A Practice That Makes Everyone Happy

This chapter discusses how practices—routinized activities that allow people to cooperate—bind donors, brokers, and villagers together in a collaborative effort. These practices also bind them by sharply constricting the range of activities that AIDS projects actually implement on the ground. The necessity of uniting actors with divergent agendas gives development projects their static quality. International and domestic NGOs seeking funding claim that they have innovative themes, but there is monotonous uniformity in what they actually do. NGOs employ a very narrow set of practices that work—work not in the sense that they effectively prevent AIDS, but in the sense that they satisfy the varied agendas of the actors. These ubiquitous practices are conducting a “training” and “monitoring and evaluation,” known as M&E.