brought the conversation back to the core point: the volume of headaches. To emphasize the burden of this new headache, Yumei pointed to the situation of colleges with several hundred foreign students. Compared to the few dozen foreign students and staff Yumei is responsible for, the amount of work for these colleges would be huge. Once again, what occupied the attention of Yumei was not the logic or rationale of the regulations in question. Indeed, the search for logic or rationale in bureaucratic regulations did not seem to interest Yumei very much. What matters for Yumei is instead the sheer volume of labor and, even more so, the practical question of how the headache at hand could be overcome.

Yumei’s attitude here is indicative of how the concept headache is deployed: rendered a headache, bureaucracy simply becomes a source of frustration to be overcome. In temporal terms, a headache is an interruption. This was something that I initially failed to grasp. Having taken to the field an interest in the regulatory and bureaucratic obstacles that IFF faced, I would often explain to IFF colleagues that I was interested in how IFF’s work was ‘constrained’ by state regulation of its activities.

I was at first surprised to hear the response, especially from administrative staff, that

IFF’s work was in no way constrained.7 This was a claim that seemed utterly incongruous with the ubiquitous bureaucratic headaches that I had witnessed. When I described instances such as Feixue’s difficulties accessing a field site or the need for staff conducting research outside of Songlin to carry an official SAPS letter of introduction, however, IFF staff would explain that these examples are merely headaches. My suggestion of constraint had implied that regulation and bureaucracy prevent activities from happening, whereas the examples I had given represented mere interruptions. One colleague, Mubai, likened these headaches to mosquitoes: ‘you can easily squash them’. He also invoked a popular idiom: ‘those in power have their policies, those below have their ways of getting around them’ (shang you zhengce, xia you dui ze). My mistake in discussing constraints had not been to see intense bureaucratic work where there was one. It was rather to have misread the temporal character of this work. For Mubai and his colleagues, the bureaucratic challenges that they routinely face do not alter the work that IFF is ultimately able to do. Here, it is significant that in the examples given above, the bureaucratic challenges were ones that IFF’s staff were confident they would overcome: it would take some work to get

Feixue access to get her research site and to get my visa, but on the other side of these obstacles, Feixue would have her site and I would have my visa. As IFF staff understand it, a headache interrupts work, but it does not constrain or transform it.

7 Sometimes this assertion would be accompanied by an explanation that IFF ‘is not an NGO’. The implication here was that IFF’s institutional identity – especially its status as a center within SAPS (see ch. 3) – means that its work is not subject to the stringent controls of domestic and international NGOs in China. As stable as this status seemed during the period of my principal field research (2014-2016), the introduction of China’s new NGO law in 2017 threatens this status, with China’s public security administration since insisting that IFF is in fact an international NGO and must be regulated as such.

Academic Bureaucracy as Headache

No less than the bureaucracy of Chinese national parks or of visa applications, the administration of research funding and of academic careers often imposes itself as a headache, as an interruption to be got out of the way as efficiently as possible. The

MELA framework described in the previous chapter is one instance of this. As described in the previous chapter, the MELA framework implied an orientation towards a preconceived future imagined through target outcomes and impacts. The momentum that drove IFF’s scientists’ commitment to the project was, however, of a somewhat different form. This was a momentum that derived to some extent from IFF scientists’ perception of their own collective failures, and the potential that the

Agroforestry for Myanmar project would provide an opportunity for IFF to do the kind of research that it should always have been doing. As described in the introduction,

Matt – a member of the Agroforestry for Myanmar project team – told me that it is embarrassing that despite an institutional mission framed around agroforestry, IFF’s

China office doesn’t really do any agroforestry. He lamented the paltry number of trees he had seen planted in his five years at IFF. On a separate occasion, expressing a similar disappointment with IFF’s contribution to research and development, Susanna

– another member of the Agroforestry for Myanmar project team – compared IFF’s work with that of a group at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS).

According to Susanna, this group had found the optimum fertilizer usage for key crops across China. Whereas Susanna had seen minimal impact from IFF’s work, Susanna admired how the CAAS group’s research had persuaded the Chinese government to change a law governing the sale of compost. Thanks to this group’s research, Susanna

told me, the government has removed a requirement limiting moisture content in compost; a requirement that previously demanded expensive drying processes now shown to be redundant. For many crops, the CAAS group have also shown that reducing current fertilizer input will increase yield; a finding with the potential to generate positive outcomes for both environmental sustainability and farmer livelihoods.

If the CAAS group’s research provided comprehensive and consequential knowledge about fertilizer usage in China, the same could not be said for IFF’s agroforestry research. Whereas the CAAS group had produced knowledge that could inform policy-makers’ or farmers’ fertilizer management, Matt and Susanna did not believe that IFF’s research had produced any knowledge that could be usefully applied to the management of agroforestry systems. Indeed, despite the several-decades long history of agroforestry science, IFF colleagues often reflected on the limits of current scientific understanding. Central to this perceived lack is the paucity of field studies.

Field trials are a common component of agricultural research. If, for example, one wanted to test the efficacy of one fertilizer regime versus another (as in the CAAS group’s project) or one cover crop versus another, the obvious approach would be to conduct field trials. One reason IFF scientists offered for the relative lack of such trials in agroforestry is the necessarily long duration of such trials. Whereas ordinary agricultural trials can be carried out over one or two years, most agroforestry systems operate on far longer cycles. Indeed, even in the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, the IFF team knew that their agroforestry plots could not reach maturity before the end of the four years to which the project was limited. As described in the previous

chapter, longer term commitments would not easily fit into the demands of funding bodies who not only prefer quick returns on short term projects, but also tie the measurement of individual project success to short-term targets. Despite these constraints few IFF colleagues could fully justify the absence of agroforestry field trials, and the resulting failure of IFF to fill what they viewed as significant gaps in scientific knowledge of agroforestry. Filling this gap was central to the ambitions of

IFF scientists involved in the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, and it was the promise of filling this gap that drove IFF scientists’ commitments to the project and gave their work its momentum.

It was this ambition and momentum that the headaches of the MELA framework interrupted. When, as described in the previous chapter, the Food Security

Fund demanded predefined project goals and monitoring frameworks, IFF scientists did not see this work as in any way connected to the knowledge production that was, to them, what the project was really about. Describing this work as a headache or mafan, the IFF project team approached the MELA framework in a manner similar to

Yumei’s engagement with the visa process: satisfying the demands of the Food

Security Fund and of the MELA framework was an interruption to be got out of the way so that the real work could continue. And just as the extra-scientific work of visa applications was delegated to administrators, when Matt took over leadership of the

Agroforestry for Myanmar project team he was keen to delegate the MELA headache to colleagues outside of the core research team. This included bringing Kathryn into the team. Through her experience working with NGOs and of studying international development, Kathryn brought to the team a familiarity with theories of change and

M&E that Matt hoped would allow her to focus on the MELA framework, and to minimize the time that the project’s original core research staff would have to spend on such distractions.

This delegation of headaches was a common strategy: the labor of dealing with headaches was distributed unevenly between colleagues. As described in the introduction, despite her nominal position as a research fellow, Ruyue spends much more time compiling project reports and other paperwork for funding agencies than she does on research. Much of Ruyue’s work focuses on project reports for Chinese

Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) grants. In contrast to MELA, funding reports made to MOST do not follow a strict formula. MOST, nevertheless expect the reports that IFF submit to evince IFF’s delivery of the work promised in the original project proposal.

Ruyue described how delays in MOST funding reaching IFF cause major headaches for reporting on these projects. Part of this problem is delays in the Ministry issuing funds, but this issue is exacerbated by the fact that as a junior partner within larger collaborative projects, IFF is often dependent on a lead project partner to pass funds issued by MOST onto IFF. In one case, Ruyue described how funding for fungal diversity research took two years to arrive with IFF. By the time this funding arrived,

Ruyue explained, IFF had already had to submit an annual report on project progress.

In another project on mining restoration that Ruyue writes reports for, headaches have emerged not only from delays in funding arriving, but from too little funding arriving.

The MOST funding for this project is through a 10 million RMB (US$1.5 million) grant to a mining company with which IFF is collaborating. Despite IFF being

responsible for the majority of project deliverables, however, IFF receives only 1 million RMB of this grant.

An important way of dealing with both delays in funding and with inadequate funding is to report research that was completed as part of a completely separate project as if it were part of the project being reported on. In the Fungal Diversity project, for example, IFF reported research that had actually been completed prior to the grant being awarded. Ruyue told me that this is very common, and that knowing that delays in funding are likely, many reviewers of MOST project proposals will look for evidence of existing research which could be passed off as being funded by the grant. This ensures that grantees can produce a positive grant report for the project’s first year. With the fungal diversity project, pre-existing research was used only to fill reports prior to the arrival of funds which would allow the research outlined in the grant proposal to begin. In the mining restoration project, however, significant portions of the final report describe activities which were originally entirely separate from the grant. This included Ruyue asking Mubai, an IFF PhD student, to write a section of the report on tea plantation research he completed a year previously and which had previously had nothing to do with the mining restoration project. As described in Chapter 1, IFF scientists’ responses to MELA are suggestive of an absurdity inherent in the frameworks temporality. Here, Ruyue locates a different but no less absurd temporal effect in the demands of MOST project reports.

The Temporalities of Headaches

To render something a headache is to conceptualize it as a temporary interruption. But what is at stake in such interruptions or what is being interrupted varies not only from case to case, but also depending on one’s position in relation to what the headaches are interrupting. Matt’s ability to delegate the work of dealing with headaches such as

MELA or equally of his student Feixue’s problems accessing her field site reflects the uneven distribution of headaches amongst IFF colleagues. For a senior international scientist such as Matt, the worry is more often ‘which of my colleagues can I rely upon to fix this headache so that I can get on with my research?’ – hence the enthusiasm to bring Kathryn into the Agroforestry for Myanmar project team and to give her responsibility for dealing with MELA. This is a different challenge to the one

Kathryn faced: ‘how do I deal with this headache so that Matt can get on with his work?’ This is not to suggest that senior research staff had it easy: the labor of, among other things, coordinating a team not only conducting research but negotiating multiple bureaucratic challenges is no small task. Nevertheless, IFF staff have diverse experiences of the same headache.

As Ruyue’s example demonstrates, moreover, there is a distinctly temporal character to this divergence. Ruyue attributes her being lumbered with this reporting work to her relatively junior position at IFF, as well as to her failure to win research funding of her own. She compares her situation with a colleague who recently won a

Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant. This grant has freed Ruyue’s colleague from the kind of work which dominates Ruyue’s professional life and has allowed this colleague to pursue her research. Ruyue continues to apply for her own

funding, but in the meantime her role within the Institute remains largely extra- scientific. Vital here is this work’s in-the-meantime character. Much of the work that

Ruyue carries out overlaps heavily with IFF administrative staff’s, but whereas the administrative staff consider report writing and other paperwork to be a core aspect of their professional work, Ruyue considers extensive report writing a temporary phase in her scientific career. Indeed, Ruyue remains animated by a passion for a research project she already has in mind. On one occasion, having concluded a thirty-minute interview with Ruyue on report writing, I returned to the desk I occupied in IFF’s open-plan office. Perhaps unsatisfied to have discussed only the unfulfilling aspects of her professional position, Ruyue wandered over to continue our discussion; only this time focused on her proposed research. Speaking excitedly, Ruyue described her ambitions for the proposed mycorrhizal fungi research described at the end of Chapter

1. It is the promise of subsequently pursuing this research that sustains Ruyue’s commitment to work through the administrative burdens of her research fellowship.

This resonates with Matt’s experience of securing access for his student’s research site or of navigating MELA. In each instance, the in-the-meantime work of overcoming headaches is animated by a faith that present headaches will eventually give way to scientific research. The generative momentum of commitment to research is sustained because work in the meantime, though entirely tangential to research itself, is held to be only a temporary interruption. The horizon and duration of these interruptions, however, varies. For Matt, the Agroforestry for Myanmar project involved research work that he was passionate about. Interruptions from the MELA framework were frustrating, but if Kathryn could deal with these headaches, Matt

could return to a research project that existed in the present. For Ruyue, by contrast, the horizon of return to research was much further away. The research she dreamt of was something that a postdoctoral fellowship would make possible, but Ruyue could not be sure when that would arrive.

This, however, did not necessarily imply that Ruyue held a less optimistic view of the future. For Ruyue, as for many junior academics, her current position was merely a stepping stone to something better: to a phase of her career where she would have the funds and the time to conduct her research. For Matt, the perspective was almost the reverse. For him, his seniority often seemed to have robbed him of his scientific career. Having lead-authored numerous papers based upon his PhD research, in five years at IFF Matt’s research output was increasingly limited to smaller contributions as a co-author. This was something that Matt explained as being due to responsibilities he now had for supervising students – the basis of many of his co- authored publications – but also as a result of the proliferation of bureaucratic work he had to deal with and coordinate. It was at a moment when headaches from the

Agroforestry for Myanmar project and numerous other projects were coalescing that, as described in the introduction, Matt told me somewhat forlornly that he

‘remember[s] when [he] used to get to think about research’. In this moment, headaches proliferated to the extent that they ceased to be interruptions and became instead the very essence of Matt’s professional life. On another occasion, Matt described how a more senior member of the research staff at IFF’s Africa-based headquarters had warned him that more research money means less freedom not more.

According to this colleague, a grant such as the one from the Food Security Fund that

is in the low US$ millions generated a significant administrative and management burden but would allow the principal investigator some scope for direct involvement in research. Larger grants, however, carried so much administration, that the principal investigator would simply become an ‘administrator’. Ruyue imagined herself on a trajectory towards having more time for science: a time when headaches would dissipate. Matt, by contrast, feared that he might be on a trajectory of less and less time for scientific work: a time when headaches would proliferate.

The idea that a scientist might become an administrator points also to the divergence between how bureaucratic headaches are experienced by scientific staff, and administrative staff whose professional work exists primarily in this domain.

Yumei’s constant form-filling – as much of which was related to IFF’s internal bureaucracy as to Chinese state institutions – earned her the nickname ‘form sister’

(biao mei). In this respect, the horizon of Yumei’s work in overcoming the various hurdles of the Chinese visa system had a horizon that was itself bureaucratic: the procurement of a visa. Yumei’s work, unlike Ruyue and Matt, was not animated by the promise of returning to her own research. Nevertheless, administrative staff’s energies were often animated by a commitment to the work that the research and development activities of the scientists that they supported. Huli, a senior member of the administrative staff, for example, told me that she had taken the job with IFF because she wanted to support the kind of agri-environmental research that IFF does.

For her, the kind of headaches she constantly has to deal with are a waste of her and her colleagues time: a distraction from the research that is meant to be what the

organization’s work is about. Huli’s frustration is with interruption to what she saw as

IFF’s collective scientific mission.

This, however, is not to say that IFF’s administrative staff have a whole- hearted belief in the value of the work its scientists conducted. Much like their scientific colleagues, administrative staff on occasion express frustration or disillusionment with IFF’s inability to do anything worthwhile. Jianming, another senior member of the administrative team, described to me how he saw no value in

IFF’s work. Echoing Jiaolong’s joke that IFF is useless, Jianming lamented IFF’s failure to demonstrate a return on investment for any of its projects. This was a frustration that Jianming framed in relation to an ambition he had long held to work in rural development. Not only at IFF, but in previous positions with international NGOs

Jianming had spent nearly a decade building what he had once thought was a dream career. By this point, however, Jianming had become disillusioned with the value of

IFF and of international research and development more broadly. Jianming’s retrospective evaluation of IFF’s failure and his loss of faith in IFF’s mission erased the future-orientation that once animated the work of overcoming headaches. Where solving headaches and navigating bureaucracies once seemed worthwhile for the activities that this work facilitated, Jianming came to see his entire job as a ‘waste of his time’. Once an interruption to something that justified the energy he and his colleagues expended on bureaucratic and administrative work, now his job seemed entirely devoid of meaning. Jianming therefore decided to leave IFF for a career in finance. If he was going to do something pointless, he told me, he may as well make good money doing so. Here working at IFF itself became the interruption: something

that only got in the way of Jianming’s leisure time, and of a better paid career elsewhere.

For Matt, Ruyue, Yumei and Jianming, the bureaucratic and administrative headaches that punctuate their professional lives are experienced as interruptions. But the specificity of these experiences of interruption are also shaped by the diverse temporal frameworks in which these colleagues approach their administrative and bureaucratic burdens. Interruptions can be shorter or more sustained, frequent or infrequent. As the diverse experiences of IFF colleagues illuminate, moreover, efforts to overcome headaches can be animated (or not) by quite different temporal horizons: from the promise that bureaucratic work will subside once one’s academic career progresses to a belief that there is no worthwhile future to IFF’s work.

Welcome Interruptions

IFF scientists’ sense of interruption resonates with the frustrations – as expressed both informally and in academic articles – of British and North American academics navigating our own institutional bureaucracies. Like IFF scientists, academics in

British and North American universities often encounter funding reports and ethical review board procedures as a waste of time and a distraction from the teaching and research work we are really here to do. This perhaps explains why even in anthropology – a discipline with a tradition of sophisticated empirical and theoretical engagement with ritual – Michael Power’s description of audit as a “form of ritual” in the everyday Euro-American sense of something “concerned with process rather than

substance” (Power 1994, 16)8 has had such an enduring appeal (e.g. Giri 2000; Pels

2000; Rottenburg 2009; Shore and Wright 1999).

Where the responses to audit of IFF scientists and of Euro-American social scientists diverge, however, is in their concern with what audit and evaluation regimes make visible or invisible. In his ethnography of the development profession in

Tanzania, Richard Rottenburg (2009) describes the formal evaluation of development projects in terms of Latourian centers of calculation (also Davis, Kingsbury, and

Merry 2012; Mosse 2005). Here, the “ritualized” process of evaluation renders projects into immutable mobiles that can be subsequently recombined into representations in a manner that suits the interests of the Western donor community – the center of calculation (cf. Latour 2014). Rottenburg suggests that the donor community render hegemonic effects invisible, masking their exercise of power over developing countries through a rhetoric of equality enacted in the ritualized process of project evaluation. Though project evaluations do not, in Rottenburg’s view, produce accurate representations of the reality of development projects, they remain a nominally representational practice. Indeed, what drives Rottenburg’s critique is the idea that ritualized evaluation creates “fictions” – by which he means falsehoods (cf.

Leach 1965) – while pretending to produce truthful representations. This is not a form of analysis that would be of much interest to the scientists and administrative staff I worked alongside at IFF. When IFF colleagues dealt with the headache of an M&E framework, a project report or a visa application, what was or wasn’t made visible was

8 I am unconvinced by Marilyn Strathern’s (2000a, 287) claim that, “Power himself uses the word ‘ritual’ advisedly. He does not just mean ritual in the common English sense of an empty or opaque show of form (though audit can appear as both those); he intends it also in an anthropological sense.”

of little concern (cf. Cavanaugh 2016; Giri 2000; Gupta 2012, 158–59, 189; Jensen and Winthereik 2013, 93–120). What mattered was simply that the headache be overcome as efficiently as possible such that one could return to whatever work it had interrupted.

Echoing Rottenburg, Chris Shore and Susan Wright (2015b, 422) highlight

“what audits and rankings bring into focus and what they render invisible or unsayable”. As with Rottenburg’s analysis, this generates a concern with who controls the making (in)visible and to what ends. Shore and Wright describe instances of gaming the system that in some respects parallel the box ticking practices of IFF colleagues. They point, for example, to a study by Michael Sauder and Wendy

Espeland (2009) that describes how, in order to boost their position in various ranking systems, US law schools carefully manage statistics on, among other things, students’ entrance exam scores and post-graduation work placements LSAT scores. This echoes how IFF colleagues designed ‘knowledge products’ as a monitoring indicator for the

MELA framework because targets framed in these terms could be much more easily achieved than targets in terms of peer-reviewed publication.9 Shore and Wright are critical of gaming strategies of this kind, suggesting they risk “organizational schizophrenia”. Rather than simply “buffer” ourselves against the impact of audit regimes, Shore and Wright (2015b, 431) argue that we should transform them:

“Another potential strategy is to take back control over the measures used to evaluate professional performance by creating alternative experts and systems of evaluation and insisting that organizations be evaluated in their own terms.”

9 See Chapter 1.

The imperative Shore and Wright identify is for the subjects of audit to take control of the terms of their own evaluation and to take responsibility for findings better systems for making performance visible (cf. Wright and Greenwood 2017b).

Notwithstanding the shortcomings that Shore and Wright highlight of gaming and box ticking as responses to audit and evaluation, there is more to be learned from such responses than simply that they are inadequate. As described above, my interlocutors at IFF approach various bureaucracies – including but not limited to the kinds of academic and development audit and evaluation described by Rottenburg and

Shore and Wright – as a matter not of evaluation, visibility, or accountability, but as a form of interruption. Shore and Wright’s call to take control of the terms of evaluation is the logical response to audit understood as a problem of visibility. Understood as an interruption, bureaucracy and audit might pose a different kind of challenge: one focused on the quality of an interruption. In this respect, there is an important sense in which, for IFF scientists, not all interruptions are headaches, or at least not necessarily so.

Whereas IFF scientists seem to inevitably experience certain activities as a headache – navigating Chinese bureaucracy, or dealing with MOST and the Food

Security Fund, for example – others are more ambiguous. A PhD defense, for instance, might in some instances appear a headache, and in others seem something quite different. The PhD defenses of two North Korean students – Mr. Pak and Mr. Choe – emerged as an oppressive headache for two of their supervisors at IFF. These two students were studying at SAPS as part of a broader collaboration between IFF and the

North Korean Forestry Department. These two students receiving their PhDs from

SAPS was an important milestone for this ongoing collaboration. What made this a headache, however, was that the limited time these two students had in China was not sufficient for them to be able to complete research to a PhD standard. As the deadline for these students to leave the country approached, fears mounted that they would not satisfy the external examiners for their PhD defense. Such was the importance of these students graduating to IFF’s ongoing work in North Korea that IFF’s director Prof.

Yin placed pressure on two of the students’ supervisors – Susanna and Amir – to do whatever was necessary to get the two theses completed to a sufficient quality. What this entailed was Susanna and Amir writing or re-writing large chunks of the theses on behalf of their students. For Susanna, this was an enormous headache, and a huge interruption to her own work – not least her soils research in the Agroforestry for

Myanmar project – which she had to pause while she got her student’s PhD defense out of the way. Much like the headache of Chinese bureaucracy or of donor reports, these two PhD defenses took on the character of unwelcome interruption and became a task to be completed and then forgotten as soon as possible.

PhD defenses at SAPS more broadly were notorious amongst many IFF scientists for the somewhat facile questions that examiners would ask of the candidate.

In one instance, an examiner interrogated the formatting of page numbers in the thesis’s contents page. This contributed to a broader sense in which PhD defenses were meaningless formalities of little value beyond the fact that SAPS required them to be completed. This, however, was not the only sense in which defenses were conceptualized. At other instances, they also emerged as sites for receiving intellectually valuable feedback. Indeed, even in the case of Mr. Pak, Susanna

remarked that the feedback they received during their defenses was surprisingly good and would help her and her student to improve certain chapters before submitting them for publication. In this moment, Susanna rendered the interruption of the PhD defense as something more than a headache. The interruption stood not simply as a headache to be completed and forgotten. Rather, the feedback provided at the defense would shape future work in a productive manner.

This was an aspect emphasized by other PhD students at IFF. Kumar, an IFF mycologist, compared the facile questioning at SAPS defenses to what he had seen at

Chaopraya University – a Thai University where many of IFF’s affiliated PhD students are enrolled. Amongst the differences Kumar noted was the superior quality of the feedback. The implication here is that a PhD defense is something that might be of value to the candidate beyond merely satisfying a required formality. As with the idea of a defense as a headache, however, I want to suggest that in its more positive rendering a defense should still be understood as a moment of interruption. Prior to

Mr. Pak’s defense, he and Susanna already had an idea for how they would turn certain thesis chapters into journal articles. But feedback from Mr. Pak’s examiners caused Mr. Pak and Susanna to revise these plans. Rather than a mere headache – an interruption that is nothing more than an inconvenient pause – the interruption of Mr.

Pak’s defense caused a positive change in the direction of subsequent work.

If feedback in a PhD defense intervenes to affect the future direction of the

PhD candidate’s work, this is in some respects an analogue of a broader notion of scientific interaction. As described in the previous chapter, prior to joining IFF,

Rebecca conducted research that demonstrated that, contrary to prior scientific

understandings, net forest soil N2O production will decrease rather than increase under conditions of drought. In a publication from this research, Rebecca calls upon ‘future investigations’ to document this effect on a global scale. She suggests that her methods of using isotopic signatures to measure soil N2O flux could be integrated into models of global N2O flux. Rebecca in effect addresses her research to scientists engaged in ongoing efforts to model global N2O and seeks to effect a positive change in the direction of that research. Like Mr. Pak’s external examiner, Rebecca sought to make a positive interruption to the work of scientific colleagues. What differentiates the positive valence of these forms or feedback or intervention from, for example, the headache of the MELA framework or a visa application is how having interrupted the research process, the former positively shape the project’s subsequent future.

Interruptions Transformed

If the demands of professional scientific practice can transform the potentially positive interruption of a PhD defense into a meaningless headache, the same is also true of the publication process. In this respect, when a scientist like Rebecca publishes her research in an academic journal, interrupting the path of others’ scientific knowledge production is seldom the only motivation. Publishing can also serve as a significant means for, among other things, establishing one’s credentials for the purposes of job applications and promotions, as well as for demonstrating to donors that quality research has been produced. This was the case where, as described in the previous chapter, IFF scientists proposed ‘knowledge products’ as an indicator in the MELA

M&E framework. But whereas in this instance IFF scientists evaded any imperative

for peer review publications, such evasion is rarely possible. In a proposal for a grant to conduct mycological research in Southeast Asia that would complement ongoing research in China as well as the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, IFF promised the prospective donor eight peer-reviewed publications. Promises and demands of this kind generate an imperative for ‘publications for the sake of publications’ that frustrate many IFF scientists. A common strategy – often called ‘salami slicing’ – for dealing with this is to parse up data from a single project into separate papers, even though a single comprehensive paper might in other respects have made more sense

(M. Tian, Su, and Ru 2016). Susanna feared that this was the kind of gaming that this latest mycology research proposal would, if funded, generate. Here Susanna identified a potential for a significant portion of the publishing work related to this project to become a frustrating, box ticking interruption to her and her colleagues’ research.

This is not to say that IFF scientists ordinarily saw peer review as a headache.

This became evident when Chad, an IFF colleague, corrected my naïve treatment of the demands of journal reviewers as an unwelcome consideration in research design.

Chad had been designing a protocol for an on-farm agroforestry experiment that would form a key part of the Eco-Friendly Rubber project. Discussing his design during a coffee break, Chad explained his concern that he would need at least five replicates – five separate farm plots with the identical set of experimental treatments – for his trial to produce scientifically valid results. This implied a need to find at least five rubber farmers willing to participate in the trials. Chad was concerned that recruiting five willing participants could be quite difficult, and worried that he might have to settle for a lower number than this. Hearing this, I suggested that though Chad

could not produce a peer-reviewed publication with fewer than five replicates, he might still use findings from a smaller dataset to persuade local farmers and policy makers to swap to one of his new rubber cultivation systems. Chad responded by explaining that multiple replications were not simply about getting publications through peer review. Peer reviewers, Chad told me, demand the standard of multiple replications, because it is necessary to make reliable scientific claims. In this instance, peer review was not merely a headache. Chad embraced the standards demanded by editors and peer reviewers as important to maintaining the quality of scientific research.

In this understanding of peer review, responses from reviewers might constitute a positive interruption in the research process. While there were also many instances of IFF colleagues disgruntled with what they considered to be inappropriate and unhelpful reviewer comments, IFF colleagues would also speak of instances where their research had been enriched by feedback from reviewers and editors.

Insofar as publications come to be – as Susanna feared they would with the proposed

Southeast Asia mushroom research – pursued for their own sake, the interruption of peer review feedback is transformed into a headache. This was the case with a further

PhD student who IFF’s senior staff were keen to graduate as soon as possible. A requirement of SAPS’ PhD program is that all students must publish an article in an

SCI-listed journal before they can graduate. In this instance, the troublesome student,

Changbi, was unable to write up his data to a sufficient quality to publish a journal article. Rather than endure the loss of face that failing a PhD student would entail,

IFF’s director gave Jiaolong the task of revising Changbi’s manuscript for publication.

As with the work Susanna had committed to completing Mr. Pak’s thesis, for Jiaolong this was an unwelcome and largely meaningless interruption to her own research.

If evaluation targets and professional imperatives often transform the way IFF scientists experience peer review as an interruption, IFF scientists also point to the way similar imperatives transform the kinds of interruption that journal editors seek to make in manuscripts submitted to their journals. Here, IFF scientists cast suspicions that editors are gaming the system to increase their journal’s impact factor – a quantitative indicator of journal quality based on the number of times the journal is cited. So, for example, IFF scientists will often complain – albeit light-heartedly – when editorial feedback contains a suggestion to consult a paper published in the editor’s own journal that is only tangentially relevant to the manuscript they had submitted. As IFF scientists explain it, such feedback is the editor’s ploy for encouraging manuscripts to include as many citations as possible to the editor’s journal and to thereby boost the journal’s impact factor. Another kind of strategizing which has emerged specifically out of evaluation by impact factor is the inverse of the salami-slicing strategy described above by which scientists parse out data to generate multiple papers. As described in the introduction, rather than parse out data to maximize the number of papers, editors sometimes collapse multiple manuscripts into a single article. This benefits editors who can boast having a high impact-factor journal. But it is often also desirable to authors who, though they must surrender their opportunity for first authorship on a paper describing a single species, receive co- authorship on a highly cited paper in a high impact factor journal.

These instances of box ticking and gaming systems of evaluation are examples of the tendency Power (1994, 16) describes for audit to “draw[] organizations away from their primary purpose” (also Kipnis 2008). The motivations that IFF scientists understand to drive these activities is a long way from filling a gap in scientific understanding of agroforestry, of highlighting an error in prior scientific interpretations of soil N2O flux, or of transforming rural landscapes. This was a phenomenon that Jiaolong raised in her blog criticizing scientists’ failure to communicate with audiences beyond the sciences.10 Jiaolong attributed the apparent lack of enthusiasm that many of her colleagues have in interesting broader audiences in their research to the demands of ‘publish or perish’. Rather than an aspiration to produce and share knowledge of interest and significance to other members of society,

Jiaolong suggests that scientists’ energies have been captured by the imperatives of professional survival. In this rendering, the work of gaming the system to satisfy contemporary modes of professional evaluation ceases to be an occasional interruption and becomes the very core of professional life – just as it was in the case described above where Matt thought of himself as becoming, or at times having already become, a full-time administrator. Overwhelmed by the persistent demands of managing relationships with project partners and negotiating monitoring and evaluation mechanisms with the project funder, the headaches Matt dealt with had lost their character as interruptions. Likewise, with publish or perish, the persistent tempo of institutional demands erases the prospect for scientists to do the kinds of work that

Jiaolong believes they should be doing (also Mountz et al. 2015).

10 See Chapter 1.

There are therefore two senses in which audit and the various other bureaucratic headaches endured by IFF scientists transform the interruptions of conventional scientific work. In the first sense, audit causes interruptions such as a

PhD defense or a journal’s peer review process to cease to be interruptions valued for their potential to transform the trajectory of research in unexpected ways. In the shadow of pressures such as those to publish at increasingly improbable rates, institutions such as peer review instead become meaningless headaches that, like the process for procuring a Chinese visa, are to be dealt with as efficiently and quickly as possible. And in the second sense, the interruptions that audit generates proliferate to the extent that scientific work as IFF scientists conventionally imagine it enters a permanent state of interruption: the activities that Jiaolong, Matt and their colleagues see as worthwhile evaporate altogether. Central to each of these transformations is a shift in the temporal framework of the interruption: not only in terms of the interruptions’ duration and persistence, but in terms of the future horizons that appear, or disappear, beyond it.

Trust in Science?: From Autonomy to Interruption

If audit can “draw[] organisations away from their primary purpose” (Power 1994,

16), for Shore and Wright there is also a sense in which the peculiar rankings and measurement systems of audit have undermined their own primary purposes. Drawing on Power, Shore and Wright (2015b, 423) describe how despite ostensibly being introduced as a mechanism for developing trust in universities, audit has

“[p]aradoxically … increase[ed] levels of mistrust, as trust and professional judgments

came to be replaced by formal systems of auditing and inspection”. For Shore and

Wright, trust is also at the forefront of how we should respond to audit. They ask:

“How can we reclaim the professional autonomy and trust that audit practices appear to strip out of the workplace?” (Shore and Wright 2015b, 422 emphasis added).

Certainly, the challenge of establishing trust in the sciences is as pertinent now as it ever has been.11 But is this a challenge that we should pair with the reclamation of autonomy? Doubtless, this is a connection that would appeal to many of colleagues at

IFF: autonomy would seem the perfect antidote to the constant interruption of bureaucratic headaches. Demanding to be left alone has intuitive appeal as a response to unending interruption. To desire autonomy, however, overlooks the arguments that

STS scholars have long made not only for the empirical fact of the sciences’ interdependence with the world around it, but also for the embrace of scientific interdependence as a political and ethical virtue. As Sheila Jasanoff (2004b, 30) puts it, STS “challenge[s] the assumption of science as an autonomous sphere whose norms are constituted independently of other forms of social activity”. In fixating on autonomy, moreover, we risk forgetting, moreover, the value that scientists already recognize in positive forms of interruption such as peer feedback.

Significantly, in the context of establishing public trust, the forms of interruptions that IFF scientists welcome do not emanate exclusively from scientific colleagues. The Agroforestry for Myanmar project, for example, sought to engage local farmers in the design of the experimental agroforestry plots that IFF were setting up. The IFF project team produced an initial design for the configuration of trees

11 See Introduction.

planted in the plots but wanted to involve local farmers in selecting the crops. As such, they planned for two local NGOs engaged in the project as local partners to run workshops through which local farmers could propose crops to be planted in the experimental plots. Ultimately, these workshops did not happen. Various headaches that involved delays in IFF’s headquarters signing MOUs with these project partners and transferring funds to the project partners meant that IFF and its local partners could not set up the workshops in time for planting. Here the interruption of bureaucratic and institutional headaches was so extensive as to frustrate an important part of the project plan. But what was interrupted by these headaches was the potential for feedback. In this instance, the IFF project team had not wanted to get on with crop selection autonomously and entirely undisturbed by external actors. Rather, it was a specific potential for farmers to intervene in this design process that headaches with

MOUs and funds transfers robbed from the project.

A more successful effort by IFF to create opportunities for interruption occurred prior to an experiment that investigated the effects of various management techniques upon matsutake yields. In this instance, the project team – of which I was a member – ran a brief workshop with local mushroom harvesters prior to implementing the experiment. The format to this workshop involved our team describing the proposed experiment to local harvesters who we had recruited to implement the experiment. As well as providing an opportunity to introduce harvesters to the protocol they would be responsible for implementing, this workshop served as an opportunity to solicit feedback on our proposed research. Much as was the case with the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, our motivation for doing this was to increase

the likelihood that our research findings might be of relevance and of use to communities actually engaged in mushroom harvesting. During the workshop, harvesters raised an objection that one of the management techniques we proposed to investigate – covering young mushrooms with a plastic dome – would increase the likelihood of mushrooms being discovered and stolen by poachers. The simple solution that was agreed to address this concern was that we revise the experimental protocol to include the recording of instances of mushroom theft. Much as Susanna celebrated the productive feedback Mr. Pak received at his defense, this was an interruption that greatly pleased our project team. To have harvesters interrupt and, even if only to a limit extent, modify the direction of our research was something we believed enhanced the project.

This positive valuation of farmer interruptions – in both the Agroforestry for

Myanmar project and the mushroom experiment – reflects an embrace of a logic that is familiar to outcomes thinking, but which also has a longer history in participatory agricultural research. As described in the previous chapter, outcomes thinking often entails an agenda for collaborative, multi-stakeholder practices. In the Lengshan

Multi-Stakeholder Platform, IFF was an initiating partner in the establishment of a platform formed to address current social and ecological challenges in the tropical

Chinese prefecture Lengshan. Rather than decide on their research focus autonomously, platform facilitators asked IFF scientists to attend platform meetings along with stakeholders from business, government, and other research organizations

– all of whom are potential next users. From an outcomes thinking perspective, this platform was envisaged as a way of allowing scientists to identify key next users, and

to shape their research approach to the demands and needs of these next users. By continuing this collaborative engagement throughout the research, moreover, scientists would, so the platform organizers told them, enhance their ability to mobilize the interests of next users, and thereby their prospects for effecting desirable changes in next users’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills.

In Chapter 1, I focused on the implications of this platform for how scientists are to imagine themselves as the cause of a preconceived future they will bring into being. But underlying the idea of multi-stakeholder platforms is also a premise that stakeholders become a cause of scientists’ actions. As part of the initiative to establish the Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder Platform, IFF hosted a workshop on multi- stakeholder innovation platforms. The workshop was delivered by two scientists,

Adem and Dennis, from one of IFF’s Africa-based sister organizations to a predominantly scientific audience from a variety of local and international agricultural research institutes who were engaged either in the Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder

Platform or in sister projects elsewhere in Asia. A key theme of the workshop was

Adem and Dennis’s claim that agricultural research for development is most effective when farmers play a more central role in setting priorities for policy and for research.

To some extent the rationale for participation of this kind is an instrumental one: farmers are more likely to trust research findings and act upon them if they feel a sense of ownership in the project (Bäckstrand 2003; Stirling 2005). In this respect,

Dennis described to me how his own research had shown that farmers would trust IFF research only if they were involved in the process from the beginning. But having explained this finding, Dennis also suggested a sense in which such engagement is an

end in and of itself. He described a multi-stakeholder platform he was involved in where he and his colleagues had built ‘so much trust that the participants would do anything he suggested’. For Dennis, this was a sign of the project’s failure as much as of its success: the project participants’ excessive deference to Dennis reflected his failure to create an environment for stakeholders to shape research and development activities. Here, not only did Dennis intend the platform to be a vehicle for enhancing the ability of agricultural scientists to act upon other stakeholders, he also intended for the platform to provide opportunities for other stakeholders to act upon agricultural scientists. Where project participants merely deferred to scientists – what Dennis described as an overabundance of trust – this goal is frustrated. As with the crop selection process for the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, the aspiration was for an aspect of the project to emerge as the effect of input from beyond the scientific community: for stakeholders to be the causes of scientific research. If feedback from scientific colleagues conventionally shapes the direction of research, participatory and collaborative models of research likewise seek feedback from broader communities.

Miyazaki and Riles (2005: 328; also Miyazaki 2004; Strathern 2006) describe the archetypal model of anthropological ethnography as “a moment of submission and response: the ethnographer abandons analytical control and submits to the agency of others.” Albeit in a very different form, IFF scientists’ invitations for colleagues and research participants to interrupt them can likewise be understood as moments of willful abeyance. The significance of these moments of abeyance for anthropologists is that, “[t]his submission occurs with another moment in mind” (328). Again, though the form this takes is very different to that of ethnography, IFF scientists’ willful

abeyance is a moment with a future moment in mind: the resumption of a research project now shaped in unpredictable ways by those who have interrupted it. Here, the value of an interruption inheres in its distinctive temporality: it is a moment of interruption that anticipates a continuation on a transformed trajectory. If this relational form – with its willful exercise of abeyance – implies a form of trust, it is a different form of trust to the kind that Dennis found in overabundance. Dennis’s goal was not a form of trust that would facilitate scientists’ autonomous authority, but a relationality that would facilitate moments of interruption.

Conclusion

IFF colleagues experience bureaucratic and administrative work from visa applications and acquiring permission for field research to donor monitoring frameworks and doctoral defenses as headaches: unwelcome interruptions that will make no difference to the work that it interrupts other than to momentarily obstruct that work’s continuation. IFF colleagues’ experiences of interruption are shaped by the diverse temporal frameworks in which scientists and administrative staff approach their administrative and bureaucratic burdens. As the experiences of IFF colleagues illuminate, efforts to overcome headaches can be animated by quite different temporal horizons: from the promise that bureaucratic work will subside once one’s academic career progresses to a belief that there is no worthwhile future to IFF’s work. In some cases, moreover, one activity – a PhD defense or the publication process, for instance

– might be experienced alternatively as a headache or as a welcome opportunity for feedback.

Much like IFF colleagues, most anthropologists would likely view the headaches that emanate from funding bureaucracies as radically distinct from the valued feedback that we receive from academic peers and from fieldwork interlocutors. Understood as alternative forms of interruption, however, the difference is much less stark. The distinction lies merely in the kinds of future horizon for one’s work that these interruptions anticipate: a future delayed but not transformed, or a future that might transform in ways one cannot fully predict. This is a framework that might challenge us as scientists to reflect upon the temporal frameworks within which we imagine our engagements with academic audit cultures and academic bureaucracies. Doing so we might find ourselves surprised in the manner that Susanna was by Mr. Pak’s defense: we might find opportunities for transforming the pathways of our projects where we would otherwise only anticipate headaches. Writing grant and fellowship proposals and funding reports, for example, we might imagine these activities not merely as meaningless headaches, but also open ourselves up to the question of how speaking to the audiences of these documents might transform the future direction of our projects.

Shifting attention from the representational paucity of academic bureaucracy to the quality of interruptions they facilitate also allows for a different kind of critique.

From this perspective, the problem with grant and fellowship proposals and funding reports might not so much be that they provide a poor means of representing the work that we have done or will do. Rather, it is that as hard as we might try to imagine ourselves in conversation with the audiences of these documents, these audiences

often don’t speak back in productive ways.12 Far from the unpredictable interruptions that IFF scientists value from each other and from local project participants, the interruptions generated by grant and fellowship applications and progress reports are often one of only two kinds: they either end a project or allow it to proceed. Under such circumstances, it is little wonder that scientists only see the interruptions of donor bureaucracies as headaches: in many cases they do not offer much else. A polite email telling us only that we have or have not won a fellowship or thanking us for completing a project report is an unlikely basis for unexpected transformations in a project’s future. The kinds of interruption that donor frameworks and academic bureaucracies impose, moreover, often negatively transform projects in ways that belie

IFF colleagues’ faith that headaches merely delay projects. Aside from occupying so much time that scientists such as Matt often feel that there will never be time to return to the research that administration interrupts, the cancellation of farmer involvement in crop selection for the Agroforestry for Myanmar project demonstrates how bureaucratic and institutional headaches can in fact destroy opportunities for fruitful interruption.

These are examples of audit “draw[ing] organisations away from their primary purpose” (Power 1994, 16). But focus on the quality of interruptions is suggestive of a different kind of critique of audit and evaluation to the one offered by Shore and

Wright or by Rottenburg. What is at stake is not that researchers have lost control of

12 There are of course many funding institutions that provide substantive feedback on all proposals that they review. I have, however, yet to encounter a postdoctoral fellowship for which this is the case. The only response that most small grant progress reports seem to garner from funding institutions, moreover, is a polite acknowledgement of receipt.

the terms of their evaluation, or that control of constructing the reality of research and development work has been co-opted by powerful others. Rather, we should see the problem of audit and evaluation frameworks in terms of the interruptions they generate, and the failure of these interruptions to provide opportunities for abeyance or for the transformed futures that momentary submission to the agency of others can generate. Understood as a problem of interruption, our response to audit and to research bureaucracies might be to imagine not alternative means of evaluation, but alternative modes of interruption.

This is a framework, moreover, that suggests that public trust in the sciences cannot be tied to scientific autonomy. When Dennis lamented project participants’

‘trusted too much’, he described a relationship of unquestioning confidence in and allegiance to his recommendations. He had generated a relationship wherein project participants saw no need to interrupt him. This was a form of trust in scientific knowledge that left Dennis’s scientific expertise all too autonomous. If, as Dennis pointed out (also Wynne 1992), this was not the kind of trust scientists should seek, what other form might trust take? I return to this question in subsequent chapters.

CHAPTER 3

TRUST AND VULNERABILITY IN CHINESE BUREAUCRACY

Analysis of how interpersonal connections permeate bureaucracy in China and elsewhere often proceed from distinctions such as formal-informal, official-personal, or legal-corrupt. In his analysis of China’s lower courts, for example, Liu Sida differentiates between “formal and informal influences. Formal influence refers to the influence through formal devices based on the law, while informal influence refers to the influence not documented by the law but prevalent in actual practice” (Liu 2006,

92). Analysis grounded in this distinction often generates either a condemnation of the corrupting influence of informal influence, or a celebration interpersonal connections

(guanxi) and informality as a subversive response to the formal structures of state power. So, for example, Xin He and Kwai Hang Ng (2018, 871) conclude from their study into the influence of interpersonal relationships (guanxi) on judicial decision making that, “law, instead of guanxi, should take center stage in judicial decision making” (see also He 2012; Kwong 1997; L. Li 2012). Conversely, Mayfair Yang

(1994, 321) celebrates guanxi as an “ethics of ancient primitive and segmentary state formations [that] will wreak their revenge on later social institutions such as the state and capitalism”. More ambivalently, other scholars have suggested that, depending on the kinds of interpersonal relationship in question and the contexts in which they are deployed, interpersonal connections can generate positive as well as negative outcomes (Ledeneva 1998; K. Li 2016; L. Zhang 2001).

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Despite the diverse conclusions these scholars reach with regards to the desirability of informality, they nevertheless share an analytic grounding in a binary between formality and informality. A number of anthropologists have critiqued this binary, accusing scholars who ground their analysis in it of drawing clear-cut divisions where there are none. Hans Steinmüller (2010, 545; also Hertz 1998), for example, takes issue with the dichotomy Mayfair Yang sets up between the “personalized relationships of renqing and guanxi, and … impersonal administrative relationships of the state”. In contrast, Steinmüller highlights how “[b]oth ordinary people and government officials use elements of vernacular and state discourses” (545). This constant boundary transgressing precipitates what Steinmüller calls “communities of complicity”: “communities … who share an awareness of intimate spaces that are marked by embarrassment, irony, and cynicism at their boundaries” (548). Likewise rejecting rigid dichotomies such as formal-informal, Beatrice Jauregui (2014) argues that the moral valences with which people view the informal social connections that permeate state institutions are in constant flux. Jauregui therefore calls for greater theorization of how the moral valence of emic categories such as guanxi and jaguud

(which Jauregui describes as guanxi’s Indian equivalent) “change[] across time and space” (Jauregui 2014, 87).

Central to both Steinmüller’s and Jauregui’s analyses is an attention to distinctions like formal-informal, state-society, and honest-corrupt as found objects – they do not follow Liu in defining such distinctions in terms of predetermined analytic categories. They highlight, moreover, the ambiguous, ambivalent and ever-shifting moral valences carried by the boundaries that their informants articulate between

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categories of practice. Steinmüller and Jauregui go on to explicate their research subjects’ moral and ethical evaluations in relation to the transgression of these boundaries (also Anjaria 2011; Gupta 1995; Tidey 2016). I pay similar attention to the categorical boundaries that structure my interlocutors’ engagements with bureaucrats and with public bodies. In this respect, I investigate formal bureaucratic proceduralism and informal guanxi as forms of transaction that my interlocutors themselves consider to be importantly distinct, rather than as an analytic dichotomy that requires prior definition by the ethnographer.

This is an approach that to some extent distances anthropologists such as

Steinmüller and Jauregui from socio-legal approaches such as Liu’s. As described above, Liu begins with an etic distinction between formal and informal. The analysis that Liu develops nevertheless places an emphasis on the messiness of moral and institutional pluralism that resonates with Steinmüller, Jauregui and other recent anthropological accounts of corruption (e.g. Anjaria 2011; Osburg 2013; Tidey 2016).

Making a legal pluralist analysis that typifies Chinese legal anthropology and sociology (e.g. S. Zhu 2016; X. Zhu 2008) Liu (2006, 75) argues that the intermingling of formal and informal influences evinces the ability of “judicial practice to reconcile the conflicts between global and local sources of legitimacy”.

Like anthropological studies of corruption this pluralist analysis draws attention to boundaries between diverse discourses and ideologies of legitimacy and morality.

Whereas anthropologists have tended to focus on the moral valence of these boundaries, socio-legal scholarship has focused instead on the difficulty of mediating or translating across boundaries. Rather than highlighting the ethics and ethical

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evaluations generated by people’s constant traversing of discursive boundaries such as state-vernacular or traditional-modern, legal pluralists highlight the cultural and epistemological challenge of mediating across these boundaries.

The bureaucracies that IFF colleagues interact with are distinct from the judicial bureaucracies that have formed the focus of much anthropological and sociological research in China. Nevertheless, as Xin He and Kai Hang Ng (2018, 871) highlight, there are significant similarities between the operations of China’s judicial system and the formal and informal operations of many of China’s other public institutions. This allows ethnography of IFF to provide insights salient not only to anthropological discussions of formality and informality, but also to socio-legal scholarship focused on China’s judicial system (e.g. He 2012; Liu 2006; S. Zhu

2016). In contrast to these two literatures, this chapter demonstrates that what is at stake in the boundaries that bureaucrats sustain is neither that lines between formal and informal constitute moral boundaries (cf. Gupta 1995; Jauregui 2014; Steinmüller

2010), nor that these boundaries divide epistemological or cultural domains across which it is difficult to translate or mediate (cf. Liu 2006; S. Zhu 2016; X. Zhu 2008).

Rather than the quality of the transaction itself, IFF scientists and administrative staff draw attention to how formal and informal modes of interaction are used to carefully manage the future entailments and remainders that relationships inevitably generate.

In this respect, just as anthropologists have long understood a crucial aspect of kinship and sociality to be how they generate relationships and effects that extend into the future (Bourdieu 1977; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Mauss 1990; Miyazaki 2004), ethnography of IFF reveals the same to be true of bureaucratic proceduralism (Hull 2012; Riles

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2011). Approaching informal connections and bureaucratic proceduralism as alternative modes of relationality illuminates how both operate to distribute future vulnerability. For the bureaucrats themselves, proceduralism often shields them from the future entailments of any relationship to or shared responsibility with their clients.

Meanwhile, the inflexible proceduralism of Chinese bureaucracy forces clients of bureaucracy to adopt fictive documentary fixes that, while effective in the immediate term, generate additional future vulnerability and labor.

For IFF staff, this vulnerability operates as a critical framework for castigating both bureaucrats and colleagues. Here, IFF’s interactions with bureaucracy offer a site for interrogating critical narratives of public institutions and the state (Gordillo 2006;

Gupta 1995; Herzfeld 1992; Witsoe 2011). Equally, however, awareness of forms of vulnerability that bureaucratic sociality generates can operate as an engine of sympathy. As well as castigating the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy (Herzfeld

1992), IFF colleagues are equally capable of humanizing their counterparts in public bodies. Here sensitivity to the entailments that transactions with IFF might generate for public officials often serves as a precursor to collaborative work. Moreover, the contrast between the diverse examples of IFF staff’s interactions with public bodies reveals how the promise of collaboration with public officials can hinge on the possibility that one’s government interlocutors are open to the forms of vulnerability, and therefore trust, that bureaucracy often seems to preclude.

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Avoiding Responsibility, Evading Trust

Before descending upon the ethnically Tibetan village of Meirong to conduct a household survey on local mushroom harvesting, Kong Shifu, IFF’s driver, and I paid a visit to the offices of the Damei County Government. With a letter of introduction from IFF’s local parent organization in hand, we presented ourselves to the county director, explained our intention to conduct a household survey, and asked if he might help us with an introduction to the head of Meirong Village. The county director politely refused, telling us that because our party included a foreigner we must first present ourselves to the Damei County Foreign Affairs Office. When we arrived at the

Foreign Affairs Office, however, two junior officers told us that while they were the responsible office for foreign visitors, they did not have the authority to approve a project related to mushroom harvesting. This, they suggested, would be a matter for the County Forestry Bureau. We should, the officers told us, ask the County Forestry

Bureau for a stamped letter approving our survey in Meirong, and then bring that letter back to the Foreign Affairs Office. By this point Kong and I were not surprised to find that help was not forthcoming from the Forestry Bureau. Trying our luck by going direct to Meirong Village, the officials there requested a letter of invitation from the local township government who in turn requested a letter from right back where we had started: the Damei County Government.

Having wasted a day being sent from office to office in a futile effort to acquire official approval for our household survey, Kong made a call to Lin Laoshi, a senior member of staff at IFF. As it happened a university classmate of Lin’s was now a senior official at the local prefectural (the level above county) forestry bureau. Lin

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made a call to her classmate to explain the predicament. When we returned to Meirong the next morning, the village leader greeted us warmly and assigned one of his officers to assist us in the household survey.

Kong and his IFF colleagues explained the bureaucratic circle he and I were sent around as the result of officials we met wanting to avoid responsibility for authorizing the presence of a foreign researcher in Meirong. Our being bounced from office to office is in this respect an example both of bureaucratic “buck-passing”

(Herzfeld 1992, 4), and of demanding documents that would diffuse agency in a manner that would guard the bureaucrats involved against individuated responsibility

(Hull 2012). A document from the Foreign Affairs Office would have allowed the

County Government to displace their potential responsibility for the foreign researcher, just as a document from the County Forestry Bureau would have done for the Foreign Affairs Office. Ultimately, no such documents materialized, but a personal phone call from an official at the Prefectural Forestry Bureau to the village leader performed a similar function. With Lin’s connection at the Prefectural Forestry Bureau having called ahead to Meirong Village, the village leader was satisfied that someone senior to himself had taken responsibility. Here responsibility was deferred to a senior government official who placed himself in this position out of a personal obligation to a classmate. If the circle we were initially sent around exemplified bureaucratic buck- passing, the conclusion to this episode exemplifies the widely-observed capacity for informal, interpersonal relationships to circumvent difficult and obstructive Chinese bureaucracies (Chu 2010; Pieke 1995; Smart 1993; M. M. Yang 1994).

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In other instances, however, a similar displacement of responsibility might equally be achieved by rigid adherence to rules and documentary procedures. In the case of Damei, it was unclear that an established procedure existed for foreign researchers. IFF staff’s interactions with bureaucracy were, however, often governed by clearly set out rules and procedures. So, for example, SAPS – itself a public research institute – has rules governing how IFF and its sister centers and departments can spend project funds, as well as procedures for reporting expenditures. This includes tight restrictions on spending that SAPS have enacted as part of China’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign. Amongst these is a rule that conferences hosted by

IFF and its sister organizations within SAPS must not spend more than CN¥450

(US$65) per conference attendee per day. Ostensibly this rule – versions of which have been adopted by government departments and public bodies across China – is intended to prevent the gluttonous banqueting for which Chinese officialdom is notorious. In practice, however, the amounts allowable are so small as to make running activities like a conference impossible. Huli, a member of IFF’s administrative team, explained that when IFF hosted a recent conference they found that the funds allowable under this policy were insufficient. Huli’s solution was to fabricate fictional conference attendees. This meant that although the conference’s expenditure per person was greater than the amount allowable, the addition of fictional attendees to the financial report gave the appearance of the conference having satisfied

SAPS expenditure rules.

Devices of this kind bear a striking similarity to what the Chinese legal anthropologist Zhu Xiaoyang (2004) observes in rural microfinance initiatives. To

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increase the amount of funds one could extract from an internationally-funded microfinance initiative, some locals would borrow the names and thereby the loan entitlements of their fellow villagers. In the eyes of the foreign donor funding the initiative, such activities were of course illegal. Zhu Xiaoyang, however, suggests that in the eyes of the villagers concerned this name borrowing was often entirely legitimate. Zhu Xiaoyang argues that many instances of name borrowing are embedded within a broader local system of social relationships and reciprocity. Zhu

Xiaoyang describes how in one of the projects he observed, project managers refused to condone any instances of name borrowing. According to Zhu Xiaoyang, the practice nevertheless continued clandestinely, resulting in book keeping that contained obvious mistruths. For Zhu Xiaoyang (2004, 2008) the “game of cat and mouse” that ensued from these microfinance initiatives was a result of a “confusion of tongues”, an epistemological dissonance between the frameworks of the international development initiative and that of its rural Chinese clients. Castigating international organizations such as the World Bank for seeking to impose Western individualist notions of responsibility, Zhu Xiaoyang calls upon such organizations to adopt a “principle of charity”; something which Zhu Xiaoyang argues would entail appreciating the context of reciprocal sociality in which the name borrowing he observed took place.

Zhu Xiaoyang’s analysis draws directly from Fei Xiaotong’s (1992) From the

Soil. Here, Fei juxtaposed the Western concept of the individual against the Chinese notion that an individual's identity is unclear because it is constituted through multifarious relationships. Fei used juxtapositions of this kind to argue the inappropriateness of modern Western judicial ideas to contemporary rural China.

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Contrasting Western rule of law with the Chinese “rule of rites”, for example, Fei

(1992, 106) suggests that “from a rural perspective, the modern judicial system has become an institution that shelters evil doers”. From the Soil has become a foundational text for the work not only of Zhu Xiaoyang, but of a growing Chinese field of legal anthropology. In this respect, analysis of law and bureaucracy in China has, like Zhu Xiaoyang’s ethnography of microfinance projects, tended to sustain Fei’s focus upon the dissonance between the values and epistemologies of rural China compared to the modernism of national and international institutions (e.g. Gao 2014;

He and Ng 2018; Liu 2006; Wang 2009; S. Zhu 2016; X. Zhu 2008). Indeed, even

Liang Zhiping who draws on the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz to critique Fei’s functionalism (Liang 2008; cf. Deng 2014; S. Zhu 2016), nevertheless draws heavily on Fei in his characterization of the interaction between state and customary laws as a conflict of knowledges (Liang 1997). Here Liang argues that formal law is based on the logic of scientific knowledge and is therefore unable to satisfy the needs of rural Chinese society. Thus, from the point of view of Chinese legal anthropology, the major shortcomings of law and bureaucracy often inhere in the incongruity between the logic of formal state law and the reality of rural society (e.g.

Gao 2014; Wang 2009; Zhao 2003; S. Zhu 2016; X. Zhu 2008). As in Zhu Xiaoyang’s analysis of ‘the game of cat and mouse’ in rural microfinance initiatives, the endpoint of analysis is an argument for cultural, legal and epistemological pluralism – a position that resonates with anthropological accounts of law elsewhere in the world

(e.g. Bohannan 1957; Comaroff and Comaroff 2004; Geertz 1983; Moore 1978).

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Despite the similarity of the bureaucratic devices adopted in the microfinance projects studied by Zhu Xiaoyang and those adopted by Huli, the frustrations of IFF staff might offer a somewhat different analysis to Zhu Xiaoyang’s conventional pluralist argument. When describing IFF’s situation, Huli suggested that it would have been obvious even to SAPS administrators that the allowable funds were not sufficient. As in Tan Tongxue’s (2015) analysis of “political agriculture”, the officials enforcing policies are as aware as those subjected to them that they are entirely unreasonable. In this respect, Huli and her colleagues never attributed their difficulties to SAPS administrators or government bureaucrats being unable to comprehend the impossibility, even absurdity, of the procedures imposed. Epistemological dissonance was not the issue. Rather, what Huli pointed towards was how the rigid and inflexible application of rules allows bureaucrats to sustain a detachment from their clients’ rule- bending, and to thereby escape potential responsibility for this rule-bending.

Trust and Vulnerability

The form of detachment that Huli admonished SAPS administrators for sustaining was something she described to me as a refusal to ‘trust’. For Huli, these attitudes towards trust are intertwined with fears that she suggested have their roots in China’s Cultural

Revolution, and that pervade contemporary Chinese society. During the Cultural

Revolution, Huli explained, every family experienced someone snitching on them for their own self-promotion or to avoid injury to themselves. In her own family, she told me, a cousin snitched on the family to advance his career. While Huli herself was too young to have experienced the Cultural Revolution, she pointed out that the current

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generation of senior government officials all grew up in this period. She suggested moreover, that this mindset has trickled down from older to younger generations. It is in this mindset that Huli located the refusal of Chinese administrators and bureaucrats to trust their clients. This implies an understanding of trust that is intimately tied to a willingness to make oneself vulnerable – to expose oneself to the possibility of harm.

To trust someone is to make oneself vulnerable for the sake of that person and one’s relationship to them. For Damei officials to have trusted the foreign researcher would have made them vulnerable to the consequences of the foreign researcher ‘making trouble’. Similarly, for SAPS administrators to have trusted IFF staff enough to allow an exception to the ordinary conference spending constraints would have meant that those SAPS administrators shared in IFF’s vulnerability to the scrutiny of any official who might interrogate the legitimacy of IFF’s spending. What rigid rule-following and bureaucratic relationality allows, however, is for bureaucrats to evade interpersonal trust and with it the vulnerability that this would entail.

In social scientific and legal scholarship – as well as in everyday language – trust is often used interchangeably with or as a synonym for confidence or belief (e.g.

Rothstein and Stolle 2008; Q. Yang and Tang 2010; cf. Luhmann 1979, 2000). But understood as a willingness to make oneself vulnerable to or on behalf of another, trust becomes importantly distinct from confidence or belief. The concept of trust underlying Huli’s analysis is, in this respect, closer to sociological theories that connect trust to risk (e.g. Luhmann 2000) or to vulnerability (e.g. Chua, Morris, and

Ingram 2009; Rousseau et al. 1998). As much as a route to a sociological definition of trust, however, Huli’s analysis reminds us that risk, hazard and vulnerability are – as

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anthropologists have observed elsewhere in the world (Keane 1997; Mauss 1990;

Weiner 1976; also Butler 2014) – intrinsic to human sociality. As James Laidlaw

(2000, 630) argues, exchange entails the circulation of “peril” or “poison”:

“demeaning or demanding connections, debts, and obligations to do things for other people’s benefit” are “dangers attendant on social interaction in general”. It is this truism, according to Laidlaw, that gives the idea of “overcom[ing] the impossibility of a free gift” its allure: to receive (or to give) a free gift would be to conduct an exchange that incurs no debts and generates no connections (631).13

Laidlaw (2000, 618–19) describes how Jain renouncers attempt to overcome the impossibility of a free gift through a process called ‘grazing’. Jane renouncers wander aimlessly with their alms bowls, receiving food from households according to a prescribed manner that allows them to avoid either accepting an invitation or offering a thank you. These protocols erase the potential appearance of exchange or reciprocity, allowing Jain renouncers to sustain the alms they receive as a ‘free gift’.

For Laidlaw, the significance of grazing is as an example of an extant free or pure gift, and in the manner that this apparent anomaly allows him to re-formulate the anthropological demarcation of gift and commodity. Following Webb Keane (1994,

1997), however, we might focus on the importance that participants in exchange place on demarcating categories of exchange. The ritual exchange that accompanies an

Anakalang wedding, for example, is valued for its ability to assure future relationships between “wife-givers” and “wife-receivers”. The success of such a transaction

13 Laidlaw (2000; also Venkatesan 2011) takes Jacque Derrida (1992) as his entry point into the ‘impossibility of a free gift’. But this is also a topic that animated Marcel Mauss’s (1990) The Gift, where he critiques Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1961, cf. 1926) notion of a ‘pure gift’.

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depends on a strict adherence to the appropriate protocol. If either of the parties

“bungle” the ritual speech that accompanies these exchanges, the transaction would become something quite different: “a low-status market transaction, an isolated encounter lacking spiritual or social consequences, and underwriting no future memories and obligations” (Keane 1994, 607). Similarly, we could point to the potential slippage implicit in Laidlaw’s description of Jain grazing. If a renouncer accepts an invitation to food or repeatedly returns to the same household for alms, the transaction, according to Laidlaw, would take on the conventional character of exchange with all its entailments of debt and obligation.

The detachment and autonomy that Jain renouncers strive to sustain through grazing is tied to their pursuits of spiritual purification. For the administrators that

Huli admonished, the pursuit is somewhat less spiritual, but what is at stake is similarly the achievement of a detachment from social interaction and the dangers that it entails. Equally, Jain renouncers and SAPS administrators pursue a similarly deliberate, even convoluted, practice for demarcating a particular form of engagement.

Whereas Jain renouncers seek to sustain alms as a free gift, SAPS administrators labor to sustain interactions with their clients as a formalistic proceduralism. Though very different kinds of demarcation, the labor of sustaining these distinctive forms is in both cases animated by concern with the kinds of entanglements dangers and vulnerabilities to which the persons engaged will subsequently be subject. If flexibly applying SAPS’s impossible expenditure rules might have opened administrator to a share in responsibility for Huli’s spending more than regulations allow, rigid

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proceduralism offered them a means of detaching themselves from the dangers of this responsibility.

Highlighting how vulnerability and entanglement are intrinsic to sociality, allows us to see Huli’s interactions with bureaucrats as a relational form analogous to many other iterations of social interaction and exchange. It also allows us to appreciate what Huli highlighted as being distinctive about her interactions with administrators and bureaucrats. Studies of guanxi in China often contrast the socially embedded ties of traditional social networks with modernist ideals of disembedded, legal, economic and bureaucratic rationality (e.g. Fei 1992; Y. Yan 1996; S. Zhu 2016). Building upon

Huli’s emphasis on vulnerability, however, points to a different point of comparison.

What differentiates the experience of social relationships and of trust in China is not the residue of traditional social ties so much as the spectral history of extreme precarity. The kind of trust-based sociality that Huli describes SAPS administrators refusing would entail embracing forms of vulnerability that are, in the manner I have described above, routine to exchange and to sociality. The difference, however, is that for Chinese bureaucrats the stakes seem impossibly high. Beneath the specter of a

Cultural Revolution in which hundreds of thousands or even millions were brutally maimed and killed, one strives to avoid vulnerability as much as is possible. Chinese bureaucrats, in this analysis, insist upon rigid bureaucratic proceduralism because they simply do not feel safe enough to embrace the vulnerability that flexibility and trust would entail.

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Turning a Blind Eye

Bureaucrats laboring to evade trust and vulnerability is by no means unique to the organization of a conference. Indeed, the fictional conference attendee strategy employed by Huli is rather common, both within and beyond SAPS. Officers in prefectural-level government offices, for example, have described to me how they use very similar fictional strategies to facilitate reimbursements for their own work. Such fixes are so prevalent that no one doubts that SAPS administrators – and their equivalents at other public bodies – are aware of such deceptions. The manner in which administrators seemingly allow themselves to be deceived is often described as

‘turning a blind eye’ (zheng yi zhi yan bi yi zhi yan). In this context, a blind eye is maintained only insofar as the administrators can sustain their rigid adherence to the rules and thereby avoid any connection to or responsibility for the rule bending in question. In one instance, Isaac, a PhD student at IFF, returned from a field research trip during which he had travelled in his own car. When his colleagues at IFF submitted his petrol receipts to SAPS the claim for reimbursement was rejected.

Though Isaac’s expense report was entirely accurate and there was no apparent breach of SAPS expenditure rules, the SAPS administrators were suspicious of Isaac’s claim to have used his own vehicle on a research trip.

Puzzled by how an administrative office that routinely turns a blind eye to tactics such as fabricated conference attendees could be pushing back at what seemed such a straightforward reimbursement claim, I discussed the case over lunch with

Mubai, a PhD student and administrative assistant at IFF. For Mubai, Isaac’s situation was not especially surprising. As he explained, in China it is very rare for people to

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make a business trip in their own car so the unusualness of the situation might in itself raise suspicions. Mubai went on to point out that from the administrator’s point of view it is hard to prove things such as how much petrol was used for business travel if the vehicle in question is a personal rather than an official vehicle, or a taxi. Compared to the official receipt issued by a taxi driver, he explained, petrol receipts did not offer as clear cut or well-established mode of documenting expenses. Once one understands the grounds for SAPS administrators’ suspicions, their blind eye to fabricated conference officials on the one hand, and their refusal of an entirely honest claim for petrol on the other are not as incongruous as they might at first seem. What really mattered from the point of view of these administrators was the likelihood that the reimbursement might be called into question later on, thus opening up scrutiny not only of Isaac but of the administrators.

What is at issue here is not that SAPS administrators disbelieved Isaac’s story of having driven his own car any more or less than they had confidence in the legitimacy of Huli’s conference expenditure. The point was rather that Isaac’s unorthodox reimbursement might generate vulnerability that the administrators could otherwise avoid. These administrators’ refusal to trust has, in a sense, some connection to belief and confidence. Framed as a matter of belief or confidence, we might say that the unorthodox and therefore fragile documentary accounting of Isaac’s expenses led

SAPS administrators to worry that they might have to ask whether they could believe him: in the absence of robust documentation future scrutiny of SAPS approving

Isaac’s reimbursement might hinge not only on procedural and documentary propriety but also on an evaluation of Isaac’s sincerity, and by implication the sincerity of the

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administrators who had trusted him. Central to their refusal to trust Isaac, however, was not that the administrators did not believe Isaac or have confidence in him, but that refusing to trust Isaac allowed them to avoid evaluations of Isaac’s sincerity and reliability altogether. As described above, the question of trust is at its crux a question of vulnerability.

Particularly illuminating in this regard was the advice that Isaac’s IFF colleagues offered him for dealing with SAPS’ obstructiveness. All Isaac needed to do, his colleagues assured him, was to get hold of taxi receipts equaling the amount he had spent on petrol, and to re-submit his reimbursement claim as if he had used taxis rather than his own car. The solution to the administrators’ refusal to trust was not to demonstrate his sincerity or to prove to SAPS administrators that they could have confidence in him. Like the government officials in Damei with whom Kong Shifu and I had had no interpersonal relationships, Isaac could not expect SAPS administrators to trust him: they would do all they could to shield themselves from responsibility for the actions of others and the vulnerability this would entail. In the absence of the possibility of trust, all Isaac could do was to provide a robust (if not necessarily sincere) documentary accounting of his expenses. Only through these documents could Isaac expect these administrators to enter into a relationship with him as a client and as a legitimate recipient of financial reimbursement.

The manner in which IFF staff draw attention to questions of responsibility, trust and vulnerability, rather than to epistemological dissonance, brings to mind

Michael Herzfeld’s (1992, 80, 149) account of bureaucratic indifference. Herzfeld describes how bureaucrats escape personal responsibility for their actions by appealing

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to a higher authority: to “the system”. Herzfeld describes such appeals to the system as a disingenuous “ethical alibi” for bureaucrats’ indifference to the fates of their clients.

Likewise, Damei officials and SAPS administrators had framed their refusals to oblige

IFF colleagues’ requests in terms of procedures that must be followed, displacing responsibility for their refusals onto an abstract other. Here the system provides an alibi for evading the reciprocal obligations that would normally compel one’s interactions with another person. In this sense, bureaucratic proceduralism perhaps equates to what Herzfeld (1992, 1) describes as the “rejection of common humanity”: a deliberate refusal of sociality. In this respect, as well as understanding informal interpersonal relations as something that allows one to evade troublesome bureaucratic formalities (Pieke 1995; Smart 1993; C. Tian 2005; Zhao 2003; X. Zhu 2003), Huli and her colleague’s experiences with bureaucracy highlight how, much like in Jain grazing, significant work simultaneously goes into evading interpersonal relationships.

Proceduralism’s Remainders

A further characteristic of Chinese authorities turning a blind eye is the ever-present possibility that the irregularities to which a blind eye was once turned could be deployed as a premise for future punitive action. Mubai likened this to a fish tank you keep filling with bad fish so that the day you want to catch one it is very easy to do so.

As an example, Mubai described how almost none of the thousands of electric bikes on the streets of Songlin City are legally registered and are therefore being ridden illegally. This is a consequence of the city administration refusing to register new e- bikes, but nevertheless turning a blind eye to the growing presence of new and

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therefore unregistered e-bikes on the roads. Mubai suggested that if it so wished, the city government could at any point cease to turn a blind eye and punish any of the many e-bike riders in Songlin. Thus, while the willingness of public bodies or government offices to turn a blind eye often allows for people to evade certain rules and regulations, exploiting a blind eye can also generate a sense of precarity and of vulnerability. Studies of guanxi in China and of gift exchange more broadly, have highlighted the effects that transactions generate into the future. Rather than discrete and isolated events, exchange creates remainders in the form of relationships, debts and obligations. The vulnerability generated by a proceduralist bureaucratic fix points to one way in which formal bureaucratic work can produce remainders of its own.

As well as producing vulnerability, bureaucratic devices can generate remainders in the form of further additional bureaucratic work. This potential is particularly apparent in the double identity of IFF. As described in the Introduction, the office in which Mubai, Huli and their colleagues work is legally constituted both as the country office of an international organization – the Institute for Farms and

Forests (IFF) – and, at the same time, as The Highland Ecosystem Center (HEC), a center within the Songlin Academy of Plant Sciences (SAPS). The same office therefore exists both as an international organization, and as a domestic public research institute. This dual identity allows a number of advantages, including potential access to two pools of funding – one international and one domestic.

Whereas most international research organizations cannot apply for domestic research grants – for example, from the NSFC, and the Ministry of Science and Technology

(MOST) – IFF can do so through its persona as HEC. The office’s dual identity can

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also allow it to escape certain obligations to IFF’s Africa-based international headquarters. For example, the China office is required to pay an overhead of around

30% on any grants it wins to IFF headquarters. This frustrates many staff members because while this overhead pays for IFF’s global resources to which regional offices have access – for example, laboratory equipment, and expert teams in monitoring and evaluation – no one in Songlin thinks these resources are useful and Songlin staff seldom use them. Such overheads can, however, be avoided by applying for a grant as

HEC rather than as IFF. Where this is done, the grant falls under the remit of SAPS who demand an overhead of only 5%.

The ability of the office to select which of its legal persona to adopt in any given situation gives it a certain degree of latitude in its administrative and bureaucratic dealings with both Chinese government offices and IFF’s international bureaucracy. This case is in some respects similar to the museum/temple described by

Gao Bingzhong (2014). Gao's study is of a local religious committee in Fan Village,

Hebei that is devoted to the worship of the Longpai deity. Gao tells us that although there is increasing tolerance and even official promotion of folk culture, opposition to

“feudal superstition” (fengjian mixin) is still a fundamental aspect of government attitudes. As such, organizations like the Longpai committee are in constant fear of being shut down by the state – in fact a Public Security Bureau document from around

1990 suggests that for Fan Village Longpai committee this very nearly happened. Gao suggests, however, that Fan Village's Longpai committee has been proactive in managing its image in the eyes of government bodies. A key success for the Longpai committee has been to construct a new “museum/temple” (prior to the construction of

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this building, festivals were held in temporary structures). To build a temple would require the permission of the Ministry of Religion. This, according to Gao, would be impossible as Longpai worship is not an officially recognized religion. The Longpai committee, however, jumped upon a Beijing academic's suggestion that a museum should be built. As a museum, the building would be “cultural” rather than “religious” and would therefore avoid the Ministry of Religion's jurisdiction. At the same time, to raise funds for the building, the Longpai committee told the local community they were building a temple. Thus, to the locals the building was presented as a temple, but to outsiders it was a museum. As with HEC/IFF, the museum/temple dual identity generates a certain leeway in interactions with domestic (and in HEC/IFF case also international) bureaucracies, facilitating activities that would not otherwise have been possible.

Highlighting the leeway generated by bureaucratic devices such as double- naming, Gao’s ethnography resonates with a broader anthropological literature that has shown how communities sustain autonomy in the face of the totalizing claims of legal and bureaucratic institutions (e.g. Collmann 1988; Merry 1986; Moore 1978; Pia

2016). As well as the latitude that bureaucratic strategies allow them, however, colleagues at IFF also highlight the bureaucratic work that such strategies can themselves generate. While seemingly a clever device to get the best of both worlds – the benefits of being an international organization as well as those of being a domestic public research institute – the office’s dual identity also means, as Huli put it, ‘getting screwed from both sides’. So, for example, running a grant through HEC rather than

IFF might save more than 25% of the grant funds in overheads, but it also subjects the

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office to SAPS’s more stringent accounting procedures (procedures that are affected by the anti-corruption measures discussed above). Additionally, international travel on a HEC administered grant are brought under SAPS’s international travel procedures.

Here detailed itineraries for SAPS international travel must be reported a month prior to departure so that a notice can be posted on SAPS’s intranet. This is an internal

SAPS policy adopted to support China’s broader anti-corruption efforts, and is designed to prevent people going on holiday with public funds.

The negative impact of these measures was apparent in a trip that Ruyue made to Europe. Ruyue had gone through the official SAPS procedures for a visit to a university in the Netherlands (including submitting her itinerary and acquiring an official passport). Shortly before she departed she was informed that she had won a post-doctoral fellowship in Germany,14 and therefore wanted to also visit Germany on the same trip. Because the itinerary she had submitted had not included Germany, and she did not have time to officially register a new trip to Germany, she could not go.

Conversely, if a grant is administered through IFF, there are fewer constraints on international travel, but there is greater scrutiny over who the office engages as project partners. Here, IFF procedures require all project partners to submit themselves to an audit. This drawn-out procedure resulted in payments to two NGOs engaged in the Agroforestry for Myanmar project by nearly a year. This was the delay that led to the cancellation of the crop selection workshop described in the previous chapter. But it also almost caused the NGOs to withdraw from the project altogether, something

14 This was a fellowship that would free Ruyue from the administrative burdens that, as described in Chapter 2, had up until this point formed a persistent interruption to her research.

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which would likely have caused the entire project to collapse. In many instances, therefore, while a bureaucratic or administrative strategy offers opportunities for mitigating or evading certain constraints or procedures, each strategy holds the potential to generate remainders both in the form of future administrative and bureaucratic labor, and in the form of additional vulnerability to troublesome regulation by either international institutions or an authoritarian state.

Anthropologists concerned with guanxi in China have highlighted the capacity for the exchange of gifts and favors to generate interpersonal obligations that extend into the future (Kipnis 1997; Y. Yan 1996; M. M. Yang 1994). In this respect, having asked a favor on mine and Kong Shifu’s behalf from her classmate at the Damei

Forestry Bureau, Lin Laoshi has also extended her own obligation to assist her classmate when he asks a favor of his own. Similarly, upon the completion of our survey in Meirong, Kong Shifu and I gave the village officials who had escorted us around the village a sum of ‘gas money’ – what was in effect a cash gift. This gift was intended to reciprocate the assistance the official had given us, but this reciprocation was also done with the potential for future favors in mind. Though we had no plan to return ourselves, another group from IFF was due to visit the area in the near future, and we hoped that our generosity would predispose the village administration to our colleagues at IFF. If a crucial aspect of gift exchange is its ability to generate effects into the future,15 the same is also true of legal and bureaucratic practice (Hull 2012;

Moore 1992; Povinelli 2002; Riles 2010). In IFF’s case, bureaucratic strategies can, no less than interpersonal relations, provide the solution to problems in the present, but

15 See Chapter 1.

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this is often at the expense of generating problems of vulnerability and further bureaucratic work that will extend into the future.

As described above, Huli imagined two pathways that would have allowed her to spend more than the impossibly restrictive SAPS expenditure rules allow. First, there was what Huli was forced to do: to find a documentary fix that allowed her to fit her reimbursement within SAPS administrators proceduralist demands. Second, there was what Huli lamented she could not do: ask SAPS administrators to be flexible in their application of expenditure rules. In both instances the immediate outcome would be identical: IFF would be allowed to use its funds to run a conference. But the key difference is in the divergent consequences that these forms would project into the future. As described above, what is at stake for the Jain renouncers who Laidlaw describes going to great lengths to receive food without ever having to accept an invitation or offer a thank you is not merely the immediate moment of transaction – the receipt of food – but the management of the effects that this transaction projects into the future. This is equally true of bureaucratic relationality: the rigid proceduralism that bureaucrats adopt is a carefully managed strategy that is concerned not so much with the immediate outcome of a transaction – whether or not IFF can fund its conference, for instance – but with managing the entanglements and vulnerabilities that this transaction might project into the future.

Remainders as an Engine of Critique

One consequence of the remainders that both formal and informal interactions with bureaucrats and administrators can generate is a critique of IFF staff who create

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unnecessary headaches. In this respect, anthropological investigation of law and bureaucracy has often approached legal and bureaucratic transactions as a site for interrogating narratives of the state (Gordillo 2006; Gupta 1995; Herzfeld 1992). In

IFF’s case, interactions with the state can, as described earlier in the chapter, engender complaints of state officials’ systematically evading responsibility (He 2012), or frustration with bureaucrats’ refusals to contemplate trusting their clients. As frequently as a critique of bureaucrats outside IFF, however, engagements with state institutions precipitate a critical gaze upon colleagues within IFF.

One of the most mundane examples of this is scrutiny of how closely researchers keep to the relevant accounting requirements while on field work or official travel. Often this means making sure to collect sufficient official receipts known as ‘fapiao’ that are stamped with a business from the specific city or county one has visited. Upon returning to Songlin, fapiao are given to IFF administrative staff so that they can compile expense reports to SAPS. Only registered businesses can issue these receipts, and even those businesses that are registered often do not carry fapiao as they must pay tax on these receipts. In rural areas in particular (where most

IFF research trips take place), fapiao can be very hard to come by and I have participated in lengthy journeys around localities in search of fapiao to take back to

Songlin. Accounting requirements also often mean a daily expenditure limit of around

CN¥200 (US$30) per person plus transportation costs. Like the limit on conference expenditure already described, this limit is related to Xi Jinping’s national anti- corruption campaign. And like the conference expenditure limit, it is not always feasible to stay below this limit – either because of high food and accommodation

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costs for IFF staff, or because it is necessary to also buy dinner, and give gifts or gas money to local government officials who have facilitated access to research sites.

IFF administrative staff are aware of these practical difficulties and therefore appreciate why SAPS accounting requirements are often not met: staff are sympathetic to the difficulties that their colleagues face in the field. But they would often complain

(though only sometimes openly) of research staff who they do not think have made adequate efforts to stick to the rules. Yanli, a member of IFF administrative staff, for example, complained of one researcher in particular who would always overspend, and did not appreciate the extra headaches this generated for her and her colleagues.

This is not to say that these headaches were insurmountable. One possibility, for example, would be to use the same name borrowing device that Huli used for the conference – that is to say, to fabricate additional participants in the research trip in question. Or, IFF could cover the funds in excess of allowable travel expenses from funds which were not subject to as strict regulation. But in Yanli’s view, these headaches were entirely unnecessary, and focused the responsibility for them, not with the troublesome financial regulations or their authors, but with the colleague who had not made sufficient effort to work within the constraints of these regulations. Here, bureaucratic headaches bring into view not the irrational, arbitrary or indifferent nature of the regulations involved (Gupta 2012; Herzfeld 1992), but the responsibility of intra-organizational colleagues to one another. In these instances, attention is brought to the externally imposed procedures that IFF must work within and around, only so as to highlight the responsibility of colleagues to appreciate these procedures and share in the work of mitigating headaches.

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A more acute instance of IFF administrative staff’s frustration with colleagues generating bureaucratic headaches was provided by the failure of the office’s communications officer, Wilhelm, to provide the appropriate documentation for his visa renewal. Wilhelm had moved house several months prior to his visa expiring, and had been told by IFF’s administrative team that he must visit the local police station to register his new address with the authorities. Wilhelm refused to do this, telling the administrative team that they should simply use his old address on official forms, or failing that go to the police station to register the new address on his behalf. Having neglected to register his new address, Wilhelm later gave the colleague responsible for renewing his visa documents with his old address and left the country to go on holiday. While he was away, IFF’s administrative staff discovered that Wilhelm had knowingly given them out of date documents showing his old address, but by the time they discovered this his renewal application was already being processed by SAPS administrators (a preliminary stage prior to it being sent to the provincial immigration authorities). The IFF colleagues involved declined to share details of exactly how

SAPS administrators discovered and reacted to this situation, but the response was sufficient for Wilhelm’s employment to be terminated and for the IFF’s director Prof.

Yin to issue an angry warning to the office’s foreign staff. At the weekly staff meeting, he demanded that foreign staff must follow all of the administrative team’s instructions for visa renewals. ‘Do not challenge the system’, he warned everyone, before telling us that he and the administrative team do not have a ‘magic wand’ that would allow us to ignore the law.

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Yin also explained that ‘if we lose out on our visas, the whole office loses’: as he described it, if one person messes up their visa application it brings the whole office under scrutiny and jeopardizes everyone else’s visa renewal. Indeed, one member of the administrative staff blamed the difficulties she subsequently encountered in procuring visas for new international staff on Wilhelm’s misconduct.

IFF staff’s disdain for Wilhelm here is a result of his failure to recognize the labor and vulnerability that bureaucratic work generates, and of his resulting failure to recognize his obligation to IFF colleagues to minimize the labor and vulnerability that the bureaucratic demands of his employment generate.

Remainders as an Engine of Sympathy

If the significance of the system within which IFF must operate precipitates a critical gaze on colleagues, it can also generate sympathy for government officials, and even act to dissolve the critique of responsibility-evading behaviors discussed earlier in this chapter. For example, Matt was having difficulty securing access to a field site in a national nature reserve for an international PhD student who wanted to collect data for the Fungal Diversity project. For everyone involved, this drawn-out process was somewhat frustrating. Discussing this case, however, Mubai pointed out that, as I had experienced in Damei, government officials are often sensitive to the presence of foreign researchers. Mubai suggested that regardless of the PhD student’s intentions, if the official in question were to grant the student access to the field site, the official could find himself having to defend the decision to his superiors. Mubai suggested, moreover, that this could harm his prospects for promotion, and suggested that if he

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were in the official’s position, he might take a similar course of action. Mubai’s sympathetic understanding of the obstructive official’s position is somewhat similar to

Zhu Xiaoyang’s (2004) principle of charity, only the directionality is reversed. Here it is the client of the bureaucracy – a member of IFF staff – who is able to appreciate the context in which an official is working, the potential vulnerability his authorizing a foreign research might generate, and thereby the potential reasonableness of the official’s position.

Mubai’s sympathetic treatment of this government official is, moreover, entirely congruous with Yanli’s above-described frustration with IFF colleagues. Both the obstructive nature reserve official and the IFF researcher who didn’t stick to the financial procedures generate headaches for Mubai, Yanli and their colleagues. But whereas the obligation to minimize headaches that Yanli imputes upon IFF researchers emerges out of their relationship to her as a colleague, the nature reserve official has no such relationship to IFF or its staff. In this respect, the obligation for an official to assist IFF is something that must be generated. So, for example, Mubai described how the willingness of Songlu Prefecture Forestry Bureau to collaborate with IFF in an earlier wild mushroom research project should be understood in the context of, among other things, the funding that IFF brought to the project, and IFF’s agreement to make one of the Bureau’s staff co-author on project publications – a potentially valuable asset for someone trying to climb the ranks of local government. By contrast to my experience in Damei, in Songlu the Forestry Bureau had an interest in placing themselves in a relationship of responsibility to IFF and its work. Discussing IFF’s collaborations with government offices, Mubai thus told me that rather than an

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altruistic concern for research or the improvement of rural livelihoods, government bodies such as the Songlu Forestry Bureau are motivated by their own interests. He highlighted government policies which encourage collaboration between public research institutes and government bodies. By entering into a collaboration, Mubai explained, both sides would be satisfying this policy. Here collaborative relations between research and government emerge as a relationship of mutual self-interest.

In his ethnography of China’s basic-level court, Zhu Suli investigates a quite different set of state institutions to the ones described in this chapter. Zhu Suli’s analysis, nevertheless, reveals issues and concerns that resonate with Mubai’s analysis of the public officials with whom he and his colleagues interact. As, for example, in

Zhu Suli’s (2016, 181) answer to the question, “Why will … judges allow … custom to enter into the judiciary?” Like Zhu Xiaoyang and Liang Zhiping, Zhu Suli provides a legal pluralist account of the dissonance between formal and customary laws, and describes instances of judges recognizing this dissonance and pragmatically negotiating between formal and customary laws. Having established this pluralist description of rural China, Zhu Suli asks this question of why judges are willing to recognize customary laws that have no status in official Chinese law. Indeed, in the light of IFF’s experience with rigid rule following, one might expect to find rural judges applying the law to the letter. As Zhu Suli puts it, “it seems as if [judges] should deal with this case according to the simplified regulations of existing statutes so that it is totally justifiable for them to do so. Strict law enforcement is the most simplified and most risk-free practice implemented.” Zhu Suli argues that this departure from rigid proceduralism cannot be explained by “the judge’s compassion

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toward the villagers or his or her approval of the villagers’ culture”. Instead, argues

Zhu Suli, the judge’s accommodation of customary law is a matter of self-interest. To rigidly apply formal laws, suggests Zhu Suli, would risk “caus[ing] a disturbance in the local area and even arous[ing] ordinary people to besiege the court” (183).

Counterintuitively, rigidly applying the law would make the judicial official vulnerable. The inverse of Huli’s experience with SAPS administrators, in this instance, it is adopting a flexible rather than rigid application of the law that allows the judges Zhu Suli encountered to evade vulnerability.

Mubai’s sympathy for the government official who refuses to help IFF could be read as Mubai offering bureaucrats the kind of “ethical alibi” that “the system” often provides for bureaucrats. Unlike in Herzfeld’s account of this ethical alibi, however, Mubai does not see this as an entirely disingenuous excuse: Mubai recognizes bureaucrats and officials as entangled in a system that is a source not only of power for the bureaucrat, but also of vulnerability. Similarly, Zhu Suli appears to give a far more generous assessment of state officials and institutions than the dehumanizing bureaucracy described by Herzfeld (1992). Nevertheless, there remains a sense in which Herzfeld’s and Zhu Suli’s accounts converge. By dichotomously opposing altruism to the self-interest of officials, and then rejecting a role for altruism,

Zhu Suli’s bureaucrat seems every bit as indifferent as Herzfeld’s. It is simply that in

Zhu Suli’s ethnography – as in Mubai’s account of IFF’s collaboration with Songlu

Forestry Bureau – we find bureaucratic self-interest to be productive of a public good.

Zhu Suli sets out a commitment to “sympathetic understanding” of the courts as a central aspect of his effort to bring the knowledge and practices of basic level judicial

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offices – their “native resources” (bentu ziyuan) (S. Zhu 1996) – to bear on China’s ongoing legal reforms (S. Zhu 2016, xli). And in this respect, he, like Mubai, suggests that collaborating with government officials must entail the abandonment of the moralizing that sometimes accompanies critical studies of state institutions. This sympathetic approach, however, does not lead Zhu Suli or Mubai to question a central aspect of such analyses: that bureaucrats are motivated more or less exclusively by narrow self-interests.

The narrative of officials acting out of calculations of self-interest are by no means unusual in contemporary China (L. Li 2012; L. Zhang 2001; S. Zhang and

McGhee 2017). It is, however, not an analysis shared by all of Mubai’s colleagues at

IFF. During a two-day launch meeting that IFF had organized for the Lengshan Multi-

Stakeholder Platform, participants were led around numerous farms and plantations by

Director Ma of the prefectural government’s Crop Development Office, followed closely at all times by a photographer from the local newspaper. During a debriefing of the project launch, I questioned the project manager Bob’s reading of Director Ma’s enthusiasm for the project. In Bob’s view, Ma’s outward display of enthusiasm for the project suggested that we could rely on him to commit his office to participate in the multi-stakeholder project. Responding with a degree of cynicism, I highlighted Ma’s eagerness for photo opportunities and the fact that Ma had not yet committed his office to any concrete activities. Making an interest-orientated analysis not unlike Zhu

Suli or Mubai’s, I suggested that Director Ma’s apparent enthusiasm might merely have reflected his desire to build his reputation or gain face via the newspaper publicity and his association with an important-sounding international project.

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Jiaolong, another member of the project team, challenged this suggestion. She agreed that Director Ma had indeed used the launch and the invitation of journalists as an opportunity to build face, but argued that he was also motivated by a genuine desire to spur sustainable development in Lengshan. Jiaolong agreed that the journalist’s presence had been organized to impress Ma’s superiors. But rather than, as my naïve comments had suggested, moralizing Director Ma’s reputation building, Jiaolong recognized such work as a necessary aspect of any official’s career. Like Mubai,

Jiaolong thought it important to appreciate and empathize with the governmental system within which officials operated. Beyond this, however, Jiaolong highlighted the value to Lengshan that she believed Director Ma’s work had brought and would continue to bring; something which had been achieved within the context of Director

Ma’s ambitious careerism, but not defined by it. Taking Ma’s professional work for something more than merely an effort to build a personal career, Jiaolong explained that Ma had spent the past 30 years working to establish the prefectural Crop

Development Office. This is an office that she believed to be a valuable stakeholder in efforts to bring sustainable forestry and agriculture to Lengshan, and is an office

Jiaolong suggested would not exist at all without Ma’s endeavors. Unlike Mubai or

Zhu Suli’s analysis of their interlocutors, however, this positive outcome was not merely a fortunate coincidence of Ma narrowly pursuing his own self-interest. Ma’s work to establish and build this office had been driven, in Jialong’s view, by a sincere desire to develop diverse and sustainable cropping systems for Lengshan. Reproaching my inability to see beyond bureaucratic self-interest, Jiaolong highlighted how

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evading vulnerability within the precarious hierarchies of Chinese officialdom might not be Director Ma’s only motivation.

Jiaolong’s engagement with Director Ma can be described in contrast not only to Mubai and Zhu Suli’s accounts of bureaucratic self-interest, but also to Huli’s experiences with SAPs administrators. What had frustrated Huli was the refusal of these administrators to contemplate trust. As I argued above, Huli understood trust in a manner that implied that what was at stake was vulnerability rather than confidence or believability. In this respect, refusal to trust was admonished as a refusal to allows oneself to be vulnerable, it is an endeavor to shore up one’s own future regardless of the consequences for others. In effect, when I described Director Ma as being interested only in gaining face, I had imputed a similar reading upon him: he was, in my naïve assessment, only interested in shoring up his own position as a powerful member of a bureaucratic elite. The reason Jiaolong castigated me was because she saw in his actions the potential for something beyond this. Without denying that

Director Ma indulges the imperatives of survival and success within the bureaucratic system he inhabits, Jiaolong pointed to work that Director Ma had done that could not be interpreted merely as an attempt to evade vulnerability: in pursuing the establishment of a government office to pursue sustainable agricultural development,

Director Ma opened himself up to vulnerabilities that he could otherwise have evaded.

In this official Jiaolong found someone with whom it might be possible to build trust.

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Conclusion

The document-mediated, proceduralist relationships that typify many of Huli and her colleagues’ interactions with SAPs administrators are relationships characterized by the refusal of bureaucrats to trust, understood here as a refusal to render oneself vulnerable. Rather than apply rules and regulations flexibly, bureaucrats operating in this mode prefer to turn a blind eye to the pervasive use of documentary fixes such as the reporting of fictional conference attendees. This highly proceduralist relationality generates remainders and vulnerabilities for bureaucratic clients like Huli that extend into the future beyond the transaction of financial reports and official documents. But for the bureaucrats themselves formal and informal relationships are carefully controlled to minimize the entailments of vulnerability for them that any relationship might project beyond the present. Insofar as bureaucratic relationships generate effects into the future, these are often effects born by the client, and of no consequence to the bureaucrat who is careful to shore up her own future. At IFF, this is a relational form that generates obligations for colleagues to minimize the bureaucratic labor and vulnerability that their activities generate for colleagues. In this respect, Wilhelm’s status as office pariah emanated from his failure to recognize the labor and vulnerability that bureaucratic relationships generate, and the obligations to his colleagues that this potential for labor and vulnerability imply.

If Huli’s analysis of trust-averse SAPs administrators resonates with Michael

Herzfeld’s critique of bureaucratic dehumanization, there are also instances in which, like Zhu Suli, IFF staff offer more sympathetic appraisals of their bureaucratic interlocutors. Zhu Suli’s (2016, xli) commitment to “sympathetic understanding” of

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the courts he studies, must be appreciated in relation to his effort to bring the knowledge and techniques of basic level judicial offices – what Zhu Suli (1996) refers to as “native resources” (bentu ziyuan) – to bear on China’s ongoing legal reforms. In this respect, Zhu Suli’s scholarship and his advocacy for the use of China’s native resources is not only a description of the collaborative nature of rural judicial work and its negotiation between the contrastive knowledges, values and imperatives of rural communities and the modern Chinese state, it is also the outcome of a collaborative engagement with his ethnographic interlocutors. Similarly, when Mubai offered a sympathetic analysis of some of the officials he had worked with, he did so in the context of IFF’s efforts to collaborate with them. For Mubai and for Zhu Suli, however, forging productive collaboration does not require looking beyond the self- interest of bureaucrats. Indeed, in Zhu Suli’s analysis, flexibly applying the law in accordance with local customs operates as a strategy for judicial officials to reduce their vulnerability to disturbance or besiegement by the rural communities they serve.

Similarly, in Mubai’s analysis, the promise of shoring up an official’s position constitutes productive grounds for drawing them into a collaborative project. No more than in the proceduralist relationality for which Huli criticized bureaucrats would pursuing Zhu Suli’s collaborative agenda require judicial officers to trust anyone.

Collaboration here does not require officials to render themselves vulnerable – it implies futures that are more certain rather than less so.

This is a different form of collaborative relationship than the one Jiaolong envisaged with Director Ma. Jiaolong recognized Ma as someone who had taken risks, and had made himself vulnerable for the sake of a concern with which she sought

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common cause: the development of diverse and sustainable cropping systems for

Lengshan. What is at stake here is not merely a recognition that by virtue of the system that they are subject to officials are necessarily themselves vulnerable. What makes the potential for collaboration with Ma so compelling is Jiaolong’s recognition that he has acted in ways that might have made him and his position more rather than less vulnerable. Recognizing Ma as a person open to the possibility of trusting in – that is to say, making himself vulnerable for the sake of – the Lengshan Multi-

Stakeholder Platform and its stakeholders, it became possible for Jiaolong to imagine collaboration with him: collaboration that would be driven not merely by Ma’s desire to shore up his future but by a shared commitment to agricultural and environmental sustainability in Lengshan.

This model of trust is very different to the kind of relationship that Dennis lamented as suffering from an overabundance of trust.16 Ma and Jiaolong’s trust in each other promised the kind of entanglement and uncertain future that trust-evading

SAPs administrators worked so hard to avoid. More like the kind of relationship that

Dennis had hoped to generate with his project participants, by committing himself to the Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder Platform, Jiaolong hoped that Ma would embrace a path whose future was willfully vulnerable to the entanglements and interruptions of his collaborators.

16 See Chapter 2.

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CHAPTER 4

AGROFORESTRY TEMPORALITIES

In Chapter 1, I described how proponents of theory of change attempt to impose novel temporal frameworks on scientific practice. This chapter explores how IFF scientists’ designs for novel agroforestry systems entail an analogous effort to transform the temporalities in which stakeholders from policy-makers to foresters and farmers engage agri-environmental landscapes. Implicit in IFF scientists’ agroforestry and agroecological designs is a concern that likewise animates scholarship in the environmental humanities: that the dominant temporal forms of contemporary economic, social and political life cannot provide a pathway to environmental sustainability. In Timescapes of Modernity, for example, Barbara Adam (1998a) describes the limits of “industrial time” and places temporality heart and center of the challenge of constructing “socio-environmental futures” (also Buck 2015; Fitz-Henry

2017; Lipscomb 2011; Nixon 2011). This chapter builds upon this body of work by highlighting some of the ways in which a similar, albeit less explicit, concern animates natural scientific research into agroforestry. Focusing on agroforestry scientists’ efforts to harness existing ecological, social and political forms in their designs for sustainable land-use, I highlight some of the blind-spots and limiting assumptions both of agroforestry science at IFF and of environmental humanities scholarship. Having argued for the extensibility of the agroforestry imperative to harness existing forms, the chapter concludes by pointing towards the institutional and professional

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constraints that IFF scientists would inevitably face in any effort to deepen engagement with their human and non-human interlocutors.

The Temporalities of Agroforestry

Many of IFF scientists’ designs for human land use in China and the surrounding region involve agroforestry. Agroforestry is the integration of trees and shrubs into agricultural landscapes. This is something that can take diverse forms and encompasses a significant amount of global agricultural land. At the time of my field research a team at IFF were using satellite imagery to map tree cover on global agricultural land. This research suggests about 40% of global agricultural land incorporates some tree cover. All trees, however, are not equal. Some of the same IFF scientists have used similar satellite imagery to undermine the Chinese government’s claims that its ongoing reforestation programs have been a success. These researchers highlighted that much of China’s ‘reforested’ land is in fact mono-crop rubber plantations. They argue that the Chinese state’s broad definition of ‘forest’ obscures the ongoing conversion of natural forest into rubber plantation. Many of these plantations incorporate a single intercrop such as pineapple or coffee in-between the rubber trees, and are therefore, in a sense, agroforestry. These two-crop plantations, however are a long way from the agroforests that IFF scientists aspire to bring into being.

IFF scientists often evaluate forest and agroforestry systems on a spectrum of ecological complexity. In order to present agroforestry options to potential participants in the Eco-Friendly Rubber project, for example, Chad put together a

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PowerPoint slide showing a spectrum of agroforestry systems from least to most complex. At one end was a rubber plantation with a pineapple intercrop. This common practice is, in Chad’s view, only a mild improvement on the bare earth that intersperses mono-crop plantations. This simple agroforestry system, no less than a mono-crop plantation, depends upon chemical inputs, and, no more than a mono-crop plantation, provides very little habitat for flora and fauna. At the other end of Chad’s spectrum was a multi-species ‘analog forest’: an agroforestry system that mimics the structure and functions of a natural forest, incorporating a rich undergrowth and multiple species in the tree canopy. Chad and his colleagues argue that such systems offer several advantages. Plant diversity – especially of indigenous species – promotes microbial diversity which in turn benefits soil health and nutrient cycling. An effectively designed agroforestry system therefore does not need the externally introduced fertilizers upon which mono-cultures depend. Soil health and soil fertility is instead achieved through by mimicking and harnessing the same processes that sustain a natural forest. Biodiverse systems, IFF colleagues also argue, mitigate against the pest problems faced by monocultures. By providing habitat for the ‘natural predators’ of agricultural pests, complex agroforestry mitigates against the sporadic pest epidemics that typify monocultures, replacing ‘chemical control’ with ‘biological control’. In its approach to nutrient cycling and pest control, as well as to other agroecological challenges, agroforestry mimics and harnesses processes that ecological scientists observe in natural forests. Often explicitly seeking to distance themselves from the industrially-disciplined and chemical-intensive designs that have characterized so many modernist agriculture and forestry initiatives (Gupta 1998;

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Scott 1998; Shapiro 2001; Sivaramakrishnan 1999), IFF scientists propose working with the forms that they find in nature.

Whereas the simplest forms of modernist agriculture operate according to an annual cycle, complex agroforestry systems, like natural forests, require much longer timeframes. If the natural forests that Chad seeks to mimic contain trees that are over a century old, to mimic the rhythms of this forest one needs a similarly long temporal horizon. Indeed, this was one of the frustrations that IFF colleagues experienced with the MELA framework. As described in Chapter 1, M&E targets that only extend four years into the future seem wildly inappropriate to a project investigating cropping systems that operated on a multi-decade cycle. As much as IFF scientists placed their faith in the idea that bureaucratic headaches of this kind did not transform scientific practice, this was a significant constraint on the Agroforestry for Myanmar Project. As much as the agroforestry system they set up would attempt to harness the temporal cycle of forest ecosystems, for the project to procure funding, these agroforestry systems would also need to harness the Food Security Fund’s short funding cycles. It was in part for this reason that IFF’s project team selected fast-growing nitrogen fixing trees for their two trial systems in Myanmar. Though these trees would not produce any crops, they would fix nitrogen in the soils and thereby benefit the crops grown between them. This was a benefit, Matt explained, that it might be possible to see even within just four years. The imperative to produce and demonstrate such short-term benefits was nevertheless a drastic truncation of the timeframe in which IFF colleagues would otherwise have designed and evaluated a system.

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In the Eco-Friendly Rubber Project, Chad saw a slightly different challenge in the timeframe of complex agroforestry. Chad wanted to incorporate slow-growing timber trees into rubber plantations. The species he proposed would produce very high value timber under harvesting cycles that could stretch over a hundred years. Chad’s knowledge of how farmers in Lengshan currently approach rubber cultivation made him pessimistic about the prospects of farmers adopting such a system. In a monoculture system, a rubber tree could be tapped within just six years and a plantation would have a productive lifetime of a decade or two. Chad was suggesting a much more extensive timeframe, and a very different rhythm to cultivation. Chad was acutely aware of what this implied for the temporal structure of economic planning: just as much as his system would harness the ecological form of a natural forest, it would need to harness the economic imperatives that drove existing rubber cultivation.

Chad’s hope was that rubber cultivators might see that his system would be more profitable in the long-term, but he was nevertheless concerned that this would mean approaching economic planning on a much more elongated timeframe than he imagined rubber farmers were used to.

Chad and his colleagues would also offer arguments that complex agroforestry systems are intrinsically better suited to the temporal rhythms and horizons not only of forest ecosystems, but also of unstable capitalist economies. The period of my field research coincided with a drop in global rubber prices. The consequence for rubber farmers in China and Southeast Asia was that once lucrative plantations now offered only meagre returns. So much so that many farmers ceased tapping their rubber trees.

Chad envisages his diverse agroforestry systems as a means to mitigate against

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inevitable fluctuations in crop prices. An IFF team, of which I was a member, made a similar point to participants in a training workshop delivered to farmers as part of the

Qingshan Agroforestry project. Whereas many farmers in the region surrounding

Qingshan relied primarily on tobacco mono-cropping, our workshop sought to highlight the potential risks of depending on a single crop and sought to persuade farmers that diverse agroforestry systems promised, among other benefits, more stable incomes. We promoted agroforestry as a form that promises stability within an economic system characterized by the unpredictable rhythm of price fluctuations.

The need for agroforestry systems to harness and to adapt to the existing form of the landscape makes IFF scientists’ proposals for agroforestry systems highly place- specific. In the Eco-Friendly Rubber project Chad’s goal was to stretch the temporal horizon of rubber cultivation, but the temporal structures that IFF plans for agroforestry respond to and impose take diverse forms. A good illustration of this is the Agroforestry for Myanmar Project. IFF initiated the project at an opportune moment, Jacob explained to me, because there was a recent and ongoing decline in shifting cultivation. With farmers swapping land use systems, Jacob saw this as a timely moment for research into agroforestry in upland Myanmar, and, Jacob inferred, this was likely a moment when farmers would be especially receptive to new ideas.

Replacing shifting cultivation, however, was something about which Jacob and his colleagues were quite ambivalent. Several IFF staff, including Jacob, had conducted research with shifting cultivators, and had contributed to a now relatively well- established scientific consensus that shifting agriculture – despite continuing popular and governmental prejudice against it – can be a very effective and sustainable land

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use system (Cairns 2007; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Forsyth and Walker 2008).

Indeed, in other contexts, IFF scientists had proposed setting up projects to reintroduce shifting cultivation systems to southwest China. Nevertheless, Jacob and his colleagues did not see this as a realistic option for Myanmar. Jacob gave three reasons for this. The first was government bans they he did not see much prospect in fighting.

The second was increasing population density, and the concurrent intensification of land pressure. A third and related factor was the rapid intensification of timber harvesting in Myanmar; something which undermined the forest ecosystems upon which shifting cultivation relies.

According to Jacob, the combination of these factors was generating pressure to produce ever greater outputs from the same land. This in turn was pushing many farmers to pursue shorter and shorter fallow periods. Increasingly, fallow periods were becoming so short that the forests upon which the system depended could not regenerate in between crops, leading to a spiral of land degradation. Shifting cultivation systems that are extremely effective in cycles of twenty or thirty years, cannot be sustained on cycles of five or ten years. No less than an agroforestry system,

Jacob and his colleagues understood a shifting cultivation system as a system that could harness the productive potential of natural ecological cycles – in this instance the process of fire disturbance and subsequent regeneration. The challenge for

Myanmar, however, was not merely to operate within the abstract idea of a natural forest, but to develop a cultivation system that could flourish in the political, social, economic, as well as ecological, constraints of the landscape. At this time, Jacob suggested, these constraints mitigate against shifting cultivation. In this instance,

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therefore, the question was not so much of stretching the temporal horizon – shifting cultivation already operated on a multi-decade timeframe – but rather of rendering the ecological timeframe sedentary. As Jacob saw it, sedentary agroforestry was the most likely system to flourish within the political, social and ecological landscape of contemporary Myanmar.

Aside from political and social considerations, climate change, another major focus of IFF research, is a phenomenon that renders IFF scientists’ knowledge of ecological futures acutely unstable and uncertain. IFF scientists’ responses to climate change take diverse temporal forms. One response has been to model predicted future climatic conditions, and to ask whether crops currently cultivated in a particular region will continue to be sustainable in coming decades. This orientation suggests a further iteration of stretching the horizon of agroforestry and agroecological planning. Rather than implement cropping systems that are suited only to today’s climatic conditions, climate modelling allows research and development projects to make plans according to forecasted climatic conditions. When selecting species for an agroforestry system, one would select species that are appropriate not only to current climatic conditions, but also to the region’s projected future climate.

Other IFF projects have studied how rural communities have responded to changing climatic conditions. One such research project found Tibetan pastoralists have adapted grazing patterns in response to climate change-induced shifts in seasonal patterns. A publication from this project calls for scientists and policy-makers to learn from these forms of ‘indigenous innovation’ and criticizes existing strict government regulation of grazing on the Tibetan plateau. The authors of this study argue that these

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regulations constrain and inhibit indigenous innovation. Though this was not an agroforestry project, this attitude to what IFF scientists call ‘indigenous’ or

‘traditional’ ecological knowledge resonates with many IFF colleagues’ imaginations of indigenous knowledge in relation to agroforestry. In a number of articles, for example, Prof. Yin, who trained as an ethnobotanist, has argued that designs for productive and sustainable land use systems must learn from indigenous land use systems such as shifting cultivation and agroforestry. In this respect, agroforestry scientists’ efforts to harness the ecological forms of natural forests, itself borrows from these scientists’ interpretations of how indigenous communities manage the land

(Malézieux 2012, 17–18). This is equally reflected in the Agroforestry for Myanmar project where, though IFF’s project would sedentize traditional shifting cultivation systems, Jacob and his colleagues sought to harness indigenous land management in their new agroforestry systems by adopting some of the crop combinations used in shifting systems. Focus on climate change adaption, however, accentuates the open- ended and ever-changing nature not only of the ecosystem, but of what agroforestry scientists understand as indigenous people’s harnessing of that ecosystem in productive systems. Prof. Yin’s analysis of indigenous knowledge, therefore, renders it a fluid and ever-changing form to be harnessed both in the present and in a future that will be transformed by climate change.

A further climate change-focused article to which several IFF colleagues contributed orientated itself towards a distant past. In this paper, the authors look back tens of millions of years to the emergence of nitrogen-fixing symbiosis – a symbiosis between certain plant species and bacteria wherein bacteria make atmospheric

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nitrogen available to the plant. What they found was that the evolution of these symbiotic systems emerged at times of significant climatic change, including high temperatures and high atmospheric CO2. According to Matt, one of the co-authors, an implication of these findings is that nitrogen-fixing symbiosis might play a role in climate change adaptation and even mitigation. The emergence of nitrogen-fixing tree species during times of high atmospheric CO2, Matt told me, suggest that they are well-suited to the conditions of contemporary anthropogenic climate change.

Moreover, Matt explained, these species tend to sequester carbon at a much greater rate than non-nitrogen-fixing species. The subsequent drop in CO2 that they observed subsequent to peaks in nitrogen symbiosis evolution, Matt suggested, may even point to the ability of this mechanism to counteract increases in atmospheric CO2. This was, in Matt’s view, a good argument for planting greater volumes of nitrogen-fixing trees not only in agricultural landscapes, but also as a part of forest conservation and restoration projects. Though somewhat speculative, Matt’s proposal mirrors Chad’s call for nature-mimicking agroforestry systems. This mimicking, however, operated on a geological timeframe: Matt proposed to harness nitrogen-fixing symbiosis in a manner that mimicked a process that had occurred tens of millions of years previously.

But it also implied a structuring of land use planning on a similar geological timeframe. Matt’s proposal would structure land management not merely on a century-long agroforestry system cycle, but on a timeframe of global climate change.

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Imposing Time

No less than a theory of change, IFF scientists’ diverse agroforestry and agroecological projects seek to impose novel temporal frameworks: in this case upon the work of planning and implementing sustainable land management. Much like theory of change, these temporal frameworks are often explicitly at odds with the temporalities that currently guide land management. In the case of introducing slow- growing timber trees into a rubber agroforestry system, for example, Chad understood rubber farmers to be orientated towards a relatively short-term financial return and sought to re-orientate farmers to a longer-term perspective. In many respects, this interpretation of farmers’ narrow temporal horizon is tied to Chad and his colleagues’ frequent attachment to a distinctly economistic view of human behavior. Much like

Alistair’s business case for agroforestry,17 Chad and his colleagues often imagined that the most effective way to promote agroforestry would be to appeal to the economic advantages. Indeed, stretching the horizon of farmers’ imaginations did not merely mean replacing economic values with ecological ones, it involved showing how a longer-term perspective would generate economic as well as ecological benefits.

This does not mean that IFF scientists were unable to appreciate moments where human motivation exceeded economic calculation. Returning from a trip to rubber plantations in southern Thailand, for example, Chad used the office’s morning coffee break to excitedly describe how he had met a rubber farmer who departs from the common practice of clearing the undergrowth of a rubber plantation. In contrast to

17 See Chapter 1.

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the stark, herbicide-managed, bare undergrowth of most mono-crop rubber plantations, the undergrowth of this plantation was thick with many of the species that populated neighboring natural forests. Chad took great delight in reporting how this rubber farmer had explained to him that his goal was to make the rubber plantation look as much as possible like a natural rainforest. Chad took this example as evidence for the broader potential of his own plan for nature-mimicking agroforestry systems.

Chad, moreover, marveled in the fact that this farmer, like himself, placed value on the aesthetics, and not just the economic productivity, of a forest.

In a later planning meeting to discuss the same project, however, the significance of extra-economic considerations seemed to once again recede into irrelevance. Here, Chad, Jiaolong and I discussed an upcoming meeting with potential project partners in Lengshan and deliberated how Jiaolong, who would represent IFF at that meeting, should present the project. Some way into the meeting, Jiaolong suggested that as well as promoting the economic benefits of rubber, we should promote the possibilities of producing rubber plantations that contribute to a more

‘beautiful’ Lengshan. This idea seemed to resonate with Chad’s earlier retelling of the rubber farmer he met who had developed an aesthetically pleasing plantation, as well as with Jiaolong’s own nostalgia for a time when her own home was surrounded by beautiful forest rather than mono-crop planation (a sentiment she had expressed on an earlier trip to her home town in Lengshan). Chad politely passed on the idea, suggesting it was a nice sentiment, but perhaps not an effective way of promoting environmentally-friendly rubber. For Chad, it seemed, the energies of farmers and other stakeholders could only be harnessed via their economic interests.

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I observed a similar instance of the erasure of land-users extra-economic motivations during a trip to the Qingshan Agroforestry project. As described in the

Introduction, this project was sponsored by a cosmetics company, Metelli. Given the importance of this kind of work to Metelli’s brand and corporate image, a Metelli corporate social responsibility officer, Liz, organized a trip to Qingshan for an international magazine. During this visit, the magazine reporter and Liz quizzed a local farmer, Mr. Wang, about the tree nursery that he was showing us around.

Though it now received support from the Qingshan Agroforestry project and was a key source for trees planted in the district’s new agroforestry systems, Mr. Wang had first started this nursery several years prior to the project’s initiation. Many of the trees in the nursery were nut trees that Mr. Wang would sell to other farmers setting up agroforestry systems on their own land. Others, however, are Yunnan firs that Mr.

Wang plans to plant in the district’s natural forests. As Mr. Wang explained, when he was growing up, Yunnan fir scattered the landscape, many so big that two people could embrace the tree from either side and their hands would not meet. In the intervening years, however, people had felled most of these trees for their timber, and

Yunnan fir are now few and far between. Mr. Wang described how he had wanted to restore these trees to the forest so that his own children might grow up to see them.

Less than an hour after hearing this, when the magazine’s reporter asked Liz to describe the Qingshan Agroforestry Project, the extra-economic was once again erased. Liz described how through agroforestry Metelli wanted to give farmers an economic incentive to protect and regenerate forest ecosystems. Unmoved by the momentum that nostalgia for his own youth and hope for future generations gave to

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Mr. Wang’s reforestation initiative, the only momentum that Liz could envisage harnessing was that generated by Mr. Wang and his peers’ economic interests.

Each of IFF’s agroforestry projects seek to impose a novel temporal framework upon local land management. Just as Chad sees himself bringing the longer temporal horizon of complex agroforestry to rubber cultivation, the Qingshan

Agroforestry project seeks to stretch the timeframe of local land management from the annual cycle of tobacco mono-cropping to agroforestry systems that integrate perennial tree crops. Equally, these are both temporal impositions that make little accommodation to the diverse temporal forms upon which they are imposing. When agroforestry projects claim to stretch the temporal scope of those managing the land,

IFF colleagues and their supra-local project partners all too often assume that their interlocutors hold only very limited sets of economic motivations. In doing so they may be ignoring potentials for harnessing forms of aesthetic valuation, nostalgia and hope for future generations that might generate momentum towards more diverse agroforestry systems.

In some respect this echoes Chapter 1’s analysis. There I highlighted how scientists already have their own theories of change and pointed towards the latent models for impactful science inherent in these theories of change. These situations and my analyses of them, however, are asymmetrical in a manner that goes beyond the obvious difference in the power dynamics that animate IFF scientists’ relationships with local land-users compared to their relationships with proponents of theory of change such as Lesley or the Food Security Fund. First, my ethnographic data was collected primarily with scientists. I make claims about how scientists temporalize the

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cause and effects of their work that are grounded in in-depth empirical research. I cannot offer the same empirically-grounded analysis of local land-users’ attitudes towards rubber cultivation in China and Southeast Asia or forest regeneration in

Qingshan. Rather, I use IFF colleagues’ discussions of these communities, as well as my own fleeting interactions with the same communities, to highlight a particular way in which IFF colleagues are sometimes satisfied to operate according to stereotypes of land-users that are, at best, extremely limited. My aim, therefore, is not so much to provide a rich account of the temporal orientations already familiar to land-users upon which IFF colleagues might find inspiration or common ground, as to highlighting instances where IFF projects have overlooked very stark opportunities for exploring these orientations and their potentials. And to thereby highlight one direction in which we might extend the agroforestry philosophy of harnessing existing forms.

A Walk in the Forest

Not unlike theory of change and agroforestry, scholarship in the environmental humanities often aspires to create new temporal frameworks to guide human imaginations of the landscape. Michael Lipscomb (2011, 302–4), for example, draws from Theodor Adorno to argue that “build[ing] a sounder environmental future” will require the development of an “affirmative countertempo” to the timelessness of economic rationalization. Here, the challenge of contemporary environmental politics is, in part at least, a question of transforming the temporality of humanity’s relationship to the environment (also Adam 1998a; Buck 2015; Fitz-Henry 2017;

Nixon 2011). This is a challenge that Anna Tsing (2015) likewise takes on in The

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Mushroom at the End of the World. Tsing seeks an “after” to capitalist progress in what she calls “salvage”. In contrast to Lipscomb, however, this is something that

Tsing finds not in the abstract work of political theory, but something she draws from ethnography of mushroom pickers. As Tsing puts it, “isn’t mushroom collecting a place to look, after progress?” (Tsing 2015, 66). Like Tsing, I am interested in the temporal possibilities for environmental politics that we might find in ethnography.

The work of cultivating temporalities for environmental politics, however, is often imagined only as a counterpoint to science (cf. Harding 1991; Keller 1985; Roy

2008; Tsing 2015). Barbara Adam (1998b, 388), for example, argues that “the a- temporal, rationalized and de-contextualized time of the clock is an essential pre- condition to scientific measurement and economic exchange” (also T. M. Li 2007;

Mitchell 2002; cf. Helmreich 2009; Myers 2015). Rendered in these singular terms, the environmental humanities have nothing positive to learn from conventional scientific practice. Scholars in the humanities and critical social sciences have had considerable justification for critiquing the failures of natural scientists to make space for the knowledge and practices of law and indigenous knowledge in scientific agricultural and environmental initiatives. As humanists and critical social scientists we should likewise not be so quick to ignore the knowledge and practices of our interlocutors in the natural sciences. This might mean accounting for the numerous ways in which scientists like the ones I worked alongside at IFF are, albeit in a less explicit manner than scholars in the environmental humanities, themselves preoccupied with concern for cultivating timescapes capable of facilitating human and non-human flourishing. In Chad’s plan for nature-mimicking rubber agroforestry or

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Matt’s speculative reflections on the lessons that can be drawn from the behavior of forests tens of millions of years ago, there are temporalities that humanists might not only ‘counter’ but also harness in their own political and intellectual work. Here, however, I want to return to a slightly different temporal aspect of scientific practice: the interruption.

My earliest experience of IFF field research was to follow Matt, Kumar – at that time a PhD student and project assistant – and four IFF graduate students to visit a research site where one of the students would conduct fungal diversity surveys for the following three wet seasons. The site itself consisted of neatly marked out grids that the student was to visit on a regular schedule and record the macro-fungi (mushrooms) that he found there. On the face of it, this set-up might typify the rationalized and de- contextualized practice that is the object of Adam’s critique. What excited Matt and

Kumar as much as the site itself, however, was the hour or so of hiking through the forests that was necessary to get to the site. This was a hike punctuated by the constant interruptions from Matt and Kumar as they stopped us all to point out the numerous points of interest from insect-devouring cordyceps mushrooms to fantastic beetles and unusual tree species.

This fascination with the forests, and the enjoyment of walking them was something that inspired many IFF scientists to pursue the work they did. (Though, other colleagues, including two of the students who joined the trip, were much happier in the comfort of a campus laboratory or greenhouse). But as well as inspiring interest in forest ecosystems, this playful walking in the forests is often a productive, even essential, aspect of scientific knowledge. Kumar, for example, specialized in macro-

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fungal taxonomy. For his scientific work, noticing unusual mushrooms in the forest was a vital skill, and as intuitive as it seemed to him it was a skill that came much less easily to the social scientist. For every dozen rare or undocumented species that

Kumar spotted on the numerous walks I made with him during my two years in southwest China, I would pick out one or two species so common that they had long ceased to interrupt Kumar’s attention. This was something that Matt took great pleasure in teasing me for: often asking me how I had managed to walk past the most fantastic plants and mushrooms without interrupting my stride. There was no simple technology or tool that would allow me to contribute here.18 Without the time or the discipline to develop the kind of technical skill that Kumar had, on walks in the forest

I contributed nothing more than distracting questions.

Walking in forests was something that frequently animated weekends and time off just as much as journeys to and from field sites. This leisure time was on occasion also scientifically productive. One of Kumar’s projects when he later joined IFF as a post-doctoral fellow was to develop new strands of cultivatable mushrooms. This was a process that often begins by finding a wild specimen of the mushroom he wants to domesticate. In the case of one valuable medicinal mushroom Kumar was searching for, Matt told Kumar that he thought he had seen this mushroom a year or so previously when he had been walking in a forest searching for potential rock climbing venues. Some days later, Kumar and I followed Matt an hour or so into the forest to the location where he recalled seeing this mushroom, and with some foraging he, sure

18 See Chapter 5.

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enough, found another. In this instance, a leisurely walk in the forest produced an opportunity for Kumar’s mushroom cultivation research several years subsequently.

As well as discovering rare mushrooms, this kind of play could also be productive of novel research projects. A more unlikely instance of this was the case of a research project to investigate plastic-digesting crickets. One of IFF’s graduate students briefly kept a pet scorpion in the office. Long after the scorpion departed, the crickets that were its feed remained in the office, and IFF colleagues continued to feed dried noodles to the crickets. On one occasion, a colleague threw in the plastic wrapper with the noodles. Some weeks later, another colleague noticed with astonishment that the crickets were eating the plastic wrapper. Shortly afterwards,

Younis, an IFF postdoctoral fellow, set up a study to investigate this phenomenon. As a PhD student, Younis had investigated fungi capable of degrading plastic, and observing these crickets eat plastic Younis saw a number of fascinating research questions, and exciting potentials: what stomach bacteria were allowing the crickets to digest the plastic?; which enzymes were involved in this process?; was the plastic poisoning the crickets?; would using the crickets as animal feed or compost introduce plastic toxins into the food chain?

These playful moments provide unexpected impetus for productive scientific work, often in ways that are not apparent at the moment they happen, let alone at a prior point of planning. Here then is a further reminder of the temporal incongruity as stake in audit frameworks such as MELA that impose predefined endpoints for scientific practice. But it is also a reminder that the neatly marked out grids to which I followed Kumar and Matt do not represent the only time and space that scientific

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practice occupies. This reflects a fundamental insight of STS scholarship: science cannot be studied only from a single moment in time (Latour 1987; Mol and Law

1994; Pickering 1995; Traweek 1988). If one observed Matt and Kumar only as they constrained their gaze to the macro-fungi within the neatly prescribed grids to which we had walked that day in the forest, or observed them only as they analyzed the spreadsheets of macrofungal data that this gazing produced, then one might easily reach the conclusion that science operates in “the a-temporal, rationalized and de- contextualized time of the clock” (Adam 1998b, 388). Focus on playful walking in the forest, or on time spent observing pet crickets, however, reminds us how agri- environmental science is also punctuated by vital moments of unexpected interruption: by moments that both stand outside of rationalized data collection and provide the impetus for this data collection.

Many anthropologists make a virtue of the open-ended nature of ethnography, often contrasting this with the depoliticizing effects of rigid technical knowledge

(Ferguson 1994; T. M. Li 2007). The difference between anthropological science and agri-environmental science, however, is not so much in the presence or absence of unstructured curiosity and openness to unexpected interruptions, but the temporal sequence of these moments. The plastic-eating insects and the wild medicinal mushroom both emerged in moments of play that subsequently gave way to more structured data collection – in these instances in the forms of carefully controlled and observed trials and experiments. This seems incongruous to anthropologists for whom data collection is the most open-ended moment of research – the moment where we are most open to the interruptions of the environments that we inhabit. Scientists at

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IFF are similarly open to the interruptions of the plants, fungi, creatures and ecosystems that they study, but this playful openness is something that precedes and informs rather than animates the moment of formal data collection. Insofar as scientists’ closure to the humans and non-humans that populate the environments they study constrain the potential for a more inclusive environmental politics, the challenge may not so much be with the absence of scientific openness, but with the rhythm and frequency at which this openness punctuates scientific practice (Garey, Hertz, and

Nelson 2014; Mountz et al. 2015).

Finding Time

IFF colleagues’ designs for agroforestry aim to harness the efficacy of existing forms

(Kohn 2013, 153–88). This means not only mimicking the structure of natural forests, but also of cultivating agroforestry systems capable of flourishing within the social, economic and political forms that these systems must both transform and inhabit. Here

IFF scientists propose imposing forms and temporal structures upon a landscape, but rather than de novo forms, these are forms that take their inspiration from the landscape they are intended to change. On occasion, however, the narrow view that

IFF scientists take of the social forms that they intend to transform leads them to overlook opportunities for forms that they might otherwise harness. As, for example, in their failure to see beyond the economic motivations of local land users. By the same token, proponents of bureaucratic forms such as theory of change might pay

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closer attention to the temporalities of existing scientific practice.19 Doing so they might find existing forms to harness in their efforts to promote impactful science.

This argument is not intended as a personal attack on IFF scientists or upon colleagues such as Lesley who promote theory of change. Scientists at IFF often express frustration at workshops such as the one on theory of change that Lesley ran in

Songlin. There is often a sentiment that the people running these workshops do not sufficiently understand the local context and the specific work that IFF’s China office does. Expressing such sentiments, colleagues at IFF-China often write off – perhaps all too quickly – the insights that colleagues from elsewhere in the world might provide. Insofar as international colleagues do arrive, and depart, underinformed, however, the failure of such visits to harness or perhaps even to understand the existing practices that they seek to transform cannot simply be explained by the close- mindedness of the individuals involved. The rapid, fly-by formats of these workshops emerge out of institutional structures and constraints within which colleagues in China and at IFF’s Africa-based headquarters must operate. Indeed, IFF’s fly-by visitors often arrive full of enthusiasm and energy to learn about and from IFF’s China office.

But the few days they have never seems quite enough to do this. The same is true of many of IFF scientists’ engagements with rural communities.

An incident during the Qingshan Agroforestry project illustrates this point. As described in the next chapter, this was a project that took on a form of openness, even playfulness, that was in some ways unusual to contemporary research and development professionalism. A core goal of the project was to develop enhanced soil

19 See Chapter 1.

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management practices for Qingshan, but to do this the IFF project team was determined that they would need to learn not only about but also from farmers in

Qingshan. This meant workshops with Qingshan farmers that explored existing soil management practices and the challenges that these farmers currently experienced.

One output of an early workshop was to learn that one farmer, Mr. Wang, had been making organic fertilizer cakes from rapeseed plants. This greatly interested Susanna, a soil scientist, who wanted to further investigate this technique. She had never heard of rapeseed fertilizer cakes before, and she wanted to work with Mr. Wang to explore the potential for and benefits of other Qingshan farmers adopting it.

Another soil management technique that the IFF team proposed during a later workshop was for farmers to plant cover crops prior to harvesting their summer crop.

This was an adaptation that Susanna had suggested to deal with the frequent failure of cover crops due to extremely dry winters. Planting cover crops a month before harvest would allow cover crops to establish before the rains finished and give them a much better chance of success. This was an innovation that we delivered to farmers as a

‘new’ idea. On a subsequent trip to Qingshan, however, Matt observed a field on Mr.

Wang’s farm where he appeared to already be doing something very similar to what we had suggested: Mr. Wang had well established winter crops growing in between a recently harvested corn crop. In one respect this discovery was a validation of

Susanna’s suggestion, but more than that it felt to the team like an indication of our failure. We had simply not known that something so similar to what we were suggesting was already being practiced. As much as we had wanted to listen to Mr.

Wang and his community, we realized that we had simply not found enough time to

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do this as well as we would have liked. Nearly two years into IFF’s involvement with the project, this was the first time anyone from IFF had had the opportunity to visit in this time of the year. Not unlike environmental humanities scholars who do not see the more playful moments of scientific practice, this was a moment in Qingshan agricultural practice that we had yet not seen. This generated a significant blind-spot in our understanding of Qingshan.

The point is not that IFF colleagues learned nothing from their visits to

Qingshan. The problem was that as much as could be gleaned from each trip to

Qingshan, the opportunities to visit Qingshan seemed all too infrequent. As with the fly-by workshops for IFF staff in Songlin, this was not merely a result of personal failings, or of unwillingness on the part of IFF colleagues to travel to places like

Qingshan. Besides obliging IFF colleagues to find time for ever-expanding bureaucratic headaches, the professional institutions that IFF colleagues inhabit seem to place remarkably little value on scientists’ prolonged engagement with the communities and landscapes that they are expected to transform. In this environment, finding opportunities to be interrupted by human and non-human interlocutors in rural areas such as Qingshan was a luxury that IFF colleagues had all too little time for. The following chapter turns to consider some of the logics and institutional constraints that make this so.

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CHAPTER 5

BEYOND PROFESSIONALISM: EMBRACING AND EVADING

VULNERABILITY

Anna Tsing (2015, 285) identifies an imperative “to create scenes that exceed or escape ‘professionalization’”. The professionalization Tsing is describing, with its scalability and cost-benefit assessments, is familiar to the MELA framework described in Chapter 1, as well as to the broader forms of professionalism at IFF that I will describe in the first section of this chapter. Anticipating Anna Tsing’s sentiments,

Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (1994, 254) earlier described “the oppressive bureaucracy of our jobs” brought about by anthropology’s professionalization.

Grimshaw and Hart sought a response to this oppressive professionalism in the amateurism of the early anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers. Taking inspiration from Tsing,

Grimshaw and Hart, the second section of this chapter describes numerous instances where scientists at IFF operated beyond the oppressive norms of contemporary professionalism. These are instances and activities that stood outside of professional logics such as scalability, measurability, rapidness and hubris, and which echo calls to challenge the invulnerability of scientific authority (Haraway 1988; Jasanoff 2003b;

Taylor 2003). I argue that if, following Anna Tsing, our challenge is to “to create scenes that exceed or escape ‘professionalization’”, then at IFF we already find the seeds of such creativity in the practices of ostensibly professional actors.

Having elaborated the extra-professional sensibilities of IFF scientists, the desires and strategies of research for development professionals emerge as somewhat

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familiar to those of anthropologists (Leach 1965; Miyazaki 2013; Redfield 2005; cf.

Ferguson 1994; Green 2012; T. M. Li 2007). In this respect, the IFF scientists I describe in the second section of the chapter, like Grimshaw and Hart’s writing on

Rivers’ amateurism, seek possibilities for something beyond, and even a potential escape from, the oppressive world of professionalism. Rather than simply celebrate this coalescence of sensibilities between anthropological, scientific and development professionals, the third and final section of this chapter scrutinizes our shared desires to escape professionalism and points to instances where these desires are wrapped up in neglect for the distinctly professional relationship scientists with those who fund their work. Building upon previous chapters’ discussions of interruption and vulnerability as a framework for collaboration, I argue that spaces of freedom from professional imperatives can facilitate scientific vulnerability. But I also demonstrate that insofar as these spaces are animated by the evasion of professional obligations, they are often also animated by desires to escape vulnerability to the financial relationships upon which scientific research depends.

Professionalizing Research, Mastering the Future

At the theory of change workshop described in Chapter 1, Lesley expected IFF scientists to identify the key barriers to next users implementing IFF’s vision for East and Central Asia. This was a task that demanded a knowledge of how next user groups

– government, media, business etc. – operated across the region. Despite our objections that this was not a subject that we had much understanding of, workshop attendees were nevertheless encouraged to not only identify problems in next user

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behavior but to also map the kinds of incentives that we could use to induce changes in their practices. Soil biologists, anthropologists, ecologists and mycologists were being encouraged against their better judgement to speculate about the behavior of people that they knew very little about. Lesley, keen to see the theory of change design process through to a provisional conclusion, urged participants to suspend their reservations. Rather than ‘getting bogged down’ with what we did not know, Lesley pushed us to complete our theory of change as best as we could. Lesley reassured participants that we could always revise our outcomes maps and theories of change as we learnt more. Lesley’s version of a theory of change was after all a provisional position. Theory of change is in many respects an effort to professionalize research for development: it is a structured technology for making development impacts from agri- environmental research. Lesley’s workshop, however, entailed compelling IFF scientists to act upon impressionistic understandings of next users that were hardly rigorous or systematic. This somewhat amateur approach to planning was out of step with other contemporary trends for professionalization.

Lesley’s approach differs from the more typical model offered by Brian, one of her colleagues at IFF’s global headquarters. On a visit to IFF’s China office, Brian gave a talk introducing his latest work on decision analysis. Like theory of change, decision analysis starts at the result one is trying to achieve and then decides what activities would allow one to reach that goal. In the case of decision analysis, however, this task is framed around a decision. The first step of a decision analysis is to establish a decision that policy-makers are in the process of making. Brian suggested that an example of this might be as simple as: what cropping system should we

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promote in a given area or region? Comparing the various alternatives available to the policy-makers in question, decision analysis provides a quantitative method for calculating which decision is most likely to have the best outcome. This method uses existing data along with Bayesian networks and calculations of probability to model alternative decisions and their likely outcomes. Central to this method are calculations of confidence in the given model: the degree of certainty one can have that the model is correctly predicting the outcomes of the alternative decisions under consideration.

This calculation of confidence, moreover, pinpoints the knowledge gaps that are responsible for any lack of confidence. Thus, a decision analysis not only produces policy advice, but also identifies the areas in which further research could increase confidence in a decision analysis. As Brian put it, ‘We can identify knowledge gaps that really limit decision-making and try to close them’. By contrast to the impressionistic predictions of how activities might generate outcomes and impacts that characterized Lesley’s workshop, Brian’s decision analysis provides a systematic technology both for comparing potential policy decisions, and for identifying those areas in which further research can best contribute to better decision making. With decision analysis Brian promises the reassurance of knowing precisely what it is that we do know and of precisely which new bits of knowledge we need to generate.

This is a certitude in the capacity of scientific knowledge that is closely tied to an idea of rational-technical decision making: to an ideal of policy as a value-neutral weighing up alternative options in terms of their cost and benefit. As Brian put it, decision analysis allows scientists to persuade next users ‘to make better quality decisions based on good science and available evidence, and to make decisions and

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preferences more transparent’. This echoes the often-observed propensity for technical and scientific knowledge to take on the dual appearance of superiority and value neutrality. As Arturo Escobar argues, for example, the idea of development has fostered a view “of social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision and management to be entrusted to that group of people – the development professions

– whose specialized knowledge allegedly qualified them for the task” (Escobar 1999,

385–86; also Ferguson 1994; T. M. Li 2007; Mitchell 2002). As Escobar and others highlight, claims to the value-neutrality of technical knowledge empower professionals, and naturalize the authority of scientific imaginations of the world. In this form, professionalism provides the technological means not only for knowing what the future should look like, but for knowing what one must do to bring that future into being.

Formalism and quantification

Aside from appeals to certainty and value neutrality, decision analysis reflects three further interconnected characteristics typical of the professionalization of research for development at IFF. The first is an understanding of scientific rigor that privileges formal and quantitative methods. As is the case with decision analysis, this is often connected to a desire to put financial value on research, and a trend to speak of research and policy in business and economic terms. In this respect, Brian explained that scientists are understandably reluctant to put a precise monetary value on their research. But, he assured his audience at IFF’s China office, decision analysis can scientifically calculate such values. He went on to suggest that where a policy decision

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is between different land use types or different cropping systems, decision analysis may be able to show that “there is a business case for agroforestry”.

Here Brian echoes Alistair’s ambition to draw on the monetizable results of

M&E in an IFF business strategy. Indeed, decision analysis could be read as the predictive counterpart to M&E’s retrospection, and particularly of the impact assessment. As Lucas, an impact evaluation and M&E specialist at IFF headquarters, explained during a visit to IFF’s China office, impact assessment can be used to show what changes in local wealth a development project has caused. Such calculations are often made through randomized control trials (RCT) wherein baseline and endline data is collected from both project and control sites. Here, project impact is condensed into quantifiable changes in monetary household income. Using a ‘control population’ – a community of people deliberately excluded from the project under investigation – to account for changes in income that are not attributable to the project’s intervention, the baseline and endline data on household income can be used to calculate the dollar income increase generated by the intervention. Impact assessment is therefore a technique for showing a donor the dollar return for local households for each of dollar spent: it allows for a retrospective assessment of return on investment.

Decision analysis likewise entails the assessment of return on investment for a given development intervention, but does so predictively. According to Brian, decision analysis can be used to predict the costs and benefits of a given project. In this regard, decision analysis is like outcomes mapping or theory of change in its attempt to develop a casual model of how the actions of various stakeholders will bring particular futures into being. But in contrast to the amateurism of theory of change in Lesley’s

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workshop, decision analysis bases this mapping of the future on a formal mathematical model, complete with calculations not only of expected costs and benefits, but also with quantified assessments of uncertainty in these expectations.

This focus on mathematical models, and quantitative conclusions does not mean that ‘qualitative’ data or even ‘subjective beliefs’ have no place in the professionalization of outcomes-focused agricultural research. Decision analysis models are based in part on the solicitation of expert judgements that decision analysts describe as ‘subjective’. But Bayesian networks allow subjective beliefs of this kind to be incorporated into formal, quantitative decision analysis models. As an iteration of contemporary emphasis on formal, quantitative methods, the key is not the exclusion of qualitative data and subjective belief so much as the imperative for formal models that are able to generate quantitative outputs. In this respect, inspired by the work of

Douglas Hubbard (2014), decision analysts like Brian hold the conviction that anything can (and often by implication should) be quantitatively measured.

Erasing technique

This conviction in favor of quantitative methods is by no means unique to decision analysis. Another IFF headquarters-based scientist, Josiah, took his visit to IFF’s

China office as an opportunity to introduce a tool he had developed for understanding local agroecological knowledge. The tool involves a series of questions asking farmers to rank local tree species in terms of specific agroecological benefits. Processed through computer software developed by Josiah and his team, farmers’ responses are used to generate a formal representation of indigenous knowledge. This knowledge is

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then presented through a searchable online database that ranks tree species according to specifiable attributes. Josiah expressed a belief that this formal method was superior to what he called ‘anecdotal methods’. Backing this up, he gave an example of a project he had been working on where they had been trying to promote a particular tree species. Local farmers were refusing to adopt the tree, but Josiah and his colleagues could not understand why. Only when they implemented his tool, Josiah explained, were they able to identify the reason for this reluctance: local farmers knew the tree in question to cause a specific form of soil erosion of which Josiah and his colleagues had been unaware.

Initially, I was unable to comprehend why Josiah was so certain his tool was superior to an anecdotal approach. In the example Josiah had given of a tree causing soil erosion, it seemed to me that informal conversations with farmers, asking them why they disliked the tree in question could quite easily have reached the same finding as Josiah’s tool. To some extent, Josiah’s heightened confidence in his tool perhaps simply reflected the above-described general preference for quantitative outputs. I later, however, came to appreciate an important advantage of Josiah’s formalism over what he called anecdotal methods: it negated the need for certain forms of skill. This was made explicit by Bob, an IFF-China research fellow who had designed a research tool of his own. Bob’s tool incorporates six quantifiable variables including gender equality in decision-making, and diet quality. These standardized measures, Bob told a seminar group at IFF, can be used for comparisons across time, allowing for the monitoring and evaluation of project successes in a similar manner to Lucas’s impact assessment. And as with Josiah’s tool, Bob highlighted that the standardized form of

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his tool enables comparison across multiple research sites. At lunch following the seminar, however, Bob explained to me that he was inspired to develop the tool by the incompetence of an IFF researcher who had implemented a survey which he said was entirely useless. By providing a ready-made survey toolkit, Bob hoped to ensure that people such as this colleague could carry out a survey despite their apparent lack of social science research skills. Here questions requiring scientific skills are dealt with and deliberately black boxed. Another colleague expressed a similar idea, when she suggested that organizations like IFF should help NGOs acquire new tools. Discussing an international conference IFF was organizing, Kathryn argued for more emphasis on

NGO participation at the conference. Having been unimpressed by the level of work conducted by NGOs she had previously worked for, Kathryn suggested that NGOs need more opportunities to learn from what others are doing. She gave the example of one NGO she had worked with in China who, she complained, did a horrible job of impact assessment studies. She suggested a solution to this apparent lack of skill: ‘they need tools’.

Though Bob and Kathryn’s comments were targeted at project managers – the person Bob criticized held a senior position in IFF’s China office – the idea of removing the need for skills also carries for survey enumerators. One of my responsibilities as a research assistant at IFF was to run a household survey on wild mushroom harvesting in the Greater Mekong region. To do this, I collaborated with

Frankie, a PhD candidate in ecological anthropology at a North American university, but who was affiliated with IFF for the purposes of running ethnographic fieldwork with mushroom harvesters. Designing the household survey, Frankie and I

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instinctively devised opened-ended survey questions as starting points for conversations with mushroom harvesters. We soon discovered, however, that such an approach would be impossible if we were to employ survey enumerators. After trialing the survey with survey enumerators, we quickly realized that lacking skills in social scientific research, enumerators were inclined to record as short an answer as possible and to ignore significant aspects of what interviewees were saying to them. For example, in one trial of the survey questionnaire, a harvester told me that he never managed to find enough wild mushrooms to be worth selling, but that he would nevertheless go collecting for fun. This instantly stood out to me as incongruous with a rural development literature that focused on mushrooms as financial or subsistence resources, but rarely as an object of leisure, and I took this harvester’s response as an entry point for a further discussion with the respondent. Meanwhile, the hired enumerator with the same questionnaire had, I discovered that evening, received similar responses, but had not recorded this data in his notes. He had seen no reason to consider this information interesting, and only recorded that such respondents seldom harvest mushrooms.

I realized at this point that informal research methods require tacit knowledge: a knowledge that one takes for granted but which is not easily transmitted to others.

Having read extensively on mushroom harvesting, and in Frankie’s case having carried out her own participant observation with harvesters, we had developed an understanding of what kind of answers were interesting or worth recording. As instinctive as these impulses now felt to us, our enumerators did not share them. Much as I could not expect to quickly master the mushroom-hunting skills that Kumar had

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honed over his years as a mycologist,20 we could not expect our enumerators to instantly acquire the intuition necessary to social science research. This is not to say that the skills of informal interviewing, and research through open-ended conversations were beyond the abilities of the enumerators we had hired. But it was a technique that would have required a lengthier learning process than we had time for.

Having been puzzled by why Josiah would prefer a complex formal method to much simpler and ostensibly more straightforward informal, ‘anecdotal’ methods, I came to appreciate that informal methods were in many respects the more difficult to implement. Instead of developing a highly skilled cohort of enumerators with a tacit knowledge of what is and isn’t an interesting response to a question, we formalized the survey, introducing more yes/no and multiple-choice questions. Here we employed a similar logic to Bob and Kathryn: we wanted to make the survey in such a way that eliminated the need for survey enumerators to acquire a novel skill or knowledge set.

This erasure of skill is analogous to the modern, capitalist process Tim Ingold

(2000, 316) describes wherein “[t]echnology … appears to erase technique”. Here

Ingold describes technique as “tacit, subjective, context-dependent, practical

‘knowledge how’, typically acquired through observation and imitation rather than formal verbal instruction”. In this respect, technique would equate to the kind of skills that we found our enumerators to be lacking. Ingold describes technique as an embedded form of action, and contrasts this to “technology, which consists in a knowledge of objective principles of mechanical functioning, whose validity is completely independent both of the subjective identity of its human carriers and of the

20 See Chapter 4.

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specific contexts of its application”. Described in Ingold’s terms, research for development technologies – what Bob, Kathryn and Brian call “tools”21 – disembed the user from the activity of research and development, externalizing the productive force of the technology from the user.

This erasure of technique has not gone unnoticed by development scholar- practitioners. Terry Rambo (2007), for example, laments how rapid rural appraisal

(RRA) – a widely deployed tool for rural research and development and predecessor to currently ubiquitous participatory rural appraisal (PRA) – has transformed in recent decades. Whereas today PRA toolkits are – much like Bob’s research tool – designed to be implemented by low-skilled practitioners with minimal experience of a specific locality, Rambo suggests that this was not originally the case (cf. T. M. Li 2007;

Mosse 2005). According to Rambo, early practitioners of RRA “held advanced degrees … had long experience working in the northeast Thailand [where the RRAs he describes were being implemented] and already had a very good understanding of the local situation” (794). These practitioners were, moreover, aware of the limits of their tools and would never imagine them “as a way of providing definitive answers to complex questions” (795). By contrast, Rambo argues, the manner in which the current generation of practitioners deploy PRA has created “the illusion that [PRA and

RRA methods] offer a cheap and easy substitute for more intensive methods of data collection” (796). Here Rambo observes not only a de-skilling in rural research for

21 Ingold (2000, 315) further distinguishes “tools” from technique, and technology. But what development professionals refer to as a tool would in Ingold’s terms be a technology.

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development, but that this de-skilling has been accompanied by a diminished awareness of the limits to these research tools and the expertise they generate.

This phenomenon of disembedding and de-skilling similarly emerges in the case of decision analysis. During his visit to China, Brian encouraged IFF-China to find a young scholar who could be trained in using the tool. Brian advised that a background in economics might be useful as the tool involves complex quantitative analysis, suggesting that a high degree of skill would be necessary to use the tool. But training this one specialist technician would at the same time make it unnecessary for other scientists in the office to develop skills in decision analysis: one person would be tasked with implementing decision analysis for all projects run out of IFF’s China office. And even this person would not need the higher level of expertise that Brian and his collaborators had needed to design the tool. A broad range of skills remains necessary in the world of research for development, but tools are technologies for minimizing the instances and scope of skills (or in Ingold’s terms technique) that it is necessary for individuals to acquire. The logic of professionalism precipitates the design of activities that can be replicated by a hastily trained cohort of low-skilled experts. Often tied to sophisticated quantitative methods, contemporary research for development professionalism entails the erasure of skill.

Scale, speed and value for money

As described in Chapter 1, theory of change targets next users rather than end users directly because this allows organizations like IFF to multiply their ultimate end user impact. Similarly, tools like Josiah’s and Bob’s offer the possibility of replicating a

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standardized protocol on a large scale. Once developed, prefabricated tools can be quickly deployed after only a short formal training. The fact that minimal skill and tacit knowledge are necessary not only accelerates the training process, but also expands the number of potential users. If even the researchers Bob considered incompetent or the relatively unskilled NGOs Kathryn had worked with can employ these tools, then the potential number of users of these tools is increased, and with it the potential scale at which it can be deployed. The impact of a tool designed by IFF is potentially multiplied by its adoption and implementation by actors outside of IFF. In this respect, easily promulgated tools play an important role in putting the scalar logic of outcomes thinking into practice.

As well as maximizing the scale of impact, tools seek to accelerate research for development. In this regard, research for development technologies – like Bob’s tool, or the RRA and PRA tools described by Rambo – often promise to provide rapid appraisal. One such tool was developed by Dennis, a European researcher who visited

IFF in China as part of the Lengshan Multi-Stakeholder Platform project. Dennis’s tool brings together representatives of farming communities, researchers, private sector and government in a two day workshop. Participants collectively determine core barriers or problems in local forestry and agriculture and identify entry points for future activities. Dennis and Bob used this tool to run a workshop in Lengshan

Prefecture. Through this workshop, they identified water pollution due to rubber processing plants as a key issue. In just 48 hours, Dennis and Bob could identify water pollution as a focus for future activities (though ultimately funding for the project was cut and nothing came of it). These rapid methods appeal to donor preferences for

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speed and cost minimization. As Terry Rambo (2007, 795) puts it, “Why fund an ethnologist to live in a village for a year when you can claim to understand everything by sponsoring a three-or-four-day rapid appraisal exercise?”.

Advantages of both scale and tempo are intricately tied to an imperative for research and development to provide value for money. This is not only in relation to the fact that technologies like decision analysis or Bob’s survey instrument can be used to generate monetized predictions or measurements of an intervention’s impact, and its return on dollars invested by the donor. It is also because the technological goals of speed and scale are themselves intricately linked to a value for money agenda.

This connection is central to the logic according to which Lesley’s outcome mapping imagines next users as the intermediaries through which IFF impacts end users. Here, working with next users promises to multiply the scale of end user impact. Likewise, as Rambo alludes to, the preference for rapid PRA exercises can be explained by their perceived cost-effectiveness compared to more rigorous and long-term engagements with communities. Value for money is central to the professionalization of research for development.

Spaces that Exceed Professionalism

Aspects of theory of change are tied to professionalizing tropes such as quantification, scale and value for money. As described in the Introduction to his chapter, however, the version that Lesley introduced IFF colleagues to seems out of sync with decision analysis’s promises of quantifiable certainty. One of my initial reactions to Lesley’s workshop was an aversion to its amateurism. It seemed somehow shocking that at a

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well-regarded research organization such as IFF, the methods for knowing the social and political context in which we were working could be so crude. This was a sentiment that was shared by some IFF colleagues. As described above, participants in the workshop pushed back at Lesley’s invitation to share our impressions of how next users in the region operated, and Lesley had to persuade participants not to get bogged down and to persevere despite our collective ignorance and uncertainty. As I encountered the drive for professionalism and value for money at IFF, however, I came to see this somewhat off-the-cuff model of theory of change as providing a certain form of relief from the ever-grander promises of professionalizing technologies from indigenous knowledge toolkits and rapid rural appraisal to impact assessment and decision analysis. Lesley’s version of theory of change offered a space that to some extent exceeded certain logics of professionalization. Further spaces beyond the professional were forged in an IFF soil training management project, an effort to use art in IFF’s Eco-Friendly Rubber project, and at a conference film festival.

Anxiety in soil training

The Qingshan Agroforestry project’s goal was to introduce ecologically complex, biologically diverse agroforestry to a region that has suffered significant deforestation, and where monoculture cash crop plantations dominate the agricultural landscape. By the time of IFF’s involvement in the project, the initiative had been going several years already, and the landscape was already dotted with many of the fruit and nut trees that formed the basis of the new agroforestry systems. The project’s sponsor,

Metelli, were unhappy with progress. On a visit to Qingshan, Metelli and Arboreus,

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the Western NGO they had hired to run the project, observed that many of the trees were in poor health, and expressed concerns that the project was not yet on the path towards the ecologically complex and biologically diverse agroforestry landscape they had envisioned. One reason for the lack of success, in the view of Metelli and

Arboreus, was the local project partner Shehui’s lack of agri-environmental expertise.

IFF’s job would therefore be to work alongside Shehui, bringing its expertise and experience to bear through, among other things, the delivery of training to farmers in

Qingshan.

IFF’s remit for the project was, however, relatively informal. IFF had a lucrative contract with Metelli to facilitate laboratory research on local medicinal plants with the potential for use in cosmetics. Given the importance of this contract to

IFF, when IFF offered its assistance to Metelli’s Qingshan project, they asked only that Metelli cover IFF’s travel expenses. Unlike the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, the absence of a formal funding agreement meant that IFF were free of the predetermined deliverables and rigorous monitoring frameworks that are typical of research and development professions. An imperative for value for money was, moreover, entirely absent. Indeed, the professional logic of value for money would have made the project an absurdity. The smallest training workshop involved three IFF scientists delivering training to a group of just five farmers, along with Shehui’s project manager and a representative from Arboreus. Even the largest workshop IFF ran in Qingshan had only twenty-five participants. These workshops were envisaged as a ‘training of trainers’ so that those in attendance were expected to share what they learnt at the workshops with their neighbors in Qingshan. Nevertheless, even if those

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at workshops disseminated the outputs of workshops as hoped, the participants represented only two administrative villages, and a few hundred households. This is nowhere near the kind of scale that Lesley imagined for her theory of change, or which Bob and Brian sought for their tools. At such a small scale, IFF could not have justified their involvement in the project in terms of value for money, and nor did they try.

The substance of the activities to be carried out in Qingshan compared to the project team’s conventional professional work further reinforced the sense that the project had constituted a space that exceeded professionalization. Though an initial farmer workshop was supported by Zheng Laoshi, an IFF social scientists and veteran of numerous participatory projects, subsequent training workshops would be run by a much less experienced team. Two of this team – Susanna and Matt – were soil scientists. I was the third member. As expert as Susanna and Matt were in the ecology of the kind of agroforestry systems the project promoted in Qingshan, the project team’s professional roles at IFF did not ordinarily extend to running workshops for farmers: the team were all operating beyond the scope of their professional expertise.

Though it fell outside the imperative for value for money and beyond the project team’s conventional professional sphere, our initial impulse was somewhat conventional. Following the contemporary consensus in professional agricultural development, we decided to search for participatory research and development tools that we could use in Qingshan. Our first port of call for help designing a participatory approach was training materials produced by IFF’s international headquarters. Here we expected we might find a pre-existing model that we could adapt to Qingshan.

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Despite the proliferation of research for development tools already discussed, we were unable to locate anything that seemed appropriate to our ambitions for Qingshan. We therefore decided to design our own workshop format from scratch. In doing this, we were driven by a loosely defined set of rationales. First, we took giving the community a say in the direction of the training workshops and the project more generally to be an intrinsic good. Second, we knew that the local ecological knowledge of Qingshan farmers would be invaluable to understanding and enhancing soil management: collaboration would be necessary because we needed to draw on the farmers’ expertise. Third, we anticipated that a participatory approach would enhance our chances of a positive response to the training. Such reasoning was by no means novel to professional research for development (Chambers 1983, 1997; cf. Cooke and

Kothari 2001; Stirling 2005). But in committing to designing the format of our workshops from scratch, we nevertheless departed from the professional logic of prefabricated tools. In Ingold’s terms, we abandoned technology, and embraced the challenge of cultivating technique.

The format we arrived at began with us presenting a variety of soil management options, including mulching, inter-cropping, cover-crops, and tillage techniques. The workshop followed a simple format: each management option was presented along with its potential benefits and drawbacks. Farmers were then asked to reflect on the potential of this management option for their own farms, and we opened a dialogue between IFF’s two soil scientists and the farmers. So, for example, one proposed soil management method was for farmers to switch from their current practice of ploughing vertically up and down the slope to ploughing horizontally

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across the slope. Farmers were initially unenthusiastic about this suggestion, responding that horizontal ploughing would increase soil erosion, and that horizontal ploughing would also make it much harder for them to use plastic mulch. Susanna and

Matt were unconvinced by farmers’ claims that horizontal ploughing would increase soil erosion, arguing that experience elsewhere in the world shows that the opposite is true: it would decrease soil erosion compared to vertical ploughing. Following a lengthy exchange, we managed to persuade the farmers attending the workshop of a compromise position wherein they might experiment with horizontal ploughing on a limited number of plots, and that this would only be considered an option for crops that do not require plastic mulch. Finally, at the end of the workshop, farmers were split into three groups and asked to select the management options that they believe have most potential for their farms. Through this exercise farmers selected three soil management options they would like to adopt. In response to these selections, Susanna proposed following up support IFF could provide to help with the implementation, and we constructed the outlines of a plan for a further workshop and a soil management calendar.

Though it never occurred to us to put it in these terms nor to relate this experience back to Lesley’s theory of change workshop, our off-the-cuff approach resonated with the mode of knowing and planning that Lesley had encouraged us to practice. The scope and scale of the Qingshan project was somewhat less grand than the regional theory of change that Lesley had asked us to develop, but it was no less a project that took IFF staff beyond the core skills and comfort of their professional expertise. This generated an enormous uncertainty, even anxiety, about how we should

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proceed. Echoing the guidance from Lesley’s theory of change workshop, however, we didn’t let the limits of our knowledge and our uncertainty ‘bog us down’.

If we did not let uncertainty bog us down, however, it did not mean that uncertainty was erased. Nor did it mean that we brought this complexity under control by calculating and quantifying the uncertainties – this was a long way from decision analysis. Rather, uncertainty remained a constant and incalculable presence. This was a presence that precipitated anxiety: our uncertainty made us uneasy about the activities we were pursuing and the impact they would have. This anxiety extended not only to the methods through which we chose to engage Qingshan farmers – were we really generating a space for open dialogue or were farmers simply telling us what we wanted to hear? – but also to the content we delivered. So, for example, one of the three novel soil management techniques that farmers expressed an interest in was to plough fields directly after harvest. Susanna, who was behind this proposal, described how this practice was employed in Europe to reduce winter soil moisture loss. Farmer enthusiasm for this strategy generated both delight and anxiety: delight that the workshop had provoked a positive response from the participants, but anxiety that the new strategy might not have the anticipated effect on soil moisture. Susanna stressed to participants that while she expected to see similar effects to those observed in

Europe, she could not be certain of this. Uncertainty in the effect that our intervention would produce precipitated an anxiety that did not bog down the project, but that did impose the incomplete and imperfect nature of her knowledge as an ever-present concern. Uncertain that the knowledge we offered would be of any use to Qingshan farmers, and uncertain that we could communicate this knowledge in a productive

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manner; the training failing to make any impact presented itself as a very real possibility.

In anticipation of this potential failure, Susanna suggested to farmers that they merely experiment with each of the novel strategies we introduced and see for themselves if it had the desired effect. Beyond this, she also proposed returning to

Qingshan to help farmers measure the comparative soil moisture of fields in which they had and had not implemented new soil management strategies. This potential for retrospective knowledge of impact through controlled comparison suggests a more ad hoc version of Lucas’s RCT. It sits, however, in stark contrast to Brian’s decision analysis. If Susanna imagined a potential to retrospectively know the effects of her work, this did not erase the uncertainty and anxiety that captured the moment of this work being done. This is a long way from decision analysis’s promise to provide calculable certainty of the best and most impactful course of action right from the beginning. Stepping outside the well-worn path of professionalized research for development, the Qingshan project generated an anxiety and uncertainty that erased some of professionalism’s hubristic potential. And generated an urge to proliferate opportunities for local participants to interrupt and transform the project’s trajectory.

Art and the personal in agri-environmental science

A different, and perhaps more deliberate, crafting of a space that exceeds conventional professionalism can be found in Jiaolong’s enthusiasm for integrating her amateur passion for art into the Eco-Friendly Rubber project. As part of this project, Jiaolong and her colleagues wanted to establish on-farm trials of potential intercrops in existing

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rubber plantations in Lengshan Prefecture – that is to say, to trial growing crops in- between already established rubber trees. At an internal meeting for this project, Chad, who was leading the project, Jiaolong and I discussed how Jiaolong would present the project to a potential new NGO partner.22 For Chad, what made the project stand out, and therefore what Jiaolong should emphasize to the NGO, was that IFF did not intend, as many prior projects had done, to offer farmers a single solution. Rather, they would involve rubber farmers in selecting and trialing several possible options for ecologically sustainable rubber. Chad also described a working paper the project team was in the process of writing and suggested that this would help to establish this novelty for the potential NGO partner.

Towards the end of the meeting, Chad raised an example of a rubber farm he had recently visited in Thailand. Here, the farmer had attempted to recreate natural jungle vegetation beneath the canopy of his rubber plantation. This was a model very similar to one of the biologically diverse agroforestry systems Chad was proposing for

Lengshan.23 Reflecting upon what Chad had observed, the three of us discussed the potential ecological, as well as recreational and aesthetic, value of agroforestry systems that mimic the diversity of natural systems. Jiaolong also proposed making a video of this Thai rubber plantation to show Lengshan farmers. Chad endorsed this idea. Jiaolong also used this as an opportunity to raise a further proposal. She suggested that the Eco-Friendly Rubber project should ‘focus on more than just the economic’ and, as described in the previous chapter, proposed that we promote an idea

22 This is the same planning meeting discussed in Chapter 4. 23 See Chapter 4.

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of a ‘beautiful Lengshan’: an idea that the now monotonous landscape of rubber monoculture plantations could once again be made beautiful. As part of this, Jiaolong, who is herself an amateur artist, suggested that we should recruit local artists to promote this theme through their artwork. Chad, however, was quick to dismiss this idea as ‘a little tangential’. In contrast to working papers and informational videos that seemed appropriate means of promoting the project, Chad saw artwork as somewhat out of place in a professional research for development project, and the idea was rejected.

At a later meeting for the project, Jiaolong raised a similar idea. This meeting was conducted with project partners from local government and research organizations. We began with Jiaolong presenting plans for the intercropping trial on behalf of Chad – who was not present – before each participant was given the opportunity to discuss his or her own vision for ecologically sustainable rubber in

Lengshan. During the discussion that followed, Jiaolong proposed that the project should pursue coverage on local television as a medium for promoting interest in Eco-

Friendly Rubber. Responding to this, Wu Laoshi, a local government officer, suggested that he could provide some of the reports his office had prepared on rubber plantations to provide content for the proposed television coverage. Jiaolong, however, corrected him. She had not meant ‘something so cold’ as government reports. Rather she wanted personal stories. She wanted people like those assembled at the meeting discussing their work, what it means to them, and why they do it. Jiaolong’s idea was neither enthusiastically endorsed, nor dismissed, and conversation moved quickly on.

Just as her proposed employment of artwork to promote ‘beautiful Lengshan’ had

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jarred with Chad’s expectations, there was an obvious (and from Jialong’s point of view quite deliberate) incongruity between this proposal and the conventional expectations of project partners like Wu Laoshi.

In his ethnography of an animal rights charity, Adam Reed (2017) describes how novel forms of managerialism have precipitated an ethic of professionalism akin to classical models of bureaucratic impersonality. Whereas personal commitment to the cause of animal rights was once a vital moral marker for charity workers, professionalism has now become synonymous with an “organizational ethics centred on the separation of competency or task from individual moral conscience” (169). If this is a model shared by classical forms of bureaucracy and contemporary managerialism, it also has an affinity to the impersonality of scientific knowledge as characterized by the notion of science as a view from nowhere. According to this understanding of science, a scientific standpoint sits in stark contradistinction to a personal one (Weber 1946; cf Haraway 1988). It is in this context that Jiaolong’s call for personal stories from scientists or government officials about their personal motivations for pursuing their project of enhancing Lengshan’s ecological landscape was out of place: she disrupted the expectation that a scientist speak in an exclusively professional and therefore impersonal voice.

The incongruity of Jiaolong’s proposals with the professional expectations of

Chad and Wu Laoshi stems also from her departure from an evidence-based approach to agri-environmental policy and advocacy. This incongruity is especially evident when compared against the marketing approach taken by Alistair.24 In his strategy for

24 See Chapter 1.

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marketing and branding agroforestry, Alistair described how IFF would need to target each of its potential customers with focused evidence on how agroforestry would improve something about which that specific customer was concerned. So, for example, he suggested that when promoting participatory approaches to government stakeholders, IFF should provide evidence that farmer participation in development research leads to improved uptake of new technologies by farmers. Following the presentation that Alistair gave to his colleagues at IFF-China, I suggested – in a manner familiar to Jiaolong’s contributions to Eco-Friendly Rubber project meetings – that as well as dealing in evidence, agroforestry scientists are also driven by ethics and values, and that this might add a dimension to his agroforestry marketing strategy.

Alistair, however, refuted this suggestion, insisting that ‘science deals in evidence’ and that the strategy must remain a matter of ‘evidence-based lobbying’.

Alistair’s categorical rejection of anything but evidence-based argument is a classic case of what STS scholars call “boundary work” (Campbell 2011; Gieryn

1983; Greenhalgh 2008; Jasanoff 1987; Kinchy and Kleinman 2003). The authority of

IFF’s professional expertise relies on demarcating evidence-based scientific knowledge from things such as opinion, ethics or emotion that actors like Alistair simultaneously construct as less valid. In this respect, one could understand Alistair’s impulse to maintain the appropriate boundary of professional work – evidence-based argument – as a strategy for sustaining IFF as one of those institutions entrusted to do the technical work of development (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994; T. M. Li 2007).

Beyond science and development, sociologists have observed similar trends in the professions more broadly. Here, the sustaining of professional boundaries is an object

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of everyday work. One’s exclusive claim to technical competence within the boundaries of one’s profession, moreover, is tied to an awareness of that profession’s limited competence – a good professional, does not transgress these limits (Neal and

Morgan 2000; M. I. Reed 1996; Wilensky 1964). In this respect, the act of delimiting the sphere in which a professional allows herself to speak authoritatively can reinforce her claim to exclusive authority.

Jiaolong’s proposals for art, and personal stories in research for development stand in contrast to the notion of professionalism as limited, but authoritative sphere of expertise. Rather than claim and then bound herself to a distinct realm of professional expertise, Jiaolong played with modes of communication beyond a scientific sphere in which she might claim expert authority. She refused the boundary of ‘evidence-based lobbying’, and the hubris that this boundary would provide. In this respect, whereas demands for humility in the sciences often involve calls for scientists to recognize the limits of their knowledge (Jasanoff 2003b; Taylor 2003), in this instance it is in refusing the limits to her expertise that Jiaolong generates the potential for humility. In contrast to Alistair’s efforts to forge a pathway of limitless, uninterrupted growth for agroforestry’s brand and for IFF’s influence, Jiaolong’s proposals might have generated spaces that interrupted the autonomy and authority of science. Spaces that might have placed the authority of science in abeyance and thereby generated opportunities for others to interrupt the pathway that Chad and his colleagues had set for the Eco-Friendly Rubber project.

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A conference film festival

If Jiaolong’s efforts to bring art into IFF’s work were frustrated, this was not always the case. As part of a conference IFF was hosting in Songlin, IFF staff organized a film festival. The first film shown, Yak Dung, was made by a Tibetan elementary school teacher with the support of a local NGO. The film depicted the myriad things that members of a small Tibetan community construct with yak dung – from courtyard walls and ovens to dog kennels and children’s sleds. Another of the films likewise focused on indigenous ecological knowledge. Describing the spiritual nature of the

Altai Mountains, this documentary lamented the negative impacts of certain forms of tourism. And it outlined the destructive potential of a planned gas pipe through the mountains, claiming that in failing to respect the spirituality of Altai, these pipelines would precipitate earthquakes and other disasters.

Aspects of these films, and the manner in which they were introduced resonate with certain attitudes to so-called indigenous ecological knowledge that anthropologists and development scholars have problematized and critiqued (Agrawal

1995; Coombe 2001; cf. Menzies 2006; Sillitoe 2002). Anthropological interrogations have, for example, demonstrated the violence that romanticized visions of ecologically noble savages can inflict (T. M. Li 2000; Nadasdy 2005). It is, nevertheless, worth pausing to appreciate the specific role that these films played in the context of the professional lives of the agri-environmental scientists assembled at the conference, and the conversation the films sparked.

For some in the audience these films had very little value. In the question and answer session, one conference participant objected that we should not let indigenous

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knowledge ‘get in the way of progress’. He argued that unless we could use science to support the Altai claim that a gas pipe would cause earthquakes then we should not stop the gas pipe running through the Altai Mountains. Like Alistair, this participant sought to defend the unique primacy of scientific evidence. The somewhat diplomatic response of Wyatt, an IFF scientist who works in Altai and had introduced the film, was that although science has brought us a lot of progress and liberated us from superstition, there is ‘something missing’. He said that we are hurtling towards destruction, and that people like those in Altai give us some alternatives. Rejecting voices that would say we can sacrifice things like Mount Altai, Wyatt wants to create a vision which includes sacredness; something which he says is missing from conventional approaches to development and sustainability. Wyatt concluded by suggesting that concepts like bio-diversity have a utility, but that there is something more than this. For Wyatt, Altai’s spiritualism provided respite to the cold utilitarianism of development professionalism.

Julie, another conference attendee, raised her hand to respond to Wyatt’s comment. Julie argued that ‘we’ – by which she meant the scientists and development professionals attending the conference – already recognize the sacred by being in awe of the nature we work in. In apparent agreement with Wyatt’s sentiments on scientific concepts like bio-diversity, Julie suggested that we do not have to quantify everything to appreciate it. She agreed with Wyatt that we can learn from indigenous people in their appreciation of nature, but insisted that we already have this capacity. She suggested that it is because we have this appreciation that we work in environmental research in the first place. Thus, while she agreed with the broader sentiment Wyatt

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expressed as to the limits of a scientific perspective, she disagreed that it was necessary for us as scientists to look beyond ourselves to appreciate this. She called for scientists to draw on what is valuable to them, to draw on what is valuable in their own cultures. That is to say, rather than locate the something missing that Wyatt identified in a realm beyond science, she suggested that this something missing is already familiar to scientists. Here Julie’s response to Wyatt can be understood as a call to embrace the personal – a call which resonates with Jiaolong’s efforts to take the

Eco-Friendly Rubber project beyond “cold” scientific and governmental reports.

Sharing in Wyatt’s desire for something beyond familiar professionalism, Julie proposed a turn to the personal: a move that created a space distinctly out of sync with the kind of professionalism generated by professionalizing technologies such as decision analysis. In contrast to the respondent who insisted that non-scientific knowledge should not ‘get in the way of progress’ and to Alistair’s boundary policing,

Julie sought to craft a space in which the personal might have a space in knowing and managing landscapes. As with Jiaolong’s efforts to integrate art into the Eco-Friendly

Rubber Project, Julie attempted to frustrate the exclusive authority of scientific pronouncements by drawing scientists beyond the narrow boundaries of their professional expertise.

Vulnerability beyond professionalism

As described in Chapter 3, IFF colleagues view many officials and administrators as preoccupied only with navigating a path that will generate personal security into the future, while minimizing the future entailments and entanglements that any transaction

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might create. What was remarkable about Director Ma was how he departed from this path-of-least-resistance – or more precisely, from this path-of-greatest-certitude-in- the-future. Ma willfully embraced a less certain future for the sake of his collaboration with IFF and the project of sustainable cropping systems in Lengshan. An analogous distinction marks out IFF activities that stand outside the constraints of professionalism. Whereas professional technologies such as decision analysis promise certainty – a technical answer to the path one should follow – the approaches that the

Qingshan team, Jiaolong and Julie embraced each precipitated distinctly uncertain futures. They invited interruptions from rural communities and project interlocutors that they hoped would set their work on paths that they could not entirely anticipate.

This is, moreover, an uncertainty that emanates from the entanglements of social relationships. Decision analysis and prefabricated research for development tools are premised on the idea of a protocol mapped out prior to the social relationships that will provide the context for their deployment. By contrast, when the Qingshan team went off-script or when Julie and Jiaolong embraced the personal, they anticipated pathways that could only unfurl out of the social relationships in which they would become entangled. Here, the alternative to the certitude and hubris of contemporary research and development professionalism is the embrace of vulnerability: an orientation to a future punctuated by interruptions that one can neither map, nor fully control.

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Escaping Professionalism’s Headaches?

In each of the above cases, agri-environmental scientists sought and embraced spaces beyond the conventional limits of their professionalism. In the Qingshan project, part of the appeal of this space beyond the professional is the escape it allowed from countervailing professional imperatives. As described above, at the outset of IFF’s involvement in the project, the ordinary value for money and M&E imperatives were entirely absent. As the project progressed, however, IFF’s apparent freedom from professionalism seemed to dissipate. Several months after running their first training workshop, the IFF team arranged what was to be a third workshop directly with

Qingshan community leaders. Having made these arrangements, however, we received a communication from Arboreus explaining that all IFF activities in Qingshan must be pre-approved by both Shehui and Arboreus. The workshop did eventually go ahead, but following the workshop, wrangling continued amongst Shehui, Arboreus, and IFF.

In the weeks and months that followed, IFF staff became increasingly frustrated with project partners who they saw as bringing only headaches to the project.

Some IFF colleagues attributed the emerging difficulties of working in

Qingshan to the incompetence of both Shehui and Arboreus. In one instance, Shehui’s project manager Xuejian explained to the IFF team that Arboreus’s training in

Qingshan had attempted to impress upon local farmers the importance of three meter spacing between trees – a guideline, Xuejian told us, that took no account of tree species or location. For IFF scientists, this absurdly global approach to tree propagation confirmed Arboreus’s ignorance. The failure of the collaboration, however, can also be attributed to an incongruity between the approaches of IFF and

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its project partners. As well as their incompetence, Arboreus’s tree-spacing guidance evinced their professionalism: it reflected their understanding of environmental sustainability as a global, standardizable and scalable process. Embracing development professionalism, Arboreus were constantly contemplating how their activities might be replicated across ever-larger scales. Indeed, this was part of the reason they wanted not only prior notification of IFF ‘s activities, but also written reports after each visit to Qingshan. On one occasion, impressed by a soil management booklet Susanna had produced specifically for Qingshan farmers, Arboreus asked whether IFF might create a similar set of booklets for them to use globally.

IFF, by contrast, approached the project much more narrowly: as a project in

Qingshan. We were seldom distracted by the question of how to replicate or up-scale activities in Qingshan. Qingshan workshops were each designed from scratch and as unique events; they did not adhere to a previously established protocol, nor did IFF staff imagine their workshops to be replicable. This contrasted with other projects wherein IFF were expected to employ protocols or toolkits that had been designed to be transferable across time and space. This is of course not to say that such imperatives were absent from IFF’s other work. Indeed, as already described, they were frequently front and center of efforts to professionalize IFF’s activities. As, for example, in the imperative Alistair saw for IFF to learn from marketing professionals and build itself a global brand. However, part of the Qingshan project’s appeal to IFF staff was that it presented an opportunity to work outside of this global scale and the accompanying imperatives of professional research for development.

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Shortly following the shambles of IFF’s negotiation for permission to run their third workshop, Arboreus commissioned an audit of the project. One outcome of the audit was for Metelli to belatedly follow up on a suggestion that IFF had made several months earlier to establish experimental agroforestry demonstration plots in Qingshan.

In response to Metelli’s enquiries, IFF produced a detailed outline of their proposal, but some at IFF half hoped Metelli would decline to fund the proposal, and thereby give IFF an excuse to leave the project. The imperative to formalize project plans and project goals, as well as to undergo audits and manage budgets, returned the project squarely to the realm of professionalism. IFF colleagues’ enthusiasm for the project faded as it began to look less and less like an opportunity to engage farmers in

Qingshan, and more and more like a headache-inducing struggle of negotiating collaboration with the project’s numerous supra-local partners.

The Qingshan project generated a particular kind of responsibility: significant energy was invested in crafting relationships with local Qingshan farmers. Personal commitments to farmers were central to IFF staff’s commitment to the project, as well as in scientists’ disappointment in the project’s ultimate collapse. This focus on relationships with farmers, however, eclipses a separate relationship of accountability and responsibility that the project team actively wished to evade: the relationship to those who paid for the project. In her ethnography of a Myanmar-based NGO, Chika

Watanabe (pers. comm.) observes that in rejecting the status of ‘professional’, NGO workers would evade the questions of accountability and responsibility to which professional work is tied. Similarly, when IFF staff embraced the Qingshan project as something that stood beyond the deliverables, and reporting procedures that

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characterize much of IFF’s work, we sought to evade questions of accountability and responsibility to anyone beyond Qingshan. We hoped to evade the obligations and entanglements that professional relationships – relationships that entail being paid for work – ordinarily bring to research and development work.

There were good reasons to want to escape the entanglements not only with partners in the Qingshan project, but with the broader professional imperatives exemplified by Alistair’s marketing strategy or the MELA framework described in

Chapter 1. Indeed, the kind of relationships that IFF staff sought to establish with farmers were in some cases undermined by the professional imperatives of funding organizations like the Food Security Fund. When I returned to China in 2017 to conduct follow up research, I discovered that the Agroforestry for Myanmar project had been terminated a year and a half early. This was because irreconcilable differences between IFF and its principal local partner had made management of the project’s experimental agroforestry plots impossible. In meetings to arrange the early termination of the project, IFF requested that the Food Security Fund allow IFF to continue with a mushroom training workshop that IFF had already promised to local farmers at one of the project sites. For the IFF team implementing the project, this promise had generated an obligation to the farmers, and was an obligation that they wished to fulfil. The Food Security Fund’s response, however, was that this workshop would not be an ‘effective use of funds’.

This response can be understood in the logic of outcomes thinking, and in the context of the Food Security Fund’s agenda for value for money, and large-scale impact. Initially the mushroom workshops were located alongside IFF’s other

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activities in an integrated project theory of change that promised improvements in upland land management. As the project was disbanded, however, the mushroom workshops now stood in isolation. Shorn of their relationship to a broader theory of change and to a concrete plan for up-scaling, the mushroom workshops lost their claims to value for money: the Food Security Fund saw little prospect of economically measurable return on investment from two international scientists running isolated workshops for twenty or so farmers. The professional logic of value for money superseded any sense of personal obligation to fulfil promises made to farmers participating in the project.

Given the widely recognized violence of contemporary forms of professionalism, the impulse to “escape” professionalism has an obvious appeal (Tsing

2015). Enthusiasm for escaping these professional relationships, however, was not universal at IFF. As described in Chapter 2, Jianming, a senior member of the administrative team, departed IFF due to his loss of faith in the value of IFF-China’s work. When he described IFF’s lack of value, Jianming did so in a manner that echoed contemporary trends in M&E and outcomes thinking: Jianming lamented IFF’s failure to quantifiably demonstrate a return on investment for any of its projects. As well as being a waste of his own energy, Jianming described its work as a waste of tax payers’ money – the source, as he pointed out, of much of IFF’s domestic and international research funding. Unlike the Qingshan project which only sought to establish responsibility towards local project participants, Jianming also pointed towards professional obligations to those who fund IFF’s work.

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Another IFF staff member, Wasim, offered his own frustration at attempts by colleagues within and beyond IFF to evade obligations to the recently completed

Asian Watersheds project for which he had been project manager. Asian Watersheds involved collaboration across three countries among IFF and two research for development organizations based in Central and Southern Asia. Unusually for an IFF-

China colleague, Wasim lamented the lack of monitoring and evaluation in this project. He described how the project involved running a household survey across four sites, with each project partner taking responsibility for at least one site. Rather than a new survey, however, a senior member of the IFF team decided that for the China site, they would re-use data from an already completed household survey. To ensure uniformity across the other sites, Wasim explained, the other project partners decided to implement the same survey instrument from IFF’s earlier household survey. As the project partners implemented this survey, however, it became apparent that the survey instrument was poorly designed and produced data of very little value to the project.

Wasim suggested that expediency had taken precedence over quality, and that the lack of monitoring and evaluation associated with the project’s funding had allowed the

IFF staff involved in this project to pass off work already completed as if it were contributing to this project. The survey was not the only example of this. The same project included GIS analysis of the four sites. Wasim explained that this GIS analysis was, in contrast to the household survey, of very high quality. Wasim nevertheless complained that this research would have happened even without the Asian

Watersheds project. Wasim lamented that the donor’s failure to impose stricter monitoring and evaluation requirements had left him as project manager impotent to

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force IFF colleagues and the other project partners to effectively fulfil the goals that had originally been envisaged. Instead, as Wasim saw it, IFF only superficially satisfied what the donors had asked of them, while using the funds provided to support

IFF’s own existing research agenda. Wasim’s colleagues at IFF viewed this donor’s requirements only as a headache25 and succeeded in navigating the donor’s reporting procedures in such a way that ensured the donor’s demands had a minimal impact upon the research that IFF scientists already had it in mind to pursue. Wasim’s frustration was that this donor’s interruptions might have provided an opportunity for enhancing IFF’s work.

IFF’s ability to spend the Asian Watersheds funding with relative liberty is another iteration of IFF scientists’ desires to escape the constraints of oppressive professionalization. But both Wasim and Jianming remind us that these constraints emerge out of IFF’s economic relationship to those who fund its research. This is not to suggest that as scientists we should simply accept the demands and imperatives demanded by contemporary donors. Obsessions with speed, quantification, and value for money typified by contemporary use of return on investment as the ultimate measure of research and development efficacy are things that we must challenge. But to challenge the rubrics of professionalization described in the opening section of this chapter, would not be the same as to escape the relationships from which these rubrics emanate. To escape the obligations of professional funding, while simultaneously accepting the funding is akin to expecting a free gift: something which anthropologists have long known to be as undesirable as it is impossible (Laidlaw 2000; Mauss

25 See Chapter 2.

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1990).26 In this respect, the attempt to evade the obligations of funding organizations mirrors the trust-evading practices of Chinese bureaucrats that, as described in Chapter

3, so frustrated Huli. Much as these bureaucrats sought to minimize the entanglements and vulnerabilities that a transaction might extend into the future, when scientists treat donor evaluations as a headache, they embrace a fantasy that the transaction of funds can be conducted in such a way that generates no entailments upon or interruptions to the future paths of their projects.

Conclusion

As Anna Tsing highlights, our energies as scholars and as scientists must exceed the narrow constraints of contemporary professionalism typified by quantifiable certainties and narrow, cold logics of value for money. Through my ethnography of the extra-professional spaces that IFF scientists craft, I have provided an optimistic take on this challenge by suggesting that activities that attempt to exceed hyper- professionalism already abound. Though often all too quickly cut down by the imperatives of contemporary research and development professionalism, these examples demonstrate that anthropologists are not alone in attempting to imagine and craft spaces that exceed professionalization. These are practices, moreover, that frustrate the invulnerability of the sciences that anthropological, STS and feminist scholars have long sought to undermine. At the same time, however, the crafting of extra-professional spaces can imply or accompany desires to escape professional obligations to those funding research. Whereas spaces that exceed professionalism can

26 See Chapter 3.

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make the monopoly of scientific knowledge vulnerable and create valuable opportunities for interruption, efforts to escape professional obligations often also reflect desires to free scientific practice from vulnerability to the interruptions of those who pay for it – desires to evade potentials for those who invest financially in the sciences to shape the futures of scientific research.

Rather than indulging the fantasy of work shorn of vulnerability to those who fund our work, we might attempt to re-craft the basis of these professional relationships in a manner that would not shut down activities simply because a return on investment cannot be shown. With research budgets closer to home as much under pressure and scrutiny as international development funding, this is a challenge for anthropologists just as much as it is for agri-environmental scientists. And it is a challenge that many anthropologists no less than agri-environmental scientists wish to shun. To give one example, a colleague who recently received an award from a government-funded research grant was asked by the anthropologist administering the award to re-write the project abstract with a right-wing legislator in mind. By re- writing the project abstract in this way, the anthropologists hoped to avoid the project being made an example of by right-wing politicians trying to paint anthropological research as a waste of public resources. But just as IFF scientists sought to escape professional obligations, these two anthropologists sought merely to superficially satisfy the expectations of politicians who might hold them to account. This re-writing of the abstract has much in common with box ticking and headache navigating described in previous chapters. Much like some of IFF’s actions described in this chapter, these two anthropologists sought to eliminate a project’s potential

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vulnerability to a funder’s interruptions. Forging a new professionalism would involve engaging, rather than evading, the challenge of our relationships to the communities that fund our work. This would mean forging a new basis for vulnerability to the interruptions of the publics who finance science.

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CONCLUSION

At various points in this dissertation, I have related IFF staff’s experiences with bureaucracy and audit to the experiences of academics in European and North

American universities. A frequent theme in the academic literature on the bureaucratization and neoliberalization of universities, as well as of my own conversations with colleagues in UK universities, is the way that academics seek to

‘game the system’. Some UK university departments will, for example, change the contractual status of academics to enhance the appearance of a department’s overall research output. Here the contracts of less productive academics are re-written to give the appearance of their employment carrying significant administrative responsibilities. This inflates departmental REF27 scores which are calculated in relation not only to total research output, but also to staff research hours. Though often acknowledged as a somewhat limited response to the challenges posed by audit, such strategies are nevertheless viewed sympathetically as a part of resistance to illegitimate audit regimes. The image conjured by such perspectives and by calls for resistance to neoliberalization is often one of academics interrupted from worthy work by illegitimate government regulation (Espeland and Vannebo 2007; Giroux 2008;

Shore and Wright 1999, 2015b; Strathern 2000b; Thornton 2010; cf. Jemielniak and

Greenwood 2015; Matsuda 2014).

27 As described in the dissertation’s Introduction, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a government mandated audit for assessing research performance in UK universities.

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As described earlier in the dissertation, faced with the demands of evaluation by publication count, scientists often employ a salami-slicing strategy – the separation of research results into as many separate papers as possible. Echoing critiques of audit in European and North American institutions, some commentators on Chinese science highlight practices such as salami-slicing as an example of the distorting effects of bureaucratic evaluation (Cao and Suttmeier 2017; Qiu 2010; M. Tian, Su, and Ru

2016). Describing practices from ghost writing and salami-slicing to data falsification and the use of fake reviewers some commentators, moreover, share Shore and

Wright’s (2015a) lament that bureaucracy and audit cultures generate pressures that frustrate scientific autonomy (Cao and Suttmeier 2017, 2001; Chen and Macfarlane

2016).

Elsewhere, however, scholarship on scientific corruption and fraud in contemporary China points to a very different evaluation of the relative virtues of academics and the state institutions that might regulate them. Whereas the critical literature on audit in Europe and North America is sympathetic to academics gaming the system, the President of the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) highlights practices such as salami-slicing as evidence of China’s problem with

“research misconduct” (W. Yang 2016; also Cao 2014; Chen and Macfarlane 2016;

Cyranoski 2017; Lin 2013; Suttmeier 1985; R. Yang 2005; W. Yang 2013). During my time in Songlin, IFF colleagues shared numerous similarly disapproving stories of research misconduct. Josh, an international PhD student at IFF, for example, described how at the interview for the PhD program at another institution to which he had applied, he was told that his application had been accepted. Rather than work on his

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own research, however, he was instructed that he would write up the results of his supervisor’s already completed research for English language journals. As Josh and his colleagues interpreted it, this was an unconscionable example of the notorious practice of scientists employing ghost writers for peer-reviewed articles. In the literature on research misconduct, a common response is to identify a need for the

Chinese state to play a stronger role in governing research ethics. Weiqin Zeng and

David Resnik (2010, 171), for example, propose the introduction of audit mechanisms to Chinese research institutes and applaud the Chinese Government and the

Communist Party for the “significant steps [they have already taken] to promote research integrity by developing policies, conducting investigations of the problem, and establishing oversight committees” (also Ren 2012; The Lancet 2010; W. Yang

2013). Whereas in the context of bureaucratizing Western universities, academics imagine each other as virtuous actors whose work is corrupted by governments and funding intuitions, commentators on Chinese science imagine corrupted academics awaiting the reforming influence of audit, governance and regulation.

The contrast between these evaluations of academic corruption and virtue might highlight how the distinction between ‘gaming’ and ‘misconduct’ is not self- evident. Indeed, Mubai, another IFF PhD student, offered a somewhat less moralistic evaluation of an entomologist he knows who regularly sells papers for publication.

The papers this person would sell, Mubai explained, describe new species of insect.

Because there are so many insects that have yet to be described in a scientific journal they are relatively easy to find, and the work of writing up the species description is fairly formulaic. Despite its low profile, the authorship of such a paper could

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nevertheless be valuable to an academic or a government research officer who is, for example, applying for a promotion. While Mubai does not aspire to a career as a merchant of off-the-shelf publications, he nevertheless does not describe such practices in the same moralizing terms as is common in published discussions of research misconduct (cf. Hvistendahl 2013). Mubai did not seem to view this trade in papers as a scourge any more than UK academics are ordinarily disturbed to describe the tricks that their own universities use to boost REF scores.

More so than highlighting divergence in evaluative frameworks of scientific practice, however, my interest is in what the literatures on academic bureaucratizing in the West and research misconduct in China have in common. In Chapter 1, I described how, to construct a theory of change, IFF’s scientists began by outlining a vision for a future they might bring into being. This utopian vision of the future would then operate as the engine of momentum for work to bring this future into being. Critiques of cultures of fraud (China) and of audit (Europe and North America), and their arguments for greater (China) or lesser (Europe and North America) regulation of scientific practice take a different temporal structure. Here, critique is premised on a model of scientific practice that has been corrupted – be it by fraudulent scientists

(China) or by neoliberal governmentality (Europe and North America) – such that the inevitable conclusion is to address this corrupting influence. Here, not only does analysis take the social sciences’ conventional retrospective framework (cf. Miyazaki

2004), but the call to action to which this analysis leads is also orientated to the past: towards recovering a model of scientific practice that precedes the corrupting influence.

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Several decades of scholarship in STS would suggest that we should be skeptical of idealized images of existing models of scientific practice. And should also remind us that the model of scientific practice we should want to build is anything but self-evident. There is more at stake here, however, than highlighting the shortcomings of the ideal models of scientific practice implied by critical literatures on Chinese science and Western universities. Borrowing from the way theory of change brings temporality into view as a problem for scientific practice, we can imagine a different kind of orientation to the challenges of scientific practice in China and the West. In the most straightforward of senses, borrowing from theory of change would mean developing a vision of an academic practice one would want to bring into being.

Rather than respond to the bureaucratization of the sciences or to the specter of scientific fraud with nostalgia, we might respond by re-doubling the creative task of crafting a design for the sciences that we want to bring into being and take such a vision as the impetus for responses to research misconduct and bureaucratization. Put simply, this would be the difference between defending the sciences, and bringing them into being.

This is a temporal orientation that would bring research on fraud and on audit into alignment with a post-critical iteration of ANT in which the work of ethnography in STS gives way to the crafting of designs for the re-ordering of the political and scientific – not to mention, social, religious, legal etc. – constitution of modernity. In

An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Bruno Latour (2013) develops a pseudo- ethnographic analysis of what he calls modes of existence. Latour stresses the importance of appreciating “how to speak of each mode [of existence] in its own

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language and according to its own principle of verification” (Latour 2013, 143). In contrast to representational pluralism and the modernist hegemony of Science as the ultimate judge of all modes of veridiction, Latour develops a constitutional framework that would foster what he calls “ontological pluralism”. He envisions a world in which the dignity of each mode of existence – including scientific, political, legal and religious modes – would be guaranteed and develops a sophisticated framework for how these modes would interact. Moving away from the empirical basis of early ANT

(e.g. Callon 1986; Latour and Woolgar 1986), Latour shifts emphasis from revealing the world as it is and as it has been towards describing a world, a new constitution, that we should bring into being (also Callon 2009; Latour 1993, 130ff, 2004a)

An alternative to such grandiose constitutional proposals exists in the more modest – though no less transformative – orientation of feminist science and feminist science studies. One way to distinguish Latour’s constitution drafting from this literature would be to highlight the contrast between the acutely coherent and universal language of Latour’s modes of existence and the way feminist utopias are often grounded in the “holding [of] incompatible things together” and in the refusal of totalities (Haraway 1991, 149, 173). But also significant is the way that feminist science studies scholars envision practices that exist on a different temporal horizon to the constitutional prescriptions of ANT.

Drawing on efforts to re-imagine science as a feminist practice (e.g. Barad

2003; Haraway 1988, 1991; Harding 1991), Deboleena Roy (2008) describes her efforts to prescribe, as well as to conduct, feminist practices in molecular biology that would allow her to “produce different scientific knowledge” (154). For Roy this

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entails a concern “with practicing research agenda choice in such a way as to eliminate injustices that result from decisions regarding which scientific knowledge gets produced” (149). This concern led Roy to refuse to conduct in vivo research that she suggests has become intertwined with a pleasure in killing animals, and with scientists’ engagements with these animals as if they “willingly [give] their lives for research purposes” (150). This feminist practice, moreover, entails what Roy calls

“meta-ideologizing” – a practice that enables feminist scientists to transform dominant scientific ideologies (152-53). Roy’s meta-ideological practice involves appropriating scientific reductionism to conduct research that challenges the “dominant ideology that places the brain in control of the pituitary gland and gonads” – an ideology that

“affects the reproductive and sexual health of millions of women around the world”

(153).

The content and goals of Roy’s feminist molecular biology differ substantially from my ethnographic interest in agri-environmental science and academic audit.

More so than the content of Roy’s argument, however, I am interested in the temporal orientation that she adopts. Roy’s attempt to practice and prescribe practices for a feminist science exemplify a temporal orientation that contrasts not only with the retrospective and nostalgic mode of critique typical of analyses of scientific fraud in

China and of academic audit in the West, but also with the constitution-writing of

ANT. Roy locates the potential of feminist science neither in the recently corrupted practices of the near past, nor in a comprehensive vision of the future we should bring into being. Roy’s orientation is instead primarily towards new practices that scientists might implement in the present and near future. Rather than the temporal frame of

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Lesley’s theory of change, this is closer to the temporal structure in which Jiaolong imagined a scientific practice that embraces the challenge of fostering public interest in one’s research. As described in Chapter 1, Jiaolong urged her scientific colleagues to ask how we might ‘use different methods to more quickly transmit our research results to our primary and middle school classmates, to our classmates’ classmates, to our kin’s kin’. Like Roy, Jiaolong’s focus is on practices that scientists might take up in the present and near future.

This is not to say that Jiaolong or Roy imagine their work to have no significance or impact beyond a pragmatic immediate future. The point of contrast with the utopian vision of a theory of change or an ANT constitution is rather that the impetus for scientific practice to transform the world does not depend upon the prior elaboration (provisional or otherwise) of a vision for the future. When Roy describes her intention to challenge an ideology that “affects the reproductive and sexual health of millions of women around the world”, she does so with an idea of a better future in mind. Likewise, Jiaolong has a better future – not least for Lengshan’s rubber plantations – in mind when she proposes that scientists do more to connect their research to the lives and interests of a broader public. But neither scholar prefigures the future we would bring into being by adopting their proposed practices. Roy, for example, does not offer a blue print of the transformed ideology and practice of reproductive and sexual health that feminist molecular biology would bring into being.

Precisely how this work might become meaningful to people’s everyday lives is not something Roy seeks to determine from the outset (cf. Wiegman 2000, 821).

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It is in a similar spirit that this dissertation calls for the embrace of vulnerability as an intrinsic and valued aspect of scientific practices, and for a scientific practice that actively seeks opportunities for interruption. These are practices that cannot merely be recovered from a prior time. This dissertation has provided examples of audit and bureaucracy frustrating these potentials, but this is not to say that a model of scientific practice stands waiting to be freed from bureaucracy. Indeed, the challenge, as Chapter 2 argued, might be to craft alternative bureaucratic practices: practices that can generate productive interruption. This would be one way to address rather than escape the challenge described in Chapter 5 of negotiating our relationships as scientists to broader communities and broader publics. Framing this challenge, however does not imply a preconceived vision for the future that these interruptions would bring about, or a pathway mapped to that future. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, mapping future outcomes is only one way of giving impetus and momentum to research. Another way is Jiaolong’s challenge of fostering broader interest in our work: A challenge that stretches the horizon of scientific work beyond the endpoint of a peer-review publication, but that nevertheless sustains a more familiar – to scientists – orientation towards the unanticipated effects that scientific knowledge might generate. One problem to which impact agendas and technologies such as theory of change respond is that the effects of science are too often null – we are often, as Jiaolong put it, useless.28 Rather than refute this problem, this dissertation re-orientates it. Whereas Lesley’s theory of change asks: What predetermined changes in the knowledge, attitudes and skills of next users does our research seek to effect?;

28 See Introduction.

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and Jiaolong’s ask: What can we do to foster public interest in our work?; this conclusion suggests that we ask: How can we proliferate the opportunities for science to interrupt and for science to be interrupted?

Embracing Vulnerability in the Face of Precarity

The embrace of vulnerability and interruption are, as described in the preceding chapters, the opposite of what many scientists would seek in response to the rapid expansion of oppressive academic bureaucracies: the establishment of autonomy for the sciences. Vulnerability is a counterintuitive virtue to embrace in the face of a situation that already feels distinctly precarious. In the UK, for example, the increasingly pervasive reach of REF audits threatens not only academic reputations, but also livelihoods: Academics live in fear that if they do not satisfy REF’s narrow quantitative measures, they may be out of a job. Similarly, IFF colleagues navigated the MELA framework against the background of an office struggling to fund staff salaries. The Food Security Fund’s imposition of their new MELA framework coincided with a moment of financial difficulties for IFF-China. Another of IFF’s major projects had collapsed, several large funding applications had been unsuccessful and IFF’s international headquarters, which had significant difficulties of its own, was cutting funding to China and its other regional offices. Some researchers had government funded fellowships that guaranteed them a modest stipend, but many colleagues did not. Administrative staff who once seemed content in their jobs discussed with each other the possibility of redundancy and made plans for alternative

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careers. As Prof. Yin told Matt, who was by then the project manager, Agroforestry for Myanmar was not a project that IFF could afford to fail.

These are unlikely conditions under which to seek vulnerability. Like the administrators and bureaucrats who evaded trusting their clients at IFF by insisting upon rigid documentary proceduralism, the precarious position in which IFF colleagues found themselves generated a distinct aversion to vulnerability. This is a context that again suggests parallels between academics in the UK who game REF and

Chinese scientists who commit ‘misconduct’. Mubai’s sympathy for scientists who buy off-the-shelf entomology papers emanates from his recognition that ever-growing demand for scientists to multiply their publication outputs – so-called ‘publish or perish’ – generates impossible pressures. A similar recognition underlies sympathy for

UK academics who game REF by changing the contractual status of underproductive academics. According to this logic, gaming/misconduct are justified by the precarious contexts that necessitate them. These are sympathies that point to some of what is so wrong with contemporary scientific and academic bureaucracies.

As described in Chapter 1, monitoring and evaluation frameworks orientate researchers towards over-determined future perfect goals. IFF colleagues’ experiences of protracted processes for counterparts at the Food Security Fund to approve the initial version of the MELA framework diminished IFF staff’s confidence in the Food

Security Fund’s assertions of flexibility and revisability. IFF colleagues’ reluctance to discuss changes with project managers was further exacerbated by the specter of what the project’s collapse might mean for IFF-China and its staff. Far from opportunities for productive interruption to the project’s trajectory, when they communicated with

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the Food Security Fund, Matt and his colleagues were animated by a fear that the Food

Security Fund might withdraw their funding for the project.

These fears led Matt to withhold from the Food Security Fund the many difficulties that IFF was having managing its relationship with the project’s key local partner in Myanmar – Shada Forestry Institute. In his original grant proposal to the

Food Security Fund, Jacob – who was IFF’s project manager at the time of the project’s initiation – made much of the Shada Forestry Institute’s role in the project. A major weakness of IFF’s proposal, Jacob told me, was that IFF do not have a permanent staff in Myanmar. Having an in-country partner such as Shada Forestry

Institute was therefore central to the project’s viability. Moreover, Jacob explained,

Shada Forestry Institute had close connections with local government – a key selling point for a project that aspired to influence public policy. Two years into the project, however, IFF had made little progress towards signing a formal memorandum of understanding with Shada Forestry Institute. Moreover, communication had increasingly broken down between Matt, who had by that time taken over as IFF’s project manager, and his counterpart at Shada Forestry Institute. Fearful that the Food

Security Fund might shut the project down if it discovered how dysfunctional IFF’s relationship with its key partner had become, Matt decided to obscure these difficulties from the Food Security Fund while he sought hopelessly for a solution to the problem.

When nearly three years into the four year project, the relationship with Shada

Forestry Institute became so difficult that the collaboration could not continue, Matt finally disclosed his difficulties to the Food Security Fund who, sure enough, terminated the project.

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The significance of this incident is not merely that Matt was right to fear the project being shut down, or that the Food Security Fund were wrong to shut it down – by that time even Matt saw little alternative. More significant is the fact that this was a fear that prevented Matt and his colleagues from openly communicating with the Food

Security Fund. This was something that not merely delayed the project’s inevitable collapse, it was also something that deprived IFF of support from the Food Security

Fund – itself a well-established and well-connected actor in Myanmar – that might have allowed IFF to revise project plans before it was too late. Rather than trust the

Food Security Fund to respond constructively and provide scope for IFF to find an alternative local partner, Matt and his colleagues decided to sustain the pretense that everything was going to plan. As Huli highlighted in relation to Chinese state bureaucrats,29 it is difficult to trust from a position of precarity. When funding bureaucracies generate such intense experiences of precarity, it leads scientists to focus only on the problem of shoring up their futures, and in so doing these bureaucracies cripple the very work they are intended to enhance.

This contrasts dramatically with the situation in which Susanna made plans for soil management in Qingshan that were willfully vulnerable to the interruptions of local farmers.30 Unlike in the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, work in Qingshan was not tied to predetermined audit metrics. And IFF’s ability to fund staff salaries was not, as it seemed to be in the Agroforestry for Myanmar project, tied to the successful realization of a predetermined project plan. This gave Susanna a certain

29 See Chapter 3. 30 See Chapter 5.

215

freedom from conventional donor-imposed demands such as value for money and scalability. But escape from these demands was significant not because it allowed

Susanna and her colleagues to autonomously conduct whatever research they saw fit.

Rather, it was freedom from these demands that allowed IFF staff to entangle themselves in relationships with rural communities – relationships that would necessarily cede a degree of control over the project. Insofar as this project represented some of the potentials for what science might be outside the constraints of contemporary professionalization and bureaucratization, its distinctive characteristic was not the autonomy that Susanna enjoyed, but the forms of vulnerability that she embraced.

As described in Chapter 5, however, there is a tension between efforts such as the Qingshan Agroforestry team’s to create spaces of engagement that exceed oppressive professionalism, and simultaneous desires to escape entanglements with those who fund research and development. Judith Butler (2014, 13) cautions that “the discourse of ‘vulnerability’” is susceptible to exploitation as a means to “to shore up … privilege” – such as, in Butler’s example, by white Californians who “losing their status as a majority … claimed that they were a ‘vulnerable’ population”.

Likewise, the fact of academics’ and scientists’ increasing precarity should not be exploited as a means for shoring up our own privilege – or more specifically, for shoring up our autonomy. Rather than indulge the fantasy of autonomy that the intense interruptions of audit seem to inspire, ethnography of IFF reminds us not only that vulnerability is an inevitable aspect of human sociality (Butler 2014), but more specifically that it serves as an engine of scientific practice. Scientific work at IFF

216

depends not upon pathways autonomously forged, but on pathways that are molded – via the interruptions of forums from peer-review to rural workshops – by the relationships in which scientists and their research are entangled and to which they are necessarily, and often willfully, vulnerable. In this respect, as well as providing tools for critiquing the bureaucratization and professionalization of science IFF colleagues’ interactions with diverse bureaucracies also give us tools for thinking about the forms of scientific practice that we should be working to bring into being. In an age of audit and bureaucratization, not to mention of anti-expert populism, we cannot underestimate the challenge of re-crafting scientific practices. Or of re-imagining the kind of trust that we ask people to place in the sciences. This is a challenge for which war is the wrong metaphor and autonomy the wrong goal.31 Rather than battle for new spaces of autonomy, we might forge new spaces of vulnerability, and new more fruitful opportunities for our work to interrupt and be interrupted by broader publics.

As ethnography of IFF demonstrates, we may not need to look far afield to find the seeds of such practices.

31 See Introduction.

217

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