ARI Working Paper Series

This paper will examine one aspect of what I have elsewhere termed the economy of virtue, that is the field in which neoliberal logics and calculations have been incorporated into strategies for global health management as rational, technical, scientific guarantors of the integrity and dignity of The Human. These neoliberal technologies and logics are a means by which humanitarian organizations demonstrate, accrue and trade in virtue, translatable into symbolic and real capital that can then be deployed to leverage greater support, funding and prestige. One key technique is the fielding of site-visit teams. Foreign NGOs concerned with HIV/AIDS prevention and control and operating in Vietnam field such teams. Team-members conduct standard audits of their Vietnamese partner NGOs, review budgets and program data, tour facilities and the like. They also use the opportunity to collect images and narratives of and from local constituents, the recipients of aid. While these images and narratives are used to assess the performance of their local partners, they are also instrumental in winning new donations and volunteers in their home countries. These powerful images and often harrowing stories take center-stage in NGO publications and on NGO websites, tugging on donors’ heartstrings and working to establish the NGOs’ humanitarian credentials. Within a humanitarian economy that prioritizes indicators of performance, images of the ill, abandoned and poor are taken and put to work among distant actors as assurances both that funds are being adequately and efficiently applied (a classical audit) and that these actors are, in the recent words of one scholar working in this field “doing good” (an accounting of virtue).

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published in Mortality Journal, Taylor & Francis Online, 21 September 2015.