Transparency Short‐Circuited: Laughter and Numbers in Costa Rican Water Politics
Transparency Short‐Circuited: Laughter and Numbers in Costa Rican Water Politics
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透明度短路：哥斯达黎加水政治中的笑声和数字
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发表时间：
2012
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通讯作者：
S. Ballestero
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作者：
S. Ballestero
2006年至2009年期间，一批哥斯达黎加非政府组织、一个西班牙援助机构和当地居民纠缠在追求透明度问题上，以此作为为他们的“享有水的人权”项目倡议分配资金的手段。该援助机构旨在开展一系列教学活动，“建立”当地关于水管理的知识，其供资条件是按照一套指标诚实和正确地执行项目。与正统观念不同，项目负责人被要求负责设计和实施审计系统，这一安排缩短了观察者之间的基本分离，并观察到了创造和谐的项目中的惯例，并赋予整个倡议实验性质。本文探讨了指标体系的建设，我的受访者自己的魅力与生产“说话的数字，”和标点符号，但结构性的作用，笑在这个过程中发挥。我认为，数字指标和笑声使审计谈到强度和重点，而不是关于排他性和离散的类别，透明度通常是预测。在这里，审计允许政治行为者重新开发水治理技术的潜力，而不是将其限制在其明确的可能性上，以构成项目参与者所想象的政治机构的一种不可或缺的形式。我认为，关注创建审计的中间过程，在其最终结果被披露之前，突出了作为一种政治手段的透明度的自我参考，短路和富有成效的用途。
Between 2006 and 2009, a group of Costa Rican NGOs, a Spanish aid agency, and local residents were entangled in the pursuit of transparency as a means to allocate funding for their “human right to water” project initiatives. Designed as a series of pedagogical activities to “build” local knowledge about water management, the aid agency conditioned their funding to the honest and correct implementation of the project as revealed by a system of indicators. Against orthodoxy, project leaders were put in charge of designing and implementing the auditing system, an arrangement that short-circuited the foundational separation between observers and observed that is customary in transparency-creation projects and gave the whole initiative an experimental quality. This article examines the building of that indicator system, my informants’ own fascination with producing “speaking numbers,” and the punctuated but constitutive role that laughter played in the process. I suggest that numeric indicators and laughter make the audit speak about intensity and emphasis rather than about the exclusive and discrete categories on which transparency is usually predicated. Here, the audit allowed political actors to rework the potential of water governance technologies, rather than limiting them to their explicit possibilities, in order to constitute what project participants imagine as an integral form of political agency. I argue that paying attention to the in-between process of creating the audit, before its final results are disclosed, highlights the self-referential, short-circuited, and productive uses of transparency as a political device.