The New Gold Standard: The Rise of Randomized Control Trials and Experimental Development

Sophie Webber and Carolyn Prouse

Economic Geography, 2018, vol. 94, issue 2, 166-187

Abstract: Development economics and institutions have a new gold standard: the randomized control trial (RCT). An RCT is an evaluation technique that draws from experimental design in order to measure the impact of a development project. Due to randomization—randomly distributing people or communities to receive either control or treatment—advocates suggest that it is possible to measure the impact of an intervention, and attribute a causal relationship between the intervention and its outcome. As such, proponents claim that RCTs are able to get to the heart of what really works for development interventions. This article charts the rise of RCTs within two major development institutions: the World Bank and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Drawing from fieldwork at these two institutions, we follow RCTs as a technology of development, finding that they take divergent forms at each of the institutions. The article examines the contested and uneven paths of RCTs as they have proliferated throughout development economics scholarship and practice, and teases out the new problems, subjects, spaces, and governance regimes of development that RCTs engender. We build on existing economic geography research concerned with the rise of behavioralism within development. By centering the methodology of RCTs, we find institutional and geographic variation as well as a reconfiguration of development governance through experimentation.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/00130095.2017.1392235

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