Assembling value for money in the UK Department for International Development

Abstract

. In recent decades, international development agencies have become increasingly focused on demonstrating the effectiveness and impact of their work through practices of (e)valuation and assessment at the level of individual projects or programmes. This chapter examines one iteration of such ‘aid effectiveness’ accounting, namely ‘value for money’ (VFM), which, at the time of writing, must be demonstrated for each project or programme funded by the UK government’s DfID. Drawing on insights from assemblage theory and the performative economics literature, this chapter traces how VFM is variously calculated in practice and explores two related framings that circumscribe the possibilities of these VFM calculations. The first framing equates robust evidence with quantitative evidence. The second figures a linear relationship between development inputs and results. The chapter shows how the calculations of VFM within these framings performatively express the value of international development as a quantified, economic relationship between development inputs and results. The analysis is situated within the particular socio-political context in which this performance of VFM by DfID has been mobilised to defend development aid spending from its critics and considers the wider relevance of this dynamic.