Power, data and knowledge in development sector impact evaluation activities: critically engaging with the impact iceberg
type: CreativeWork
description: The study opens with a simple observation: International Development is now a digitally data/knowledge intensive sector. This mundane remark suggests development has also become a rich domain for studying how power, data and knowledge are related. In data/knowledge intensive development, our ideas about impacts may appear empirical and objective, based on data and expertise, and often digitally immaterial. However, these ideas involve power and politics which shape data desires and data cells, knowledge products, packaging and pitching, governing processes and digital systems. Such dynamics place demands upon agents like non- government organisations (NGOs), transforming them from an old emphasis on tangible and physical relief, such as providing medicine, food, or clothes to those in need, to constructing and exchanging digital data and expert impact products in diverse development markets and bureaucracies. Processes, like impact evaluation are caught up in this shift to data/knowledge intensity and the power relations, inequalities and silences that accompany the shift. This study elucidates these power/data/knowledge relations, specifically with regard to impact evaluation itself, but more broadly regarding data/knowledge intensive development, or what some observers have christened “development 2.0”. Two bodies of literature are relevant to the study. Firstly, the normative discourse on how-to- do evaluation, and secondly, critical perspectives which acknowledge power and politics, and the impacts of (the doing of) evaluation. The prescriptive discourse is found to rely on old and problematic, yet still pervasive and implicit, models of data/knowledge construction which ignore or elide practice and power. Therefore, an alternative view of data/knowledge construction is proposed, and a research approach developed to explore how critical insights might live in the wilds of development sector evaluation practice. The approach draws on Cultural Historical Activity …
abstract: The study opens with a simple observation: International Development is now a digitally data/knowledge intensive sector. This mundane remark suggests development has also become a rich domain for studying how power, data and knowledge are related. In data/knowledge intensive development, our ideas about impacts may appear empirical and objective, based on data and expertise, and often digitally immaterial. However, these ideas involve power and politics which shape data desires and data cells, knowledge products, packaging and pitching, governing processes and digital systems. Such dynamics place demands upon agents like non- government organisations (NGOs), transforming them from an old emphasis on tangible and physical relief, such as providing medicine, food, or clothes to those in need, to constructing and exchanging digital data and expert impact products in diverse development markets and bureaucracies. Processes, like impact evaluation are caught up in this shift to data/knowledge intensity and the power relations, inequalities and silences that accompany the shift. This study elucidates these power/data/knowledge relations, specifically with regard to impact evaluation itself, but more broadly regarding data/knowledge intensive development, or what some observers have christened “development 2.0”. Two bodies of literature are relevant to the study. Firstly, the normative discourse on how-to- do evaluation, and secondly, critical perspectives which acknowledge power and politics, and the impacts of (the doing of) evaluation. The prescriptive discourse is found to rely on old and problematic, yet still pervasive and implicit, models of data/knowledge construction which ignore or elide practice and power. Therefore, an alternative view of data/knowledge construction is proposed, and a research approach developed to explore how critical insights might live in the wilds of development sector evaluation practice. The approach draws on Cultural Historical Activity …
author: Kelly, Paul
date published: 2019
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:18:32Z
provider: University of Essex
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Lancaster University