Visible Materials, Invisible People: How Branding in International Development Reproduces Inequality

Abstract

A democratization program in postwar Angola offers an example of contemporary development work and its branding: donors’ bureaucratized practice of claiming credit for any attempt at social improvement while simultaneously distancing themselves from failures. Development branding achieves its claims‐making and distancing effects by emphasizing, in institutional narratives of development work, the role of material resources over the larger social contributions of local staff and beneficiaries. Development agencies’ increased bureaucratization, including their focus on branding, is not incidental to the undertaking but an outgrowth of shared histories; bureaucracy as social form, including institutional narratives emphasizing the material, and development as industry are both rooted in racialized and classed systems of hierarchical relations. Branding practices work to conceal and deepen these relations. A complete accounting of development must include attention to how—in form, action, and representation—it perpetuates historical relationships of inequality in addition to documenting their effects.