Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Accounting, Organizations and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aos Assembling international development: Accountability and the disarticulation of a social movement Daniel E. Martinez a, *, David J. Cooper b a b HEC Paris, Department of Accounting and Management Control, 1 rue de la Liberation, 78350, Jouy-en-Josas, France School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2R6, Canada a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Received 29 July 2013 Received in revised form 10 January 2017 Accepted 10 February 2017 This paper examines how international development funding and accountability requirements are implicated in the so-called disarticulation of a social movement. Based on field studies in Guatemala and El Salvador, we show and explain the way accountability requirements, which encompass management and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, constitute the field of international development through the regulation of heterogeneous social movement organizations. We highlight how accountability enables a form of governance that makes possible the emergence of entities (with specific attributes), while restricting others. Our analysis has implications for governmentality studies that have examined the interrelation of assemblages by analyzing how these interrelations are operationalized at the field level through the Deleuze-and-Guattari-inspired processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Accountability Social movements International development Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Governmentality Assemblages I left the country soon after my brother was disappeared by the military.1That was in 1980 and government repression had escalated, forcing a number of us involved in the movement to cross the border into Mexico as political refugees. There, I started to work with other exiled activists to aid communities caught in the middle of the war. We sent our first funding proposal to an organization in Holland with close ties to the church. The proposal included a description of the problems, the objectives we expected to achieve, the activities to carry out, and an explanation of how it would be evaluated. It also included a budget, which was quite general, not very specific, like these days. For example, a line item would be for food and we would write that $10,000 worth of food was needed, same for clothes and medicine. Of course, we had to justify the expenses with receipts, whenever we could get them. The budget was a page long. In total the proposal was five pages and it took no more than 15 days for the funds to be deposited into a bank account that one of the priests opened in his name for us to use. This is nothing like our current proposals, which are * Corresponding author. E-mail address: martinez@hec.fr (D.E. Martinez). 1 In Guatemala, the Commission for Historical Clarification estimates that over 200,000 persons were disappeared or killed during the 36-year war. The document notes: “State forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of the violations documented” (Historical Clarification Commission, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2017.02.001 0361-3682/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. much longer and denser with technical and financial information. The agencies also knew we could not provide the most detailed and transparent paperwork because we were facing a humanitarian crisis. We were refugees and did not have the documentation to start an NGO or open a bank account. What we did have was the support of a few priests and the support of international NGOs with offices in Mexico. The precarious situation in which we worked meant that it was of fundamental importance that we established relationships based on mutual trust, that there be a commonality in values and principles. We were all engaged in the same movement, locally and internationally, to promote social change. The personnel in the aid agencies and international NGOs that we worked with showed a political commitment to the cause and they provided financial support for that cause. They knew that their administrative requirements could not always be met because of the war. When representatives from international organizations were able to visit and monitor a project, they would observe the conditions of the communities in which we worked and the lack of administrative infrastructure. The monitors did not count in great detail the amount of bags of corn purchased or see whether everything was there. It was not the overarching preoccupation and they would not hassle us too much about the receipts: That they were missing, not in the proper format or order, that the signature was not legible, and so on. There was more understanding, more flexibility. D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 This understanding is also reflected in the way financial transactions were managed. The money had to be wire-transferred by international donors into our bank accounts. At first we used banks in Mexico, but we ran into some trouble with the accounts. We needed our accounts in US dollars and the Mexican government did not allow that at the time. The banks in our home country were too risky because the military was auditing internationally funded accounts. The best option at the time was to open accounts in Panama because their banks operated in dollars and were less regulated. But that meant that one of us would have to go and collect those funds once we got confirmation that the funds were transferred. On a few occasions I had to take that dreadful trip. It meant taking the bus to Panama to retrieve the funds, we are talking tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and make my way back to Mexico on another bus. That also meant that we had dollars in our safe that needed to be converted into Mexican pesos and then into Guatemalan quetzals. We could not depend on banks for this either; that meant someone had to take cash to the border and exchange it at black market rates. It was unreasonable to expect a receipt from a black market transaction. But funders knew. They noticed that we did not use the official exchange rate in our financial reports. We also worked a lot with cash, which meant that we seldom provided bank statements. So here again is the element of trust. When I was given the order to take those trips to Panama it meant that they trusted my political commitment; the same way they trusted the person responsible for the exchange rate; the same way that international funders trusted our organization with the funds it provided; and that we trusted that they would not give intelligence to the military or anyone that could put us and the communities in danger. The funders trusted that every dollar would be used to the best of our abilities to improve the situation of the communities. It would not make sense to risk our lives, to build a reputation based on our commitment to the struggle, and then throw all that away by embezzling a few dollars or by not doing the best project we could with the conditions we were working in. If something were to go awry with the funds, well, it was more than an administrative penalty, it was a political one. 1. Introduction Antonio2 provides an account of the accountability relations between non-formalized grassroots organizations and European and North American international funders during the war.3 It highlights how “solidarity,” “trust,” “a commonality in values and principles,” and a sense that they “were all engaged in the same movement” 4 underpinned funding and accountability relations between grassroots organizations and their funders. To be clear, Antonio's account is not the portrayal of a golden era. It indicates how an organization avoided capture by governments (which often meant torture, disappearance, or death) and how it 2 This is a composite character based on interviews with three NGO workers' experiences with international development and the social movement since the war. This composite character provides an ethnographic account that protects the identity of specific interviewees and helps to make the case more vivid (for similar approaches see Rottenburg (2009) and Dugdale (1999)). 3 Both countries were engulfed in an internal armed struggle that pitted their military-led governments against various left-wing guerrilla organizations. This is developed in section 3. 4 Referring to the social movement in the singular was a common way for interviewees to refer to the historical social movementda way of characterizing a social movement with origins in the war. Currently, there are various social movements (e.g., campesino, labour, feminist movements) and we are not suggesting that they are acting as a singular entity. Like our interviewees, we reserve the singular use to refer to the historical social movement that is at the centre of our study. 19 operated in adverse conditions. Antonio provides us, rather, with a particular experience of a social movement and highlights three important features. First, its components: International NGOs and funding agencies, non-formalized grassroots organizations, refugees, and priestsdeach with its own mode of political intervention. Second, the relations between the social movement and funding agencies, characterized by lenient legal and accounting requirements and the use of an underground economy to avoid banks and the military. Finally, Antonio articulates a unifying political aspiration, a “commonality in values and principles,” that kept the disparate components of the movement together. This aspiration is not restricted to the past, though, as it permeates organizations operating in the increasingly technical and professionalized world of international development. It is a “politics of affirmation” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 6) that informs their critique of international development and the articulation of alternative modes of accountability and political intervention. Antonio's narrative offers a starting point to examine how grassroots organizations and the broader social movement that they were “all engaged in” have been altered. Our study was initially prompted by interviewees' concern over the changes they experienced since the war. As a Guatemalan community organizer noted: “International development has been able to do what the military was not able to do during the war: Disarticulate the social movement.” Another interviewee active in organizing communities during the war, and now an NGO project coordinator, similarly noted: “There are grassroots organizations, movements that have been disarticulated due to economic influence, due to money. But above all, because they have become NGOized.” These, like other
pez & B

pez, a Tiul, 2009; Morales Lo accounts (see also Morales Lo 2010; Roy, 2004; Alvarez, 1999, 2009), sensitize us to the powerful effects of international development's accountability requirements on social movements. The study of this so-called disarticulation was also motivated by our understanding of how accountability requirements enable the formation of a governable field by regulating its component parts, their relations, and political aspirations. Previous studies indicate that accounting and accountability technologies are implicated in bringing a governable field into being (Miller & O'Leary, 1987; Miller, 1990; Preston, 2006; Rahaman, Neu, & Everett, 2010). Less has been written on how this bringing into being limits and regulates other entities. This prompted us to study not only how “complexes” of rationales and practices mesh together, intersect, and are constitutive of one another (Miller, 1990), but also the processes through which one complex gives way to another. We address these understandings through a field study conducted in Guatemala and El Salvador; each one engulfed in its own internal war until left-wing guerrillas and the state signed peace accords in the 1990s. The accords marked the beginning of a reconstruction process: The formation of state institutions through which grassroots organizations and guerrillas could carry out their political programme as political parties, labour unions, and NGOs. International development work became one way through which these actors could intervene in the process of reconstruction. We argue that accountability requirements, which encompass management and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, played an important role in the formation and continued maintenance of international development as a space for social movement organizations to intervene but to also be intervened and constituted as proper developmental actors. Studying how social movement organizations became components of this field of development intervention, though, also exposed us to how bringing something into being has disarticulating effects. To help us think about this we enlist Deleuze and Guattari's notion of “assemblage” and their processes of 20 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 territorialization, coding, and overcoding. Through these processes we trace how the international development assemblage comes into being by acquiring particular content from the social movement assemblage and by giving this content an expression, an emerging identity. These processes provide us with greater focus into how assemblages intersect. Unlike Miller's examination of the “programmatic dimensions of power/knowledge” (1990, 334), we focus on the technologies of governance that enable intersections and their disarticulating effects. We describe the formation of an important assemblage in the region (international development) whose formation regulates the political and accountability connections with, and even the survival of, another assemblage (the social movement). That is, we show how an assemblage is constituted out of the organizational and aspirational components of an increasingly disarticulated other. To disarticulate is not just that the social movement loses organizations to the international development assemblage, but also that these organizations' political aspirations are rearticulated in the service of international development. This is important because it highlights how a heterogeneous mix of formalized and non-formalized organizations became projectimplementing NGOs. After all, we have learned that accountability requirements have effects on NGOs accountability to different stakeholders, on their capitals, and their professionalization (Chenhall, Hall, & Smith, 2010; O'Dwyer & Unerman, 2008). But these studies have been conducted at the organizational level. Our account extends their findings by considering the effect these requirements have on how these NGOs become parts of an emerging assemblage. The significance is that we learn that changes in accountability requirements enable organizations, such as non-formalized grassroots organizations, to acquire certain features, become “proper” project implementing NGOs, as they make their way into the field of international development. This requires us to analyze how a confluence of accountability requirements contained in registration forms, funding proposals, and monitoring reports are implicated in transforming the organizations and the field of relations into another governable composition.5 The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section two situates our study in the accountability literature that discusses its constitutive power, including the power to constitute a governable field of actors. We introduce Deleuze and Guattari's concepts to help us analyze some of the processes through which this happens. Section three explains our research methods. This is followed by two sections that describe the processes through which funding and accountability requirements compose the international development assemblage out of the social movement's components. Finally, section six concludes with a discussion of the study's implications. 2. Accountability and the assembly of a field of governance Our point of departure is that accountability is a “constituent” of a type of governance (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 30; Quattrone, 5 This is not to say that there is no resistance or agency. Organizations do contest some of these transformative pressures. We encountered organizations that choose not to submit proposals to some international agencies as a form of protest. Others engage in administrative strategies to finance politically charged projects that would otherwise not get funded by leaking funds out of international development into the social movement. The latter are “invisible” strategies or what interviewees called “manoeuvres” or “tricks” that enable them to operate and contribute to both assemblages. We intend to develop on these in a subsequent paper (see also Li, 2007, p. 264). 2004). The power of accountability as a tool of governance is that it has “significant consequences for the entities held to account,” including the possibility that new entities are “brought into being” (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 58). Governmentality studies, together with Deleuze and Guattari's concepts, provide us with valuable tools to examine how accountability brings a certain field “into being.” The governmentality literature has mobilized multiple concepts to describe a dynamic composition of heterogeneous parts and power relations. Miller (1990), for instance, studies accounting and the state as two distinct but mutually constitutive complexes of practices and rationales. We too are interested in examining “how changes in the constitutive components of one complex make possible the emergence, articulation or transformation of the other” (Miller, 1990, p. 316). Whereas Miller studies the vision that programme architects have about the way society ought to function and the calculative technologies that intervene to constitute the population as a self-governing entity, we want to examine these intersections as experienced by the subjects of governance. And while we have learned that accounting and accountability technologies are implicated in governing through the constitution and arrangement of actors in a particular field (see Neu, Ocampo, Graham, & Heincke, 2006; Rahaman et al., 2010), we still do not know how they intervene in assembling a field of governance by disarticulating another. Focusing on governmental interventions in relation to “actual” organizations provides us with a better view into how these organizations are transformed, as they are absorbed into an assemblage while regulating their relations to the assemblage from which they came.6 We enlist another set of concepts to study the relation between assemblages. We define the social movement and international development as “assemblages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which shares the same intuition as concepts in the governmentality literature such as complex, constellations, fields, and networks. Our use, though, makes more explicit a form of governing that “operates by stratification” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 433): a process through which components of the social movement assemblage are subsumed into the assemblage of international development. Accordingly, we conceptualize social movements as “expansive, heterogeneous and polycentric discursive fields of action […] constructed, continuously reinvented and shaped by distinctive political cultures and power distributions” (Escobar & Osterweil, 2010, pp. 195e6). The heterogeneous and dynamic social movement assemblage of our study has undergone and continues to undergo a series of transformations as its parts are enveloped into the emerging assemblage of international development. International development, unlike the social movement, is a stratified assemblage: A “vertical, hierarchized aggregate” whereby components of “very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities” are made to “resonate” with one another by acquiring linked characteristics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 433). This aggregate is formed through the regulation of these diverse components: In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, it slows down, or controls those relations … it isolates itself from the remainder of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert 6 Rather than a study of programmers' aspirations, this is a study of the “messy consequences of programmes” (Li, 2007, p. 28). This is not to say that this renders a more “realist” account; programmes have effects, many of them unintended (Miller, 1990), and we document some of these messy consequences, some of the possible stances that subjects take amidst these programmatic rules. D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 even stricter controls over its relations with that remainder. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 433; emphasis ours) To stratify an assemblage is to hierarchically aggregate diverse components and make them cohere and give them an orderdit disarticulates by regulating, by cutting off their relations to what is now “exterior.” This stratification involves the interrelated processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding. Territorialization demarcates the content of an assemblage. It is a process that includes a degree of filtering and the establishment of boundaries to make possible that “proper” organizations are included in the emerging aggregate. This is not simply a physical space, but rather, a calculative space (Miller & Power, 2013). Coding involves arranging the assemblage's content into “more or less uniform layers” (DeLanda, 2000) by complying with funding agencies' (more or less) homogeneous administrative categories. At stake are organizations' structure (legally and administratively as a type of NGO) and mode of development intervention (as noted with the prevalence of the project management). Although organizations become administratively similar, this is not another story of isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), they are also differentiated: Funders require organizations to specialize and intervene in specific agency-mandated programmatic and geographic areas. Territorialization and coding, in other words, is what gives an assemblage its particular content. Overcoding is a process of establishing functional relations, of binding components together to constitute a whole. In our empirical site, cementing relations among organizations is achieved in part by (a) administratively overwhelming organizations, requiring them to focus on their relationship of accountability with funders; (b) requiring specific forms of inscriptions such as receipts and invoices, establishing fixed administrative paths among organizations; and (c) altering flows of funds, encouraging administrative and financial alliances among NGOs and between NGOs and their local governments. Through these, the more or less similar content is “made to work in a ‘functional structure’” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 83). The assemblage exerts its force, its expression, a quality, onto its components as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and is able to exert focused systematic behaviour” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 37).7 Individually, these three processes may seem familiar. Prior literature indicates that accounting technologies both filter and establishes boundaries thereby creating an inside and outside (Miller & Power, 2013; Mouritsen & Thrane, 2006; Neu, Everett, Rahaman, & Martinez, 2013), make organizations isomorphic (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), and alter their relation to one another as they are unified as a network (Rahaman et al., 2010). But, by placing these processes side-by-side we learn how these individual processes overlap and reinforce each other as parts of a larger process of constituting a governable assemblage in the name of “developing” or improving the wellbeing of a region (Li, 2007). This provides a view into how the different accountability requirements, legal requirements, and funding flows intervene in the different processes to dispose these populations to intervene in their own development, not as the social movement Antonio envisioned, but as an assemblage of professionalized and technically competent NGOs. To conclude, while governmentality studies provide us with a 7 Deleuze and Guattari (1987), reflect on the “double articulation,” a dual process, implicated in the process of stratification. We adapted it, in a schematic way, as interventions that give the assemblage its “content” (mainly through territorialization and coding) and interventions that give it an “expression” (mainly through overcoding). 21 view into how a field of actors and their relations come together, we employ additional concepts to make sense of how one type of assemblage is constituted out of another. Through stratification processes we learn how boundaries are defined, parts are made coherent as they acquire certain features, and their relations are controlled and “cut off” from the assemblage from which they come from. This cutting off makes the social movement something exterior, which is central to its disarticulation. 3. Research methodology 3.1. The field of Guatemala and El Salvador Our field study takes place in Guatemala and El Salvador. Both countries were engulfed in an internal armed struggle that decimated many facets of the countries' political, social, and economic infrastructure, with deleterious effects on the population at large, particularly in the area of human rights. Guatemala and El Salvador experienced 36 and 12 years of conflict, respectively, that pitted the military-led government against various left wing guerrilla armies that eventually unified as the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (UNRG, by its Spanish acronym) and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. During the war, the social movement, broadly composed of guerrilla armies, student, labour and campesino [peasant] organizations, churches, human rights organizations, and international solidarity organizations, was driven underground. NGO-like entities were closely linked with the social movement. They were, however, as we learned though Antonio, often not formalized (legalized) as NGOs because their work was mainly clandestine and at times based in neighbouring countries, working with exiled and internally displaced populations. The signing of the peace accords in the 1990s led to the formation of a series of institutions that, on paper, at least, enabled guerrillas and grassroots elements of the social movement to continue their political struggle through these institutions. This gave rise to not only the formalization of guerrillas into political parties, but also the formalization of grassroots organizations into NGOs. With the signing of the Accords, Guatemala and El Salvador witnessed an NGO boom.8 The Accords were an important part of the incorporation of those “outside” into the state and the regulated field of international development.9 International and domestic development NGOs played an active role in the process of reconstructing Guatemala and El Salvador during and after the war as aid agencies provided technical training and funds to domestic NGOs. The signing of the Accords marked a transition for many organizations, a transition that is at the centre of our study. 3.2. Field study and analysis We undertook two field trips in 2010 and 2011 to El Salvador 8 Exact figures are difficult to access. One study estimates that there are approximately 3000 NGOs in Guatemala (Foro de Coordinaciones de ONG de Guatemala, 2012, 103). 9 International development includes government agencies of OECD countries that administer foreign aid programs to developing countries; examples include the United States Agency for International Development and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation. We focus on funds that originate from these statefunding agencies. In most cases though agencies transfer funds to local NGOs through either multilateral agencies, such as the United Nations Development Programme, and the World Bank, and/or international NGOs such as Oxfam, CARE, and Trocaire. Our empirical focus is on local NGOs that operate in Guatemala and El Salvador and receive grants from bilateral and multilateral government agencies and international NGOs, as well as from their local states. 22 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 and Guatemaladinvolving 7 weeks in El Salvador and 7 weeks in Guatemala.10 The first field trip permitted us to get insight into what were the management devices used, how they were used, and their effects. Our initial interviews also focused on the field's characteristics and on identifying the pressing issues faced by the participants. These areas of interest were explored in more detail through subsequent interviews. 38 interviews were conducted during the first visit and 24 during the second, involving 20 local NGOs, 2 non-incorporated organizations,11 1 municipal government, 8 international NGOs, 10 funding agencies (6 bilateral and 4 multilateral), and 2 consulting firms (see appendix A). Participants include managers, community organizers and technicians, accountants and administrators, consultants, civil servants, and social justice activists. All but five were digitally recorded. The interviews provided sufficient material to address our conceptual concerns. We took particular interest in NGO workers and grassroots activists that had experience that date to the war. They provided valuable perspectives into the social movement's history. We also thought important to identify personnel in NGOs that do not see themselves as part of the social justice movement that dates to the war.12 They provided us with perspective on the field's professionalization. These interviews helped us track some of the changes experienced in the field over the years. Weaving together the past with current practices was a recurrent theme in our interviews and we seek to reflect on this in this study. This weaving was often done through the notion of social movement. Interviewees repeatedly referred to the historical social movement as a field of organizational and political relations and as that under threat of disarticulation. This is a partial and historically contingent notion of the social movement, and one integral to the discussion on international development and the centrality of accountability requirements. Participants were asked for documents that illustrated the reports and management tools commonly used in their organizations. Formal documentation provides a view into projects and how requirements are enacted at the organizational and operational level (Jensen & Winthereik, 2013). Most of the organizations provided copies or allowed photographs of a project's monitoring reports, work plans, annual financial reports, position papers, budgets, etc. (in total 1500 pages of documents were photographed). Together with documents downloaded from NGOs' and funding agencies' websites (including: annual reports, promotional material, financial statements, etc.), these inscriptions gave us a visual representation of the major templates (such as the Logical Framework, budgets, and operational plans) that are part of the legal, accounting, project management, and financial requirements used to manage internationally funded projects. We also observed how projects were operationalized in the field by attending project-related activities and workshops. These visits enabled us to observe how the project, as a mode of development intervention, was enacted and later accounted for by the technicians and accountants. We also observed meetings among project 10 One of the authors also spent six months between 2004 and 2005 in Guatemala as part of a previous research project with an organization with close connections to the social movement and international development. This provided us with some of the initial contacts and insights into the field, which inform the current study. 11 Volunteer-based “activist” organizations/collectives that resist incorporating as an NGO. 12 This is a matter of degree. While we got some insight into the extent of these NGOs' connections with the grassroots social movement from reading their websites and published materials, the following were also assessed during the interviews: the practices and discourses (extent to which they communicate with activist organizations, mode of interventions such as rallies, and their vocabulary on the state, capitalism, class, management, accountability, and gender). coordinators and technicians in one of the NGOs, which helped us understand how accountability is performed. While empirically informed, the aim of the data collection process, and the methodological considerations that informed it, is to enable us to tell a convincing and theoretically informed story that reflects some of the transformations (and ambiguities) of the fields we studied. Our methodological approach is not to “represent the world as it is or what it means, but to survey and map its tendencies” (Holland, 2013, p. 37). In this regard we provide one account (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 256; De Laet & Mol, 2000) of the requirements and some of the effects they have. The technologies and the effects that we identified in the field were among the more discussed and stressed among the interviewees. We weave them in as examples to address an empirical concern, that of disarticulation, which was itself motivated by the interviewees' concerns over what they were experiencing, and to address our theoretical concern over how compositions are constituted. 4. Administrative codes: territorializing and coding components Antonio's remarks at the beginning of this article stress his organization's avoidance of the repressive Guatemalan state and the banks. This implicated working as clandestine organizations. Their funders, their “solidarity” partners, as Antonio put it, were sensitive to these conditions. Their administrative code did not “channel and block” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 19) important financial and political flows. Although legal requirements, management by objectives, budgets, and project design and performance measurement systems were part of the aid agencies' tool kit, they were not rigorously applied. For instance, his was a grassroots organization that operated without a formalized legal structure and professionalized staff. The financial flows, while subject to funders' and banks' administrative code (e.g. requirements for receipts, signatures, banks statements, etc.), often required their decoding and flight into other assemblages (e.g. an underground network and black market to move funds) facilitated by the use of cash that left little trace. Another instance of the extent to which agencies applied their administrative code is notable in the records sent by Antonio's organization: Project proposals and monitoring reports were flexible in detail and format. Funders “would not hassle us too much about the receipts: That they were missing” or they would “not count in great detail the amount of bags of corn purchased or see whether everything was there.” The mode of intervention was the provision of services through a “project,” but the intervention was also about building political and solidarity connections not only with aid agencies and international NGOs but, importantly, also with beneficiaries and the “movement” at large. The point is that funders were perceived as having “more understanding, more flexibility” of the political and humanitarian situation and as such their administrative requirements did not threaten the diversity of the social movement's organizational forms and modes of intervention. For Antonio, funders' international development accountability requirements previously coexisted with social movement's principles of solidarity and trust. Boundaries were blurreddcertainly the military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala had difficulties making the distinction, often equating international development with revolutionary activity.13 Social movement organizations collaborated with international NGOs that provided aid agency funds to finance their local struggles. 13 A director for a European international NGO in El Salvador commented: “NGOs have been perceived negatively by previous governments. They categorized all NGOs as communists [guerrillas].” D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 In the following, Antonio describes how this space was altered by giving an account of how his organization is absorbed into the international development assemblage. Administrative requirements started to change in the late 1980s. We were encouraged to formalize the NGO and show the proper documentation and organizational structure, such as having an executive director and board of directors. Funding agencies also asked us to hire an accountant since we had a volunteer with no formal accounting training keeping the books. Even the reports changed as the budgets had to be more detailed by including the number of items we were going to purchase. Around that time international agencies also started to check our books. We were all shocked the first time this happened as this guy suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, walked in, shook my hand, acknowledged the administrator and the accountant with a nod, and asked us to leave him alone with the books for an hour. I was furious! “This bastard, what does he think he is doing?” I wanted to kick him out. We were accustomed to another dynamic; at least some chitchat about the political situation, life in exile, or whatever, and then get onto business. This was different. It was cold. Add to that, what came across was an arrogant attitude that marked the difference between the have and the have-nots, giving them certain rights over us. No sensibility to the political struggle we were engaged in. So I called the agency to ask them what was going on and they told me that he was just going to check the books, that he was very good at what he did, and that he did not talk about politics. At that moment I was made aware of the impending changes. In retrospect, not all bad of course. This was in 1986e87, and as an organization we decided to go along with these changes and we took that leap with the agencies. They for instance started to train the accountant and administrator on proper reporting and controls. Our staff also received technical training and they were expected to have a higher level of academic preparation. They demanded more from us and there were occasions where projects or disbursements were not approved because the reports were not clear enough. Our work became more technically and administratively demanding. Then the personnel we knew at the international organizations started to change. They had new people, who were not familiar with our name, our past … like that guy who wanted to check our books: They did not talk about the political struggle. They started to introduce more technocrats, which is the current situation. It is not that technocrats are the problem, what I lament is that there is a political emptiness. Everything is transparent now, which is not bad, but the political element of our relation is missing. This account of how Antonio's organization becomes administratively regulated through a number of international aid agencies' accountability requirements sets the stage for understanding how social movement organizations are territorialized and coded into the international development assemblage. 4.1. Territorialization: creating boundaries As Antonio's narrative unfolds, the funder's administrative code becomes more formalized and pronounced, and so does the distinction between international development and the social movement. Aid-providing states started changing the nature of their development agencies, what Antonio noted as agency staff becoming more technocratic or “neoliberalized” (see also Wallace, 2009). They subordinate an accountability based on patchy evidence, solidarity and trust to an administrative code that for Antonio is “transparent” and “technocratic.” The introduction of hierarchical accountability (Ebrahim, 2005; Roberts, 1996) gives 23 international development its content through the processes of territorialization and coding. Antonio realized that there was a boundary territorializing the space. To continue accessing funding, his organization took a “leap” into the funding agencies' emerging administrative space by registering as an NGO and complying with administration requirements. This included letting the funder audit the books and hiring a proper accountant, and not making “politics” a necessary feature of the relationship. These requirements give the composition its boundaries by filtering organizations (who do not meet the requirements). Thus, some organizations did not “take the leap” because they did not have the administrative knowhow or political inclination to formalize their structure and linkages with international funders (we will discuss later the case of a youth-based activist organization). We can get a further sense of how this territorial boundary is maintained by examining some current requirements. These requirements include registration forms (such as the EuropeAid Potential Applicant Data Online Registration, or PADOR),14 which have to be completed before the organization submits funding proposals. Other forms require organizations to include project specific criteria. These are part of a complex of “formal” documents that help produce developmental reality and are ubiquitous in the field (Jensen & Winthereik, 2013, p. 94). A municipal civil servant in El Salvador, who once helped grassroots organizations access international funding, noted that the PADOR form makes visible some administrative and legal requirements, but it also, and in a more subtle way, tests the administrative capacity to complete the form. The civil servant continued, referring to a small municipality: They are small, with no specialist in international development and with a very small budget, which means that they are not required by law to prepare financial statements. So then, how are they going to prepare the financial statements that the PADOR requires? The audit reports? Who is going to complete the form? Unable to successfully register with PADOR, this municipality, like the other grassroots organizations he once worked for, was not able pass through one of the first filters: it cannot operate in the administrative space. The effect was highlighted in one of our first interviews. A director and project manager with 18 years of experience with a European NGO in El Salvador was having difficulties securing funding for organizations that were once able to do so. He pointed out that project proposals are too demanding for the populations he worked with: “It can take them months to complete it. I can do it. You can do it. But the organization of campesinos, they may eventually be able to do it, but why complicate things for them?” This is not to say that interviewees were dismissive of requirements. For the civil servant, the requirements “add a technical component and forces us to evaluate what we are doing.” But they also contain “the rules” that mark the requirements for entry. The civil servant clearly articulates the boundary: “international development funding, in general terms, has become a privileged circle made up of those who know and are able to meet all the rules, the forms, and all that stuff”. 14 PADOR is “a database managed by EuropeAid and contains information about organizations applying for grants of the European Commission in the field of external assistance” (http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/work/onlineservices/pador/ index_en.htm). 24 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 The point is that the boundaries have become more explicit. Being part of this “privileged circle” not only requires administrative capacity (hence the large numbers of workshops helping organizations to develop this capacity), but also a certain type of political discourse. This political element became evident to us during a conversation with a Guatemalan youth-based grassroots organization that has refused international development agencies' offers to take the “leap.” As one of the organization's activists noted, taking this leap required: “Totally changing one's discourse [discurso]. For example, we had a slogan that was not very conciliatory at a time when international funders were promoting reconciliation after the peace accords.” Whereas entry for the small municipality and the campesino organization was conditional on their form-filling abilities, for the youth-grassroots organization, it was on their capacity to accommodate a specific political tone. These are connected. The forms administratively suggest the demarcation of a political space. The overlap that Antonio documented, whereby social movement and international development organizations “were all engaged in the same movement,” has been intersected by a boundary.15 This political and administrative boundary does not necessarily imply the social movement's disarticulation. But, it does have disarticulating effects when the territorial boundary is reinforced by emphasizing distinctions between what is a part of the new assemblage and what is notdthereby marking the social movement's components as the “outside” or “remainder.” 4.2. Coding the organizations' form and mode of intervention Organizations are not only exposed to requirements as they contemplate whether to enter the assemblage of international development or not; these requirements, mainly for those committed to entering, are transformative: They give the emerging composition a particular type of content. This constitutive element is what we call coding, the moment when funder requirements interact with organizations to make them administratively coherent units. Coding also illustrates that territorialization is not only about exclusion, but selected inclusion, making the territorialized grassroots components susceptible to alterations in their governance and administrative structure and mode of development intervention. The following describes how organizations are altered as they are positioned within the territorialized space. These interventions are more “internal” to organizations. They have, though, assemblage-level implications: to govern the assemblage is to constitute its content along a code. 4.2.1. Organizational form: becoming an NGO In terms of organizational form, Antonio noted the effects of these requirements when his organization was “encouraged to formalize the NGO and show the proper documentation and structure, such as having an executive director and board of directors.” Requirements can be gathered from the aforementioned PADOR and funding forms, including providing information on: whether they are incorporated as an NGO; to what extent the board of directors is involved in the organization; whether they have an account for each project, number of accounts, currency, signing authority; where petty cash is kept, rules for its use, who administers it; accounting personnel's capacity; extent to which financial 15 This boundary is not impermeable. There are overflows. Through our field study we learned of NGOs channelling international development funds to social movement organizations through all sorts of administrative manoeuvres. These “hybrid” organizations work between social movement and international development, but are finding it increasingly difficult to do so (Alvarez, 1999). reports are audited; taxes paid; and financial sustainability.16 Organizations are required to adhere to these legal and administrative principles to access funding. Funding agencies also help organizations meet these requirements, thereby facilitating their inclusion into the assemblage. The project coordinator for a bilateral development agency remembers: “Two years ago, in one of our lasts visits [to a community], we were horrified to be informed that one of the organizations we were starting to work with did not have legal status and that they would not pass the audit.” In such a situation “we had to help the organization get their legal status. We had not spoken with them for many years … they were people that came from the war, they were part of the resistance.” Other, already “legalized” organizations, require adjusting their organizational form to position themselves in the assemblage. A labour union and a rural advocacy organization in Guatemala offer striking examples. The labour union's director recounts: “We realized in 2000 that it was necessary to create a technical unit to lend support to the [labour] movement … we should broaden the trade union's efforts by creating this technical unit.” The technical unit is constituted as an NGO, enabling the union to access new funds. A Guatemalan consultant familiar with the case noted that the labour union “simply did it because they have to survive.” An NGO worker also familiar with the case noted this sort of funding has “torn the labour union in two”: One part for international development and the other for the labour movement. She went on to say that the union's structure and its accountability to its due-paying membership were segmented, “torn,” and so was its capacity to voice the grassroots' aspirations. Similarly, a campesino community association with a mission statement to access land and “class struggle” received financial support from an international NGO to create a technical unit, an NGO. While enabling access to much-needed funds, it also, as one of its organizers noted, imposed “conditions that undermines some of the work we have done” as the funder's development objectives are closely aligned with the “neoliberal state policies” often critiqued by the association's membership. These examples show how funders' administrative requirements provide the codes for organizations to change their governance structure. An NGO worker in Guatemala, noted that at this point, “the NGOization of the social movement begins.” Grassroots organizations, formalized or not, are rearticulated as one type of formalized organization, an NGO, positioned in the international development assemblage. Significantly, for the labour union and the rural advocacy organization, as the quotes suggest, this change also affected their mode of accountability and political intervention. In the following section we explore the changes in mode of accountability and intervention through an analysis of the development project. 4.2.2. Mode of development intervention: the project Project-level requirements are another form of administrative standardization. Projects are the primary form of development intervention; as the director of an international NGO in El Salvador comments, they “allow us to execute our programmes. We execute our programmes through the projects.” For a project coordinator at a Guatemalan NGO: “All social organizations manage international 16 There are also governance and fiscal requirements set by the Guatemalan and El Salvadorian governments that organizations have to comply with to be legally recognized as an NGO. The Guatemalan Ley de Organizaciones no Gubernamentales para el Desarrollo and its equivalent in El Salvador, for instance, decree among other things: a particular definition of NGO, adherence to a set of accounting and tax principles, and the formation of a board of directors and a general assembly. D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 development projects. We became project designers and executers.” The significance of NGOs formulating their interventions through projects is that it makes their intervention administratively controllable. Project management and accounting devices17 are used to make projects appear coherent with funding agencies' development models and goals. The executive director of a Guatemalan association of local development NGOs commented: “Let's just say that the thinking was different 5 or 10 years ago. Now, the majority of [aid] agencies have clearly defined their own objectives. So one has to go and present proposals that fit with those objectives.” NGOs align their development projects to these objectives through agency-mandated “methodologies” such as the Logical Framework and results- and activity-based budgets (Martinez & Cooper, 2014). The effects of these requirements are significant and farreaching. The Logical Framework's methodology facilitates the design of projects that can be readily measured, such as building infrastructure (Ebrahim, 2005). This view is shared across many of the organizations we interviewed. For the director of a large international NGO: The Logical Framework is good for constructing buildings and classrooms, training teachers and things like that. But it is limited when it comes to capacity building: Engaging with the community to promote an active citizenry. … For me, it is a tool that is not very useful for political advocacy where you want to promote behavioural changes. Further, a project designer and coordinator at a populareducation NGO in El Salvador described how the Logical Framework “robs you of the energy and creativity needed for the struggle.” In effect, she notes that: “These are projects that do not challenge anything … they are not conceived as a means to organize people towards the formulation of certain demands, but rather to meet basic local needs, and that is it. There is no political perspective.” This does not mean that the aspiration to intervene politically is completely blocked or disarticulated; it is rather redirected towards the funder's goals. These project-level requirements “contribute to giving form to new versions of the political” (Jensen & Winthereik, 2013, p. 83). We can start to see how disarticulating the social movement is about articulating a different version of the “political.” In such settings the political is rearticulated in ways made possible through funder project management requirements. This became quite explicit for an NGO working with internally displaced communities in Northern Guatemala. The director informed us that one of his funder's project requirements opened new opportunities for political intervention: There is an entry point, because before the political was seen as that person, a leftist, promoting full-on revolution. But now, all those political spaces that do not appear to be visible to them, are there; for example, it is now about governance, democratic processes, the strengthening of local governments. These make a number of opportunities [to intervene] available … it is now a matter of finding that political component. Agencies have created spaces for a different type of political 17 These include: Logical Frameworks, budgets for the project and for each of the activities and results, project timetables, project approval letters, overview of project activities, mechanisms for the internal evaluation of the project, and assessments of the sustainability of the project. 25 intervention. These “political spaces” are made visible through the project's general objectives, such as “strengthening of local governments” which NGOs operationalize, through the Logical Framework, into a series of concrete activities. Interventions are made measureable, tangible, and practical. This is also linked to the perception among interviewees of little project diversity. This became apparent to the project coordinator at a Guatemalan NGO: “There were, without exaggerating, six or seven NGOs working in the same community … and we were doing the same thing!” Ferguson (1994), similarly notes that, “many aspects of ‘development’ interventions remain remarkably uniform and standardized from place to place” (258). Thus, while international development requirements have depoliticized and standardized interventions (Ebrahim, 2005), we suggest that requirements redefine the scope of political intervention. To disarticulate the social movement is to rearticulate its aspiration for political change in a way that is useful for the international development assemblagedthat is, within its administratively allotted “political spaces.” To disarticulate, though, is to also relegate that which does not comply (“leftist, promoting full-on revolution”) to the outside (with the remaining components of Antonio's social movement). 4.3. Creating difference within the assemblage So far we have documented how coding alters the assemblage's content by targeting an organization's form and mode of developmental and political intervention. Although organizations accumulate similarities, coding is also a process whereby organizations are differentiated by placing them in an order. This is noticeable in the way the asymmetric relationship between the funders and NGOs becomes more explicit. As Antonio points out, the changes in requirements “marked the difference between the have and the have-nots, giving them certain rights over us.” The administrative and accountability requirements that differentiate funder and funded also introduce differentiation amongst the funded organizations by arranging them into specialized segments. Differences are instilled within the territorialized space. Funding forms and templates make explicit the requirement that an NGO position itself into a specialized segment, thereby marking the distinctions among the NGOs themselves. By the 1990s aid agencies encouraged the segmentation of international development in Guatemala and El Salvador into programmatic (e.g. local economic development, small business, infrastructure, health, gender, the environment) and geographic sectors (e.g. regions, provinces, cities). Governments and aid agencies emphasized managing for results and setting long-term targets for NGOs by requiring the development of strategic plans, which required them to define and focus on their areas of specialization. For a project designer in an El Salvadorian NGO, making their area of specialization explicit to the agencies means: “We cannot, for example, ask an agency to finance a water project. We do not have the ability to implement these types of projects.” Similarly, the director and project manager at an international NGO with offices in El Salvador noted: “Our funder (a bilateral agency) asks us to specialize in a determined sector. That is what they promote. If you construct houses, then only ask to finance houses. And with that there is a loss of organizational diversity.” For the director of a Guatemalan association of development organizations, the effect of this segmentation is that: “There is no longer an integration of the different development processes in a holistic manner. The one that specializes in micro-credit does not have time to chat with those working in agriculture or in education.” In other words, 26 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 organizations are arranged according to specializations.18 These distinctions are managed according to expertise, affecting the assemblage's “organizational diversity” and the type of “integration” needed to execute more “holistic” development projects. Antonio's social movement, one in which “We were all engaged in the same movement” has been segmented into arrangements based on specialization. To summarize, components of the war-era social movement have been enrolled into the emerging international development assemblage. This enrolment is made possible through shifts in the notion of accountability: From trust and solidarity to an increasingly formalized administrative code, where, as Power (1997) observes, different conceptions of trust are produced through procedures, expertise, and calculations. To operationalize the enrolment, legal-administrative requirements and accounting and project management technologies are introduced. These territorialize the field and code organizations, thereby giving the emerging assemblage its content. Our analysis indicates how the agencies' legal and administrative requirements establish boundaries around the emerging assemblage, thereby filtering the components that can gain entryda space of tolerated variations is formed. Components are also exposed to legal and project administrative requirements that make them coherent (in organizational form and mode of development intervention) while also differentiated along geographic and technical areas of specializationdthereby “organizing differences according to a hierarchical scale” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 28).19 The organizational and aspirational components of this social movement are confronted with a scenario where they either adapt to the new assemblage's territory and code or are relegated to the “outside.” Becoming external is central to the process of disarticulation. In the following section we discuss how this is intensified as relations among these territorialized and coded components are unified, giving the assemblage its expression. 5. Overcoding: regulating relations and reinforcing boundaries Relations among the territorialized and coded components are established and cemented together through overcoding, discouraging connections with anything beyond the territorial boundaries. The disarticulating effects of administrative requirements are made more apparent at this stage. We show this by emphasizing, first, how overwhelming NGOs with administrative requirements directs their attention toward a hierarchical relationship of accountability with funding agencies. While this is extensively discussed in the literature on government reforms and NGOs (Oakes, Townley, & Cooper, 1998; O'Dwyer & Unerman, 2008), we stress how it undermines the capacity to get involved in other relations. Second, we highlight that requiring specific forms of documentation enables connections with organizations able to produce “proper” records, while preventing others. Third, we show that changing financial flows alters the funding landscape, encouraging competition and financially motivated relations among NGOs and increasing their 18 We do not want to give the impression that organizations rigidly adhere to the segments. Some NGOs adapt to shifting agency priorities by changing their area of specialization. 19 While similar to Hwang and Powell's argument that: “foundations are playing a critical role as carriers of modernity in the non-profits field, rendering a heterogeneous mix of organizations more similar” (2009, 293), our emphasis is to show the way similarities are accumulated and differences are enabled and managed as an integral part of a larger process of constituting this particular type of assemblage. Both similarity and difference are regulated (for more on difference amongst repetition or variation amongst stability see Deleuze (1994) and Aroles & McLean (2016)). proximity to their local governments. These accountability and financial requirements reinforce the territorializing and coding processes and enable relations that give the international development assemblage its expression, whereby a whole emerges and exerts a conduct on its partsda conduct that restricts NGOs' relation to the social movement. 5.1. The administratively inundated NGO Much of an NGO's operations depend on international funding and on providing “proper” accounts. Increases in funding requirements have had the effect of requiring NGOs to allocate more resources (such as time and money) to meet them. This has been intensified as timeframes have been shortened,20 requiring more project submissions. Resources are spent submitting proposals more often while demanding the organization to simultaneously manage more projects. When asked to what extent they formulate projects, the director of an international NGO in El Salvador commented: “24 h a day, 365 days a year. This is a project factory.” This sentiment was also expressed by the director of an El Salvadorian NGO that provides education services: We are investing a lot more time formulating projects. We now submit 20 to 30 per cent more proposals. Also, the proposal is more demanding, from the design to other administrative requirements … today an agency sends you a list of 25 different annexes to be included in the proposal. This is not restricted to the application process. More elaborate proposals also mean that aid agencies require more elaborate interim monitoring and final evaluation reports. It is becoming commonplace for the budgets included in the proposal to include a detailed cost breakdown of the project's activities21 and these must be periodically reported according to a funding agency's results and timeframe. These administrative requirements have the effect of directing NGOs' attention toward their relation of accountability with funding agencies rather than making connections with developmental and political issues associated with their grassroots activism. The project coordinator at one Guatemalan NGO commented: International agencies have forced us into all of that [administrative work]. So the work we did with advocacy, activism, I've had to put that aside and be dedicated to better accountability. Look, for a project, 75% goes into administrative work. While requirements encourage a focus on administrative and financial accountability to funders (O'Dwyer & Unerman, 2008), they leave the impression that “advocacy, activism” are beyond the boundaries of international development. Overwhelming NGOs and directing their connections towards funders reinforces the territorializing and coding effects of requirements. Handling a set of standardized templates and procedures requires a considerable amount of resources and discipline, which further discourages NGOs from exploring other forms of political interventions. This is similar to Oakes et al.’s (1998) analysis of how the introduction of business plans in publicly funded 20 According to the director of an El Salvadorian NGO: “There were agencies that approved projects for six or even ten years. … Now the agencies are saying they are not committing funds to projects over two years.” 21 For instance, project activities previously might include a budget line of $100 for promotional t-shirts. Now, budgets require specifying the number of t-shirts to be purchased (for example, 50 t-shirts at $2 each). D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 organizations increases the time managers allocated to revenuegenerating activities, undermining the organizations' social and cultural capitals (see also, Ebrahim, 2002). 5.2. Changes in record requirements While overwhelming NGOs with requirements directs their gaze towards funders' accountability requirements, seemingly mundane records such as invoices and receipts carve “fixed paths” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 387) that regulate relations among organizations and reinforce the assemblage's administrative boundaries. In what follows we analyze how the requirement to produce inscriptions discourages certain types of financial transactions. It also encourages community associations to formalize in order to provide services and proper receipts to NGOs. Invoices and receipts inscribe financial transactions and are an important part of NGOs' accountability practices and reports. These documents are bound by various rules: some funders require them in a certain order and with particular seals, some accept photocopies while others want originals, some accept till/cash receipts while others require more formalized receipts, which include tax identification numbers.22 The requirement for invoices and receipts also enables and blocks financial transactions that have direct implications on who can participate and on connections within the international development assemblage.23 For instance, the requirement has discouraged connections with organizations that cannot meet the evidential criteria. NGOs often contract small businesses outside of the community to provide a service that they would prefer to be done by the community where the intervention is taking place. For example, the youth activist organization mentioned previously points out “we work in communities where people cannot usually provide them [documents].” The youth organization is also not able to provide their services to allied local development NGOs that receive aid monies because they cannot provide formalized receipts. An El Salvadorian civil servant whose office received international funding for a local community project noted that the requirement for proper invoices and receipts is frustrating because it discourages community members from organizing and building their own community hall. For him an effect is that “the objective of having the community being involved in its own development is lost in red tape.” Another interviewee, from an international NGO in Guatemala, similarly suggested that the development potential of a construction project was not achieved: “It could have been constructed using people from the community. Using a private company promoted the construction of roofs, but not community development. I am interested in forty community members partaking and learning so that they can have sources of income.” The quotes illustrate that the requirement for particular types of documentation discourages grassroots and community organizations from intervening around the project, or at least alters their type of involvement. These inscriptions do, however, create an administrative space that facilitates cooperation with organizations, such as businesses, who are able to provide proper invoices and receipts (further discussed in the following section). Documentation, such as receipts and invoices, help systematize 22 The emphasis on invoices and receipts is linked to government initiatives to regulate the informal economy. As the state formalizes the economy, international agencies are better able to enforce stricter receipt and invoicing policies since more businesses are able to provide proper documentations for transactions with NGOs. 23 The role of paper trails in enabling and discourages certain forms of accountability (especially combating or facilitating fraud) is discussed in Neu et al. (2013). 27 connections among administratively consistent organizations (NGOs, business, the state), while restricting financial connections with organizations that do not meet the requirements (i.e. grassroots social movement organizations). This sort of criteria for “proper” financial records serves to identify the international development assemblage's boundaries and strengthens the financial ties among organizations in the assemblage. It also, however, serves to exclude organizations that do not meet the requirements. 5.3. Changes in funding flows Changes in funding flows since the 2000s have also altered relations among the assemblage's components through changes in international agencies' funding priorities in Guatemala and El Salvador and through the shift to direct government support whereby aid is provided to governments for them to disburse. These changes had an impact on organizations' financial and political connections. That is, they increased both financial uncertainty and competition and alliances among NGOs; they also prompted financial exchanges between NGOs and governments, which jeopardized the former's autonomy. NGOs have been affected by the reduction of funds entering the region (see Appendix B).24 A Guatemalan NGO that works in the area of human rights witnessed a significant reduction of staff from 20 to 4. Reductions have increased tensions among NGOs and increased competition among them. For the director of one NGO: “There are fewer resources from international agencies and increasingly the project approval process is more competitive.” Competition has also intensified as international NGOs register and set up offices in the region, effectively competing with local NGOs for the same pool of resources (see also Agg, 2006). The project coordinator for a Guatemalan NGO referred to relations among NGOs as increasingly “protective” and “territorial” given the competition. Reduced financial resources enable a certain expression to emerge: the assemblage is developing a technicaladministrative and competitive identity that instils a competitive dynamic among the assemblage's content. International agencies have encouraged the formation of “consortiums,” alliances among project-implementing organizations. While a means for NGOs to work together toward a common goal, these have been criticized as alliances mainly based on accessing funds. A project technician for a Guatemalan rural development NGO observed: Often organizations form consortiums and remain divided as they execute the same project. There is the “if we unite we have funds” mentality among some organizations and we think that it should not be only about accessing resources. As an organization we have to ask ourselves: “What common vision do we have with the others?” Because we have learned from this experience that if each organization is doing its own thing, the consortium does not work. The agencies are making it quite clear though: “there are no funds unless you unite as a consortium.” Her comments not only reveal a cautious stance towards these funding opportunities and the fragility of some of the alliances, but 24 This reduction may be explained by changes in funders' development priorities. For example, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development no longer includes Guatemala and El Salvador as priorities. Another explanation may be related to the financial crisis: “This decline represented nearly USD 2.3 billion in real terms and mostly affected countries in Central America” (OECD, 2012). 28 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 also the opportunistic approach to access funds. Some consortiums do create fruitful connections among organizations (including forprofit enterprises) that were “once not part of our group of allies.” But, as the project coordinator for a Guatemalan NGO noted, NGOs with different political backgrounds and relations to communities are grouped together in these “unnatural alliances … forced by the funding agencies.” Political and historical differences (for instance, based on NGOs' historical affiliation with guerrilla organizations during the war) are administratively overcoded through consortiums. For the project coordinator, consortiums oblige these organizations: To sit at the same table, and that gets complicated in our community [of organizations]. We have had a similar trajectory, but we are connected in different ways. One connection is with the revolutionary organization that one belonged to during the war. This type of connection has had its own segmenting effects. NGOs with historical linkages to revolutionary groups would still find themselves, on occasion, operating along the rebel groups' historical geographic areas: That happened a lot when we worked in the northern region of the country, which was a FAR (in English: Rebel Armed Forces) area, and there were many [NGOs] with historical connections to them that worked there. But we were an organization that belonged to the ORPA (Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms). We would get asked in the North: “What are you doing here? ORPA operates in between the highlands and the coast.” For her, consortiums put these NGOs “at the same table,” overcoding some of the historical guerrilla affiliations that existed among organizations. Disarticulation in this regard is also about subsuming relations that date back to the war by superimposing technical and administrative codes. Financial uncertainty has been created through funding agencies that provide direct support to the Guatemalan and El Salvadorian governments. NGOs send proposals to government offices that manage the funds. Although this is intended to strengthen the state, there have also been concerns about the implication of working for the government. For a Guatemalan NGO project coordinator: The agencies are now telling us: “We are strengthening your government through budgetary support.” So they tell us to go to the government ministry responsible for those projects and we end up being subcontracted by them … we become employees of the government. Our role as autonomous organizations disappears. The budgetary support approach situates the NGO closer to local components of the state it once directly resisted during the war. The feeling of working “for the state” is especially disconcerting for NGOs with a connection to the social movement's political struggle in the war.25 In this section we analyzed the way accountability requirements and changes in funding flows cement relations among the assemblage's components. We have identified three interrelated ways in which these overcoding processes seem to happen: Inundating 25 An administrator for a Guatemalan NGO investigating human rights violations during the war expressed concern about submitting proposals to the government because the NGO is preparing court cases against officials and military personnel that continue to have close linkages with the government. NGOs in administrative work, requiring organizations to “properly” inscribe transactions, and changing funding flows. Whereas territorialization and coding creates assemblage-level boundaries and alters the organization's form and interventions through legal and project management and accounting technologies, these overcoding processes reinforce the territorial boundaries by encouraging the newly included content to direct their accountability relations within such boundaries by administratively overwhelming and regulating financial flows. Social movement practices are discouraged within the international development assemblage, as are connections to social movement organizations that now lie outside it. Intervening in the assemblage's content also results in the contents' (political and even historical) expression being subsumed, and disarticulated, by the assemblage's own emerging expressiondit conveys a conduct to its component parts, one that is increasingly competitive and financially motivated. 6. Discussion and conclusion The starting motivation for this study has been to empirically and conceptually examine a concern voiced by some of our interviewees over the way funding agencies' accountability requirements are implicated in disarticulating the social justice movement in Guatemala and El Salvador. As we embarked on this study we learned that there was an important history being mobilized among interviewees whose experiences with international development date back to the war. We represent this collective history through Antonio. His narrative portrays the social movement as a historically specific assemblage with unclear boundaries: As a dynamic and heterogeneous composition of organizational forms, modes of intervention, and politically informed commitments and accountability relations that at one time co-existed with their funders' own aspirations. This composition, though, is intervened and segmented. Funding agencies' accountability requirements, which include a host of project management, legal, and financial devices, intervene in specific ways to create boundaries and compose international development out of the social movement's components by altering their form, mode of intervention, and their financial and political relations. Our analysis shows how a governable space is constituted out of another. We describe how a boundary is created that allows selective inclusion into this space by organizations able and willing to comply with requirements. By taking this “leap” into the new territory, previously non-formalized grassroots organizations are transformed into NGOs with a “proper” governance structure and project management expertise in a particular geographic and programmatic area of specialization. The formation of a territorialized and coded content then enables the regulation of their relations, which is done by administratively overwhelming, requiring the provision of invoices and receipts, and changing the flow of funds into the region. To study disarticulation, is to study how a space of operation is created out of the components of another that is now exterior. Disarticulation, though, is also about regulating the aspiration to forge connections to this exterior by directing this force towards funders' developmental goals. As we learned from Antonio, the desire to “promote social change” based on an accountability of “solidary and trust” still finds its way into current international development discussions. This aspiration acts “as a creative force that gives the ‘wretched of the earth,’ as Fanon put it, a head start toward the world-historical task of envisaging alternative world orders and more humane and sustainable social systems” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 32). But “memories need imagination to empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 236). Imagination and experimentation, borne D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 out of necessity in the social movement during the war, however, are confined within the legal, accounting, and administrative boundaries of the international development assemblage. The point is that these boundary-making accountability requirements disarticulate the social movement by (a) altering its components and their relations as they are plugged into another composition and (b) channelling a force, the social movement's political aspirations, into relations and goals that are technically and politically useful for the international development assemblage. We are not suggesting that there are currently no social movements in the region. Far from it (see Granovsky-Larsen, 2013). But as the quotes by the two community organizers in the introduction and Antonio's narrative at the beginning of the article suggest, a historically specific social movement has been disarticulated. We do not comment on the extent to which this is the case, but our
pez (2010), that write: the account joins others, such as Morales Lo “disarticulation of the Central American social movement with the characteristics of the previous decades, […] left a vacuum temporarily occupied by non-governmental organizations” (103, own translation).26 What the preceding shows is how accountability requirements bring both account givers and the assemblage in which they operate “into being” as the international development assemblage (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 58), but also how these requirements restrict the social movement that made it out of the war from operating, by disarticulating it. This has broad implications for the study of how fields of governance are assembled. The governmentality-inspired literature has mainly focussed on how a complex of rationales and practices and a field of actors are constituted (Miller, 1990; Miller & O'Leary, 1987; Neu et al., 2006; Rahaman et al., 2010). Miller (1990) shows “how changes in the constitutive components of one complex make possible the emergence, articulation or transformation of the other” (316). This observation prompted our microanalysis of how this dynamic is articulated and experienced by actors in the field. The international development and social movement assemblages are intersecting and mutually constitutive. But by using a set of related concepts we can explain how these once overlapping complexes are differentiated and the accountability-driven processes through which one assemblage gives way to another. Processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding demonstrate how accountability is implicated in making a heterogeneous mix of organizations administratively consistent as proper content, through the formulation of territorial boundaries and the coding of organizations' form and their modes of development intervention. The contents' relations to one another are then regulated, cemented to form a unity, giving the assemblage an expressiondone where the aggregate's emerging identity (of dependence, competition, and financially-motivated and administratively-mediated linkages) overcodes the contents' political and historical expression. These processes, like the package of accountability requirements, overlap, alter, and reinforce each other (i.e., overcoding reinforces territorial boundaries). The significance is that these processes enable us to study the way assemblages intersect with one another. Specifically, how a governable assemblage comes into being by subsuming parts from another and how relations between the two are regulated. In analyzing these assemblages, we learn that heterogeneous grassroots organizations become project-implementing NGOs. In so doing, we compliment organizational level studies on the effects 26
pez & B
For the specific case of Guatemala see Morales Lo a Tiul (2009). For other accounts of disarticulation through the “NGOization” of social movements see Alvarez (2009) and Roy (2004). 29 of funder requirements on NGOs and their beneficiaries (O'Dwyer & Unerman, 2008; O'Leary, 2016) by examining how requirements alter not just organizations but also the field in which they operate. This resonates with accountability studies which focus either on the construction of the organization as an accountable self (Messner, 2009; Roberts, 1991) or the construction of a broader “accountability regime” (Mehrpouya, 2015); we, in contrast, propose that these are interrelated by documenting how making the organization accountable as project implementing NGO is part of bringing the new governable assemblage of international development into being. Importantly, while these studies have analyzed a process of construction, for us, accountability is as much about disarticulation as it is about construction. The disarticulating aspect of accountability helps us address calls for studies on how funding agencies' funding and accountability requirements affect NGOs' mission (O'Dwyer & Unerman, 2008) and how NGO's “involvement in advocacy, political mobilization or community engagement is dampened by widespread adoption of evaluative metrics” (Hwang & Powell, 2009, p. 293). We show how conditions are created where NGOs' emancipatory aspirations and their objective of working with communities and other components of the social movement are regulated. This extends other work critiquing how NGOs and grassroots organizations are “too close for comfort” with aid agencies, undermining their innovativeness, flexibility, legitimacy, and accountability to broader stakeholders (Edwards & Hulme, 1996; Ebrahim, 2005; Mitlin, Hickey, & Bebbington, 2007). This also develops Alvarez’s (1999) thesis that it has become increasingly more difficult for NGOs to operate in both international development and the social movement. We posit that these challenges are part of larger processes, and as such, the effects are not restricted to international development NGOs but also the social movement. This again shows the benefit of examining assemblages in relation to one another; of tracing where components parts come from, where they are going to, and what are the effects of doing so.27 The project coordinator for an international funding agency, reflecting on over 30 years of work in the region, noted: The social movement's capacity for autonomy in its finances and directives has been lost. The project and the NGO has consumed them and I think all of us involved in this have to assume that responsibility and find a way to provide support without inserting them in such dynamics. While far from a rosy picture, the reflection provides inspiration for this study and can do so for future studies. One question it elicits is: what type of “support” can be provided to the social movementinspired organizations that are inserted in the international development assemblage? Although at some cost, plugging into the international development assemblage has provided grassroots social movement organizations with the financial, political, and administrative resources to continue some version of their work. Some of these organizations develop strategies to contest these accountability requirements and actualize their aspiration for social change. Li (2007, 264) notes that there is acknowledgement that the expansion of governance is met with contestation and division (e.g. Rose, 1999, p. 51), and yet there has been little attempt to explore how contestation is manifested. And, while the focus of this study was 27 We suspect that our findings detailing international development's relation to the social movement are not restricted to international development in El Salvador and Guatemala since state funding agency requirements are adapted by NGOs seeking financial support throughout the developing world.. 30 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 mainly on the way funding and accountability requirements constitute international development out of social movement components, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at how the social justice movement operates. That is, to what extent and how are management and accounting devices implicated in social movement assemblages “composed of innumerable elements that remain different, one from the other, and yet communicate, collaborate, and act in common” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 140)? This would also offer a space for studies on the construction and operation of other forms of accountability that contest neo-liberal versions (Kamuf, 2007; McKernan & McPhail, 2012). from comments by Afshin Mehrpouya, Simon Granovsky-Larsen, Keith Robson, Jeremy Morales, Eija Vinnari, Kari Lukka, Darlene Himick, Sebastian Becker, and the participants at the 2012 AOS workshop on Accounting, Non-governmental Organizations and Civil Society, the 2014 Critical Perspectives on Accounting Conference, the 2015 EIASM New Directions in Management Accounting conference, and those at seminars at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Canada, and Turku, Finland. We would like to give special thanks to the editors and the reviewers for their suggestions and guidance. This study was financed by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant number 410-2010-0379. Acknowledgements Este estudio fue posible gracias a las personas en Guatemala y El Salvador que compartieron conmigo sus experiencias. Les agra
s. This paper benefited dezco su generosidad, paciencia, e intere Appendix A. List of interviews conducted 2010-11 Domestic organizations # Organization-type NGOs 1 2 Persons interviewed Trip # Interview # Popular education Rural development SV SV GT GT GT GT GT GT GT GT GT Executive director Executive director/project planner Accountant Project designer /technician Administrator Project designer/coordinator Executive director Accountant Regional manager Regional administrator/accountant Accountant Project coordinator/designer/technician Project/programme coordinator/technician Director/manager Executive director Project coordinator Accountant/administrator Administrator Project technician Project coordinator Director/manager Director Founder/director Senior manager Director Manager 1 1,2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1,2 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1,2 1 1 1 1,2 1,2 1 1, 40 2, 44 13 4 5 6 7 9 11 15, 41 12 43 16 18 21 22 23 26 27 30, 58 31 32 36 35, 53 37, 52 55 3 Urban development SV 4 5 6 Women's/feminist Administrative support Rural development SV SV SV 7 Popular education SV 8 9 10 11 Women/feminist Under process of incorporation Democratic governance Rural development SV GT GT GT 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Human rights Campesino rural NGO coordination/support Youth and arts Democratic governance Women/feminist Displaced communities NGO coordination/support Ecology/Agriculture Non-incorporated organizations 1 Human rights/youth 2 Human rights/campesino GT GT Community organizer Community organizer 1 2 25 62 Municipal government 1 International development office 2 Arts and culture SV SV Manager Manager 1 1 10 14 Consultants 1 2 3 4 GT GT GT GT Junior consultant Senior consultant Senior consultant Senior consultant 1 1 2 2 20 24, 27 50 57 Person interviewed Trip # Interview # Director and project manager Accountant/ administrator Managers Project coordinator Director 1,2 1 1 1,2 2 3, 39 17 19 36, 61 47 Consulting firm Independent consultant Consulting firm Independent consultant International Organizations # Headquarters International NGOs 1 Europe 2 Europe 3 North America 4 Europe 5 North America SV SV GT GT SV D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 57 (2017) 18e32 31 (continued ) Domestic organizations # Organization-type 6 7 8 Europe Europe North America Persons interviewed Trip # Interview # GT GT GT Programme manager (evaluation) Administrator Director 2 2 2 54 56 59 International funding agencies 1 European bilateral agency SV 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 GT GT GT SV SV GT GT GT GT Project coordinator Project administrator Executive director Project coordinator Director Project coordinator Programme coordinator Monitoring & evaluation specialist Senior manager Technician Programme manager 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 8 42 29 33 38 45 46 48 49 51 60 European bilateral agency European bilateral agency North American bilateral agency European bilateral agency Multilateral agency Multilateral agency North American bilateral agency Multilateral agency Multilateral agency Appendix B. Changes in international funding in the region Fig. 1. 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