From girls to the poor: understanding changes in a conditional cash transfer education stipend project in Bangladesh

This dissertation critically examines the history and administration of the Secondary Education Stipend Project (SESP) in Bangladesh, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) education stipend program targeted at female and poor students in rural Bangladesh. Based on ten months of ethnographic field work within the Ministry of Education in Dhaka, and supplemented with interviews and discourse analysis from Sweco Consultants in Copenhagen and the World Bank in Washington D.C., this mixed-methods multi-sited institutional ethnography demonstrates that international discourse surrounding 'best practices' and technologies of development interact with local development processes in complex and transformative ways, which may foreclose more democratic development possibilities. I trace the history of the program alongside a directed intervention into the complex development history of Bangladesh, demonstrating how particular processes and conjunctures produced openings into which development expertise, technical assistance, and international financing intervened. I demonstrate how these international development practices and discourses have altered the trajectory of this project in consequential and, I argue, problematic ways. This work emphasizes the need to reconsider the notion of preconceived best practices in development, as I demonstrate the inherent flaws in approaching development interventions with pre-designed technologies. I argue that the World Bank's relentless pursuit for and proliferation of best practice technologies of development, and the corresponding reporting practices, are part of an ongoing need to remain legitimate, elite, and relevant. This work also demonstrates how this particular expert-led technology of development has reconfigured state power, and altered how participants and non-participants understand and enact their agency and engagement with the state.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Alison Horton Schaeffin