Searching under the streetlight: A historical perspective on the rise of randomistas

Luciana de Souza Leão and Gil Eyal

World Development, 2020, vol. 127, issue C

Abstract: In our contribution, we compare recent development RCTs with an earlier wave of development experiments dating from the 1960s and 1970s to investigate the links between the academic success of randomistas and historical changes in the development aid industry. We show how the recent privatization and fragmentation of the foreign aid sector enabled randomistas to bypass the political resistance to randomization among development workers and beneficiaries, which had bedeviled their predecessors. Comparing current development RCTs to earlier experiments, we find that they tend to be of shorter duration, smaller scope, and that they often limit themselves to evaluating only what can be easily measured. While this might be useful to cement the alliance between randomistas and global foundations interested in demonstrating the impact of their giving, we argue that the targeted interventions characteristic of the randomista movement obscure the harder task of addressing the complex mechanisms reproducing global poverty.

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:127:y:2020:i:c:s0305750x19304309

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104781

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