Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20

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Accounting, Organizations and Society

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Assembling international development: Accountability and the

disarticulation of a social movement
Daniel E. Martinez a, *, David J. Cooper b
a
HEC Paris, Department of Accounting and Management Control, 1 rue de la Liberation, 78350, Jouy-en-Josas, France
b
School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2R6, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper examines how international development funding and accountability requirements are
Received 29 July 2013 implicated in the so-called disarticulation of a social movement. Based on field studies in Guatemala and
Received in revised form El Salvador, we show and explain the way accountability requirements, which encompass management
10 January 2017
and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, constitute the field of international development
Accepted 10 February 2017
Available online 17 April 2017
through the regulation of heterogeneous social movement organizations. We highlight how account-
ability enables a form of governance that makes possible the emergence of entities (with specific at-
tributes), while restricting others. Our analysis has implications for governmentality studies that have
Keywords:
Accountability
examined the interrelation of assemblages by analyzing how these interrelations are operationalized at
Social movements the field level through the Deleuze-and-Guattari-inspired processes of territorialization, coding, and
International development overcoding.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Governmentality
Assemblages

I left the country soon after my brother was disappeared by the
military.1That was in 1980 and government repression had escalated,
forcing a number of us involved in the movement to cross the border
into Mexico as political refugees. There, I started to work with other
exiled activists to aid communities caught in the middle of the war.
We sent our first funding proposal to an organization in Holland
with close ties to the church. The proposal included a description of the
problems, the objectives we expected to achieve, the activities to carry
out, and an explanation of how it would be evaluated. It also included
a budget, which was quite general, not very specific, like these days.
For example, a line item would be for food and we would write that
$10,000 worth of food was needed, same for clothes and medicine. Of
course, we had to justify the expenses with receipts, whenever we
could get them. The budget was a page long. In total the proposal was
five pages and it took no more than 15 days for the funds to be
deposited into a bank account that one of the priests opened in his
DOI of original article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2017.02.001.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: martinez@hec.fr (D.E. Martinez).
1
In Guatemala, the Commission for Historical Clarification estimates that over
200,000 persons were disappeared or killed during the 36-year war. The document
notes: “State forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of the
violations documented” (Historical Clarification Commission, 1999).
name for us to use. This is nothing like our current proposals, which are
much longer and denser with technical and financial information. The
agencies also knew we could not provide the most detailed and
transparent paperwork because we were facing a humanitarian crisis.
We were refugees and did not have the documentation to start an NGO
or open a bank account. What we did have was the support of a few
priests and the support of international NGOs with offices in Mexico.
The precarious situation in which we worked meant that it was of
fundamental importance that we established relationships based on
mutual trust, that there be a commonality in values and principles. We
were all engaged in the same movement, locally and internationally, to
promote social change. The personnel in the aid agencies and inter-
national NGOs that we worked with showed a political commitment to
the cause and they provided financial support for that cause. They
knew that their administrative requirements could not always be met
because of the war. When representatives from international organi-
zations were able to visit and monitor a project, they would observe
the conditions of the communities in which we worked and the lack of
administrative infrastructure. The monitors did not count in great
detail the amount of bags of corn purchased or see whether everything
was there. It was not the overarching preoccupation and they would
not hassle us too much about the receipts: That they were missing, not
in the proper format or order, that the signature was not legible, and so

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2017.02.002
0361-3682/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
on. There was more understanding, more flexibility.
This understanding is also reflected in the way financial trans-
actions were managed. The money had to be wire-transferred by in-
ternational donors into our bank accounts. At first we used banks in
Mexico, but we ran into some trouble with the accounts. We needed
our accounts in US dollars and the Mexican government did not allow
that at the time. The banks in our home country were too risky because
the military was auditing internationally funded accounts. The best
option at the time was to open accounts in Panama because their
banks operated in dollars and were less regulated. But that meant that
one of us would have to go and collect those funds once we got
confirmation that the funds were transferred.
On a few occasions I had to take that dreadful trip. It meant taking
the bus to Panama to retrieve the funds, we are talking tens of thou-
sands of dollars in cash, and make my way back to Mexico on another
bus. That also meant that we had dollars in our safe that needed to be
converted into Mexican pesos and then into Guatemalan quetzals. We
could not depend on banks for this either; that meant someone had to
take cash to the border and exchange it at black market rates. It was
unreasonable to expect a receipt from a black market transaction. But
funders knew. They noticed that we did not use the official exchange
rate in our financial reports. We also worked a lot with cash, which
meant that we seldom provided bank statements.
So here again is the element of trust. When I was given the order to
take those trips to Panama it meant that they trusted my political
commitment; the same way they trusted the person responsible for the
exchange rate; the same way that international funders trusted our
organization with the funds it provided; and that we trusted that they
would not give intelligence to the military or anyone that could put us
and the communities in danger. The funders trusted that every dollar
would be used to the best of our abilities to improve the situation of the
communities. It would not make sense to risk our lives, to build a
reputation based on our commitment to the struggle, and then throw
all that away by embezzling a few dollars or by not doing the best
project we could with the conditions we were working in. If something
were to go awry with the funds, well, it was more than an adminis-
trative penalty, it was a political one.
1. Introduction
Antonio2 provides an account of the accountability relations
between non-formalized grassroots organizations and European
and North American international funders during the war.3 It
highlights how “solidarity,” “trust,” “a commonality in values and
principles,” and a sense that they “were all engaged in the same
movement” 4 underpinned funding and accountability relations
between grassroots organizations and their funders.
To be clear, Antonio’s account is not the portrayal of a golden era.
2 which grassroots organizations and guerrillas could carry out their
This is a composite character based on interviews with three NGO workers’
experiences with international development and the social movement since the
war. This composite character provides an ethnographic account that protects the
identity of specific interviewees and helps to make the case more vivid (for similar
approaches see Rottenburg (2009) and Dugdale (1999)).
3
Both countries were engulfed in an internal armed struggle that pitted their
military-led governments against various left-wing guerrilla organizations. This is
developed in section 3.
4
Referring to the social movement in the singular was a common way for in-
terviewees to refer to the historical social movementda way of characterizing a
social movement with origins in the war. Currently, there are various social
movements (e.g., campesino, labour, feminist movements) and we are not sug-
gesting that they are acting as a singular entity. Like our interviewees, we reserve
the singular use to refer to the historical social movement that is at the centre of
our study.
7
It indicates how an organization avoided capture by governments
(which often meant torture, disappearance, or death) and how it
operated in adverse conditions. Antonio provides us, rather, with a
particular experience of a social movement and highlights three
important features. First, its components: International NGOs and
funding agencies, non-formalized grassroots organizations, refu-
gees, and priestsdeach with its own mode of political intervention.
Second, the relations between the social movement and funding
agencies, characterized by lenient legal and accounting re-
quirements and the use of an underground economy to avoid banks
and the military. Finally, Antonio articulates a unifying political
aspiration, a “commonality in values and principles,” that kept the
disparate components of the movement together. This aspiration is
not restricted to the past, though, as it permeates organizations
operating in the increasingly technical and professionalized world
of international development. It is a “politics of affirmation”
(Braidotti, 2011, p. 6) that informs their critique of international
development and the articulation of alternative modes of
accountability and political intervention.
Antonio’s narrative offers a starting point to examine how
grassroots organizations and the broader social movement that
they were “all engaged in” have been altered. Our study was
initially prompted by interviewees’ concern over the changes they
experienced since the war. As a Guatemalan community organizer
noted: “International development has been able to do what the
military was not able to do during the war: Disarticulate the social
movement.” Another interviewee active in organizing communities
during the war, and now an NGO project coordinator, similarly
noted: “There are grassroots organizations, movements that have
been disarticulated due to economic influence, due to money. But
above all, because they have become NGOized.” These, like other
accounts (see also Morales Lo
pez & B

pez,
a Tiul, 2009; Morales Lo
2010; Roy, 2004; Alvarez, 1999, 2009), sensitize us to the power-
ful effects of international development’s accountability re-
quirements on social movements.
The study of this so-called disarticulation was also motivated by
our understanding of how accountability requirements enable the
formation of a governable field by regulating its component parts,
their relations, and political aspirations. Previous studies indicate
that accounting and accountability technologies are implicated in
bringing a governable field into being (Miller & O’Leary, 1987;
Miller, 1990; Preston, 2006; Rahaman, Neu, & Everett, 2010). Less
has been written on how this bringing into being limits and regu-
lates other entities. This prompted us to study not only how
“complexes” of rationales and practices mesh together, intersect,
and are constitutive of one another (Miller, 1990), but also the
processes through which one complex gives way to another.
We address these understandings through a field study con-
ducted in Guatemala and El Salvador; each one engulfed in its own
internal war until left-wing guerrillas and the state signed peace
accords in the 1990s. The accords marked the beginning of a
reconstruction process: The formation of state institutions through
political programme as political parties, labour unions, and NGOs.
International development work became one way through which
these actors could intervene in the process of reconstruction. We
argue that accountability requirements, which encompass man-
agement and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, played
an important role in the formation and continued maintenance of
international development as a space for social movement orga-
nizations to intervene but to also be intervened and constituted as
proper developmental actors.
Studying how social movement organizations became compo-
nents of this field of development intervention, though, also
exposed us to how bringing something into being has
8 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
disarticulating effects. To help us think about this we enlist Deleuze
and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” and their processes of
territorialization, coding, and overcoding. Through these processes
we trace how the international development assemblage comes
into being by acquiring particular content from the social move-
ment assemblage and by giving this content an expression, an
emerging identity.
These processes provide us with greater focus into how assem-
blages intersect. Unlike Miller’s examination of the “programmatic
dimensions of power/knowledge” (1990, 334), we focus on the
technologies of governance that enable intersections and their dis-
articulating effects. We describe the formation of an important
assemblage in the region (international development) whose for-
mation regulates the political and accountability connections with,
and even the survival of, another assemblage (the social movement).
That is, we show how an assemblage is constituted out of the
organizational and aspirational components of an increasingly dis-
articulated other. To disarticulate is not just that the social move-
ment loses organizations to the international development
assemblage, but also that these organizations’ political aspirations
are rearticulated in the service of international development.
This is important because it highlights how a heterogeneous mix
of formalized and non-formalized organizations became project-
implementing NGOs. After all, we have learned that accountability
requirements have effects on NGOs accountability to different
stakeholders, on their capitals, and their professionalization
(Chenhall, Hall, & Smith, 2010; O’Dwyer & Unerman, 2008). But
these studies have been conducted at the organizational level. Our
account extends their findings by considering the effect these re-
quirements have on how these NGOs become parts of an emerging
assemblage. The significance is that we learn that changes in
accountability requirements enable organizations, such as non-
formalized grassroots organizations, to acquire certain features,
become “proper” project implementing NGOs, as they make their
way into the field of international development. This requires us to
analyze how a confluence of accountability requirements contained
in registration forms, funding proposals, and monitoring reports are
implicated in transforming the organizations and the field of re-
lations into another governable composition.5
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section two
situates our study in the accountability literature that discusses its
constitutive power, including the power to constitute a governable
field of actors. We introduce Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to
help us analyze some of the processes through which this happens.
Section three explains our research methods. This is followed by
two sections that describe the processes through which funding
and accountability requirements compose the international
development assemblage out of the social movement’s compo-
nents. Finally, section six concludes with a discussion of the study’s
implications.
2. Accountability and the assembly of a field of governance
Our point of departure is that accountability is a “constituent” of
a type of governance (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 30; Quattrone,
5
This is not to say that there is no resistance or agency. Organizations do contest
some of these transformative pressures. We encountered organizations that choose
not to submit proposals to some international agencies as a form of protest. Others
engage in administrative strategies to finance politically charged projects that
would otherwise not get funded by leaking funds out of international development
into the social movement. The latter are “invisible” strategies or what interviewees
called “manoeuvres” or “tricks” that enable them to operate and contribute to both
assemblages. We intend to develop on these in a subsequent paper (see also Li,
2007, p. 264).
2004). The power of accountability as a tool of governance is that
it has “significant consequences for the entities held to account,”
including the possibility that new entities are “brought into being”
(Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 58). Governmentality studies,
together with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, provide us with
valuable tools to examine how accountability brings a certain field
“into being.”
The governmentality literature has mobilized multiple concepts
to describe a dynamic composition of heterogeneous parts and
power relations. Miller (1990), for instance, studies accounting and
the state as two distinct but mutually constitutive complexes of
practices and rationales. We too are interested in examining “how
changes in the constitutive components of one complex make
possible the emergence, articulation or transformation of the
other” (Miller, 1990, p. 316). Whereas Miller studies the vision that
programme architects have about the way society ought to function
and the calculative technologies that intervene to constitute the
population as a self-governing entity, we want to examine these
intersections as experienced by the subjects of governance. And
while we have learned that accounting and accountability tech-
nologies are implicated in governing through the constitution and
arrangement of actors in a particular field (see Neu, Ocampo,
Graham, & Heincke, 2006; Rahaman et al., 2010), we still do not
know how they intervene in assembling a field of governance by
disarticulating another. Focusing on governmental interventions in
relation to “actual” organizations provides us with a better view
into how these organizations are transformed, as they are absorbed
into an assemblage while regulating their relations to the assem-
blage from which they came.6
We enlist another set of concepts to study the relation between
assemblages. We define the social movement and international
development as “assemblages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which
shares the same intuition as concepts in the governmentality
literature such as complex, constellations, fields, and networks. Our
use, though, makes more explicit a form of governing that “operates
by stratification” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 433): a process
through which components of the social movement assemblage are
subsumed into the assemblage of international development.
Accordingly, we conceptualize social movements as “expansive,
heterogeneous and polycentric discursive fields of action […]
constructed, continuously reinvented and shaped by distinctive
political cultures and power distributions” (Escobar & Osterweil,
2010, pp. 195e6). The heterogeneous and dynamic social move-
ment assemblage of our study has undergone and continues to
undergo a series of transformations as its parts are enveloped into
the emerging assemblage of international development. Interna-
tional development, unlike the social movement, is a stratified
assemblage: A “vertical, hierarchized aggregate” whereby compo-
nents of “very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic,
moral, economic, technological particularities” are made to “reso-
nate” with one another by acquiring linked characteristics (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, p. 433). This aggregate is formed through the
regulation of these diverse components:
In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off their relations
with other elements, which become exterior, it inhibits, it slows
down, or controls those relations … it isolates itself from the
remainder of the network, even if in order to do so it must exert
6
Rather than a study of programmers’ aspirations, this is a study of the “messy
consequences of programmes” (Li, 2007, p. 28). This is not to say that this renders a
more “realist” account; programmes have effects, many of them unintended (Miller,
1990), and we document some of these messy consequences, some of the possible
stances that subjects take amidst these programmatic rules.
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20 9

even stricter controls over its relations with that remainder. view into how a field of actors and their relations come together, we
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 433; emphasis ours) employ additional concepts to make sense of how one type of
assemblage is constituted out of another. Through stratification
processes we learn how boundaries are defined, parts are made
To stratify an assemblage is to hierarchically aggregate diverse
coherent as they acquire certain features, and their relations are
components and make them cohere and give them an orderdit
controlled and “cut off” from the assemblage from which they come
disarticulates by regulating, by cutting off their relations to what is
from. This cutting off makes the social movement something
now “exterior.”
exterior, which is central to its disarticulation.
This stratification involves the interrelated processes of terri-
torialization, coding, and overcoding. Territorialization demarcates
3. Research methodology
the content of an assemblage. It is a process that includes a degree
of filtering and the establishment of boundaries to make possible
3.1. The field of Guatemala and El Salvador
that “proper” organizations are included in the emerging aggre-
gate. This is not simply a physical space, but rather, a calculative
Our field study takes place in Guatemala and El Salvador. Both
space (Miller & Power, 2013). Coding involves arranging the as-
countries were engulfed in an internal armed struggle that deci-
semblage’s content into “more or less uniform layers” (DeLanda,
mated many facets of the countries’ political, social, and economic
2000) by complying with funding agencies’ (more or less) homo-
infrastructure, with deleterious effects on the population at large,
geneous administrative categories. At stake are organizations’
particularly in the area of human rights. Guatemala and El Salvador
structure (legally and administratively as a type of NGO) and mode
experienced 36 and 12 years of conflict, respectively, that pitted the
of development intervention (as noted with the prevalence of the
military-led government against various left wing guerrilla armies
project management). Although organizations become adminis-
that eventually unified as the Guatemalan National Revolutionary
tratively similar, this is not another story of isomorphism
Unity (UNRG, by its Spanish acronym) and the Farabundo Martí
(DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), they are also differentiated: Funders
National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. During the war, the
require organizations to specialize and intervene in specific agency-
social movement, broadly composed of guerrilla armies, student,
mandated programmatic and geographic areas. Territorialization
labour and campesino [peasant] organizations, churches, human
and coding, in other words, is what gives an assemblage its
rights organizations, and international solidarity organizations,
particular content.
was driven underground. NGO-like entities were closely linked
Overcoding is a process of establishing functional relations, of
with the social movement. They were, however, as we learned
binding components together to constitute a whole. In our empir-
though Antonio, often not formalized (legalized) as NGOs because
ical site, cementing relations among organizations is achieved in
their work was mainly clandestine and at times based in neigh-
part by (a) administratively overwhelming organizations, requiring
bouring countries, working with exiled and internally displaced
them to focus on their relationship of accountability with funders;
populations.
(b) requiring specific forms of inscriptions such as receipts and
The signing of the peace accords in the 1990s led to the for-
invoices, establishing fixed administrative paths among organiza-
mation of a series of institutions that, on paper, at least, enabled
tions; and (c) altering flows of funds, encouraging administrative
guerrillas and grassroots elements of the social movement to
and financial alliances among NGOs and between NGOs and their
continue their political struggle through these institutions. This
local governments. Through these, the more or less similar content
gave rise to not only the formalization of guerrillas into political
is “made to work in a ‘functional structure’” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004,
parties, but also the formalization of grassroots organizations into
p. 83). The assemblage exerts its force, its expression, a quality, onto
NGOs. With the signing of the Accords, Guatemala and El Salvador
its components as “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
witnessed an NGO boom.8 The Accords were an important part of
and is able to exert focused systematic behaviour” (Bonta & Protevi,
the incorporation of those “outside” into the state and the regulated
2004, p. 37).7
field of international development.9
Individually, these three processes may seem familiar. Prior
International and domestic development NGOs played an active
literature indicates that accounting technologies both filter and es-
role in the process of reconstructing Guatemala and El Salvador
tablishes boundaries thereby creating an inside and outside (Miller
during and after the war as aid agencies provided technical training
& Power, 2013; Mouritsen & Thrane, 2006; Neu, Everett, Rahaman, &
and funds to domestic NGOs. The signing of the Accords marked a
Martinez, 2013), make organizations isomorphic (DiMaggio &
transition for many organizations, a transition that is at the centre
Powell, 1983), and alter their relation to one another as they are
of our study.
unified as a network (Rahaman et al., 2010). But, by placing these
processes side-by-side we learn how these individual processes
3.2. Field study and analysis
overlap and reinforce each other as parts of a larger process of
constituting a governable assemblage in the name of “developing”
We undertook two field trips in 2010 and 2011 to El Salvador
or improving the wellbeing of a region (Li, 2007). This provides a
view into how the different accountability requirements, legal re-
quirements, and funding flows intervene in the different processes 8
Exact figures are difficult to access. One study estimates that there are
to dispose these populations to intervene in their own development,
approximately 3000 NGOs in Guatemala (Foro de Coordinaciones de ONG de
not as the social movement Antonio envisioned, but as an assem- Guatemala, 2012, 103).
blage of professionalized and technically competent NGOs. 9
International development includes government agencies of OECD countries
To conclude, while governmentality studies provide us with a that administer foreign aid programs to developing countries; examples include the
United States Agency for International Development and the Spanish Agency for
International Cooperation. We focus on funds that originate from these state-
funding agencies. In most cases though agencies transfer funds to local NGOs
7
Deleuze and Guattari (1987), reflect on the “double articulation,” a dual process, through either multilateral agencies, such as the United Nations Development
implicated in the process of stratification. We adapted it, in a schematic way, as Programme, and the World Bank, and/or international NGOs such as Oxfam, CARE,
interventions that give the assemblage its “content” (mainly through territoriali- and Trocaire. Our empirical focus is on local NGOs that operate in Guatemala and El
zation and coding) and interventions that give it an “expression” (mainly through Salvador and receive grants from bilateral and multilateral government agencies
overcoding). and international NGOs, as well as from their local states.
10 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
and Guatemaladinvolving 7 weeks in El Salvador and 7 weeks in
Guatemala.10 The first field trip permitted us to get insight into
what were the management devices used, how they were used, and
their effects. Our initial interviews also focused on the field’s
characteristics and on identifying the pressing issues faced by the
participants. These areas of interest were explored in more detail
through subsequent interviews. 38 interviews were conducted
during the first visit and 24 during the second, involving 20 local
NGOs, 2 non-incorporated organizations,11 1 municipal govern-
ment, 8 international NGOs, 10 funding agencies (6 bilateral and 4
multilateral), and 2 consulting firms (see appendix A). Participants
include managers, community organizers and technicians, ac-
countants and administrators, consultants, civil servants, and social
justice activists. All but five were digitally recorded. The interviews
provided sufficient material to address our conceptual concerns.
We took particular interest in NGO workers and grassroots ac-
tivists that had experience that date to the war. They provided
valuable perspectives into the social movement’s history. We also
thought important to identify personnel in NGOs that do not see
themselves as part of the social justice movement that dates to the
war.12 They provided us with perspective on the field’s profes-
sionalization. These interviews helped us track some of the changes
experienced in the field over the years. Weaving together the past
with current practices was a recurrent theme in our interviews and
we seek to reflect on this in this study. This weaving was often done
through the notion of social movement. Interviewees repeatedly
referred to the historical social movement as a field of organiza-
tional and political relations and as that under threat of disarticu-
lation. This is a partial and historically contingent notion of the
social movement, and one integral to the discussion on interna-
tional development and the centrality of accountability
requirements.
Participants were asked for documents that illustrated the re-
ports and management tools commonly used in their organiza-
tions. Formal documentation provides a view into projects and how
requirements are enacted at the organizational and operational
level (Jensen & Winthereik, 2013). Most of the organizations pro-
vided copies or allowed photographs of a project’s monitoring re-
ports, work plans, annual financial reports, position papers,
budgets, etc. (in total 1500 pages of documents were photo-
graphed). Together with documents downloaded from NGOs’ and
funding agencies’ websites (including: annual reports, promotional
material, financial statements, etc.), these inscriptions gave us a
visual representation of the major templates (such as the Logical
Framework, budgets, and operational plans) that are part of the
legal, accounting, project management, and financial requirements
used to manage internationally funded projects.
We also observed how projects were operationalized in the field
by attending project-related activities and workshops. These visits
enabled us to observe how the project, as a mode of development
intervention, was enacted and later accounted for by the techni-
cians and accountants. We also observed meetings among project
10
One of the authors also spent six months between 2004 and 2005 in Guatemala
as part of a previous research project with an organization with close connections
to the social movement and international development. This provided us with some
of the initial contacts and insights into the field, which inform the current study.
11
Volunteer-based “activist” organizations/collectives that resist incorporating as
an NGO.
12
This is a matter of degree. While we got some insight into the extent of these
NGOs’ connections with the grassroots social movement from reading their web-
sites and published materials, the following were also assessed during the in-
terviews: the practices and discourses (extent to which they communicate with
activist organizations, mode of interventions such as rallies, and their vocabulary on
the state, capitalism, class, management, accountability, and gender).
coordinators and technicians in one of the NGOs, which helped us
understand how accountability is performed.
While empirically informed, the aim of the data collection
process, and the methodological considerations that informed it, is
to enable us to tell a convincing and theoretically informed story
that reflects some of the transformations (and ambiguities) of the
fields we studied. Our methodological approach is not to “represent
the world as it is or what it means, but to survey and map its
tendencies” (Holland, 2013, p. 37). In this regard we provide one
account (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 256; De Laet & Mol, 2000) of
the requirements and some of the effects they have. The technol-
ogies and the effects that we identified in the field were among the
more discussed and stressed among the interviewees. We weave
them in as examples to address an empirical concern, that of
disarticulation, which was itself motivated by the interviewees’
concerns over what they were experiencing, and to address our
theoretical concern over how compositions are constituted.
4. Administrative codes: territorializing and coding
components
Antonio’s remarks at the beginning of this article stress his or-
ganization’s avoidance of the repressive Guatemalan state and the
banks. This implicated working as clandestine organizations. Their
funders, their “solidarity” partners, as Antonio put it, were sensitive
to these conditions. Their administrative code did not “channel and
block” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 19) important financial and political flows.
Although legal requirements, management by objectives, budgets,
and project design and performance measurement systems were
part of the aid agencies’ tool kit, they were not rigorously applied.
For instance, his was a grassroots organization that operated
without a formalized legal structure and professionalized staff. The
financial flows, while subject to funders’ and banks’ administrative
code (e.g. requirements for receipts, signatures, banks statements,
etc.), often required their decoding and flight into other assem-
blages (e.g. an underground network and black market to move
funds) facilitated by the use of cash that left little trace. Another
instance of the extent to which agencies applied their administra-
tive code is notable in the records sent by Antonio’s organization:
Project proposals and monitoring reports were flexible in detail and
format. Funders “would not hassle us too much about the receipts:
That they were missing” or they would “not count in great detail
the amount of bags of corn purchased or see whether everything
was there.” The mode of intervention was the provision of services
through a “project,” but the intervention was also about building
political and solidarity connections not only with aid agencies and
international NGOs but, importantly, also with beneficiaries and
the “movement” at large. The point is that funders were perceived
as having “more understanding, more flexibility” of the political
and humanitarian situation and as such their administrative re-
quirements did not threaten the diversity of the social movement’s
organizational forms and modes of intervention.
For Antonio, funders’ international development accountability
requirements previously coexisted with social movement’s princi-
ples of solidarity and trust. Boundaries were blurreddcertainly the
military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala had difficulties
making the distinction, often equating international development
with revolutionary activity.13 Social movement organizations
collaborated with international NGOs that provided aid agency
funds to finance their local struggles.
13
A director for a European international NGO in El Salvador commented: “NGOs
have been perceived negatively by previous governments. They categorized all
NGOs as communists [guerrillas].”
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
In the following, Antonio describes how this space was altered
by giving an account of how his organization is absorbed into the
international development assemblage.
Administrative requirements started to change in the late 1980s.
We were encouraged to formalize the NGO and show the proper
documentation and organizational structure, such as having an ex-
ecutive director and board of directors. Funding agencies also asked us
to hire an accountant since we had a volunteer with no formal ac-
counting training keeping the books. Even the reports changed as the
budgets had to be more detailed by including the number of items we
were going to purchase. Around that time international agencies also
started to check our books. We were all shocked the first time this
happened as this guy suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, walked in,
shook my hand, acknowledged the administrator and the accountant
with a nod, and asked us to leave him alone with the books for an hour.
I was furious! “This bastard, what does he think he is doing?” I wanted
to kick him out. We were accustomed to another dynamic; at least
some chitchat about the political situation, life in exile, or whatever,
and then get onto business. This was different. It was cold. Add to that,
what came across was an arrogant attitude that marked the difference
between the have and the have-nots, giving them certain rights over
us. No sensibility to the political struggle we were engaged in. So I
called the agency to ask them what was going on and they told me that
he was just going to check the books, that he was very good at what he
did, and that he did not talk about politics. At that moment I was made
aware of the impending changes. In retrospect, not all bad of course.
This was in 1986e87, and as an organization we decided to go
along with these changes and we took that leap with the agencies.
They for instance started to train the accountant and administrator on
proper reporting and controls. Our staff also received technical
training and they were expected to have a higher level of academic
preparation. They demanded more from us and there were occasions
where projects or disbursements were not approved because the re-
ports were not clear enough. Our work became more technically and
administratively demanding.
Then the personnel we knew at the international organizations
started to change. They had new people, who were not familiar with
our name, our past … like that guy who wanted to check our books:
They did not talk about the political struggle. They started to introduce
more technocrats, which is the current situation. It is not that tech-
nocrats are the problem, what I lament is that there is a political
emptiness. Everything is transparent now, which is not bad, but the
political element of our relation is missing.
This account of how Antonio’s organization becomes adminis-
tratively regulated through a number of international aid agencies’
accountability requirements sets the stage for understanding how
social movement organizations are territorialized and coded into
the international development assemblage.
4.1. Territorialization: creating boundaries
As Antonio’s narrative unfolds, the funder’s administrative code
becomes more formalized and pronounced, and so does the
distinction between international development and the social
movement. Aid-providing states started changing the nature of
their development agencies, what Antonio noted as agency staff
becoming more technocratic or “neoliberalized” (see also Wallace,
2009). They subordinate an accountability based on patchy evi-
dence, solidarity and trust to an administrative code that for
Antonio is “transparent” and “technocratic.” The introduction of
hierarchical accountability (Ebrahim, 2005; Roberts, 1996) gives
international development its content through the processes of
11
territorialization and coding.
Antonio realized that there was a boundary territorializing the
space. To continue accessing funding, his organization took a “leap”
into the funding agencies’ emerging administrative space by
registering as an NGO and complying with administration re-
quirements. This included letting the funder audit the books and
hiring a proper accountant, and not making “politics” a necessary
feature of the relationship. These requirements give the composi-
tion its boundaries by filtering organizations (who do not meet the
requirements). Thus, some organizations did not “take the leap”
because they did not have the administrative knowhow or political
inclination to formalize their structure and linkages with interna-
tional funders (we will discuss later the case of a youth-based
activist organization).
We can get a further sense of how this territorial boundary is
maintained by examining some current requirements. These re-
quirements include registration forms (such as the EuropeAid Po-
tential Applicant Data Online Registration, or PADOR),14 which have
to be completed before the organization submits funding pro-
posals. Other forms require organizations to include project specific
criteria. These are part of a complex of “formal” documents that
help produce developmental reality and are ubiquitous in the field
(Jensen & Winthereik, 2013, p. 94). A municipal civil servant in El
Salvador, who once helped grassroots organizations access inter-
national funding, noted that the PADOR form makes visible some
administrative and legal requirements, but it also, and in a more
subtle way, tests the administrative capacity to complete the form.
The civil servant continued, referring to a small municipality:
They are small, with no specialist in international development
and with a very small budget, which means that they are not
required by law to prepare financial statements. So then, how
are they going to prepare the financial statements that the
PADOR requires? The audit reports? Who is going to complete
the form?
Unable to successfully register with PADOR, this municipality,
like the other grassroots organizations he once worked for, was not
able pass through one of the first filters: it cannot operate in the
administrative space.
The effect was highlighted in one of our first interviews. A
director and project manager with 18 years of experience with a
European NGO in El Salvador was having difficulties securing
funding for organizations that were once able to do so. He
pointed out that project proposals are too demanding for the
populations he worked with: “It can take them months to com-
plete it. I can do it. You can do it. But the organization of
campesinos, they may eventually be able to do it, but why
complicate things for them?”
This is not to say that interviewees were dismissive of re-
quirements. For the civil servant, the requirements “add a technical
component and forces us to evaluate what we are doing.” But they
also contain “the rules” that mark the requirements for entry. The
civil servant clearly articulates the boundary: “international
development funding, in general terms, has become a privileged
circle made up of those who know and are able to meet all the rules,
the forms, and all that stuff”.
The point is that the boundaries have become more explicit.
Being part of this “privileged circle” not only requires
14
PADOR is “a database managed by EuropeAid and contains information about
organizations applying for grants of the European Commission in the field of
external assistance” (http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/work/onlineservices/pador/
index_en.htm).
12 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
administrative capacity (hence the large numbers of workshops
helping organizations to develop this capacity), but also a certain
type of political discourse. This political element became evident to
us during a conversation with a Guatemalan youth-based grass-
roots organization that has refused international development
agencies’ offers to take the “leap.” As one of the organization’s ac-
tivists noted, taking this leap required: “Totally changing one’s
discourse [discurso]. For example, we had a slogan that was not
very conciliatory at a time when international funders were pro-
moting reconciliation after the peace accords.” Whereas entry for
the small municipality and the campesino organization was con-
ditional on their form-filling abilities, for the youth-grassroots or-
ganization, it was on their capacity to accommodate a specific
political tone. These are connected. The forms administratively
suggest the demarcation of a political space.
The overlap that Antonio documented, whereby social move-
ment and international development organizations “were all
engaged in the same movement,” has been intersected by a
boundary.15 This political and administrative boundary does not
necessarily imply the social movement’s disarticulation. But, it does
have disarticulating effects when the territorial boundary is rein-
forced by emphasizing distinctions between what is a part of the
new assemblage and what is notdthereby marking the social
movement’s components as the “outside” or “remainder.”
4.2. Coding the organizations’ form and mode of intervention
Organizations are not only exposed to requirements as they
contemplate whether to enter the assemblage of international
development or not; these requirements, mainly for those
committed to entering, are transformative: They give the emerging
composition a particular type of content. This constitutive element
is what we call coding, the moment when funder requirements
interact with organizations to make them administratively
coherent units. Coding also illustrates that territorialization is not
only about exclusion, but selected inclusion, making the territori-
alized grassroots components susceptible to alterations in their
governance and administrative structure and mode of development
intervention. The following describes how organizations are altered
as they are positioned within the territorialized space. These in-
terventions are more “internal” to organizations. They have,
though, assemblage-level implications: to govern the assemblage is
to constitute its content along a code.
4.2.1. Organizational form: becoming an NGO
In terms of organizational form, Antonio noted the effects of
these requirements when his organization was “encouraged to
formalize the NGO and show the proper documentation and
structure, such as having an executive director and board of di-
rectors.” Requirements can be gathered from the aforementioned
PADOR and funding forms, including providing information on:
whether they are incorporated as an NGO; to what extent the
board of directors is involved in the organization; whether they
15
This boundary is not impermeable. There are overflows. Through our field study
we learned of NGOs channelling international development funds to social move-
ment organizations through all sorts of administrative manoeuvres. These “hybrid”
organizations work between social movement and international development, but
are finding it increasingly difficult to do so (Alvarez, 1999).
16
There are also governance and fiscal requirements set by the Guatemalan and El
Salvadorian governments that organizations have to comply with to be legally
recognized as an NGO. The Guatemalan Ley de Organizaciones no Gubernamentales
para el Desarrollo and its equivalent in El Salvador, for instance, decree among other
things: a particular definition of NGO, adherence to a set of accounting and tax
principles, and the formation of a board of directors and a general assembly.
have an account for each project, number of accounts, currency,
signing authority; where petty cash is kept, rules for its use, who
administers it; accounting personnel’s capacity; extent to which
financial reports are audited; taxes paid; and financial
sustainability.16
Organizations are required to adhere to these legal and
administrative principles to access funding. Funding agencies also
help organizations meet these requirements, thereby facilitating
their inclusion into the assemblage. The project coordinator for a
bilateral development agency remembers: “Two years ago, in one
of our lasts visits [to a community], we were horrified to be
informed that one of the organizations we were starting to work
with did not have legal status and that they would not pass the
audit.” In such a situation “we had to help the organization get their
legal status. We had not spoken with them for many years … they
were people that came from the war, they were part of the
resistance.”
Other, already “legalized” organizations, require adjusting their
organizational form to position themselves in the assemblage. A
labour union and a rural advocacy organization in Guatemala offer
striking examples. The labour union’s director recounts: “We
realized in 2000 that it was necessary to create a technical unit to
lend support to the [labour] movement … we should broaden the
trade union’s efforts by creating this technical unit.” The technical
unit is constituted as an NGO, enabling the union to access new
funds. A Guatemalan consultant familiar with the case noted that
the labour union “simply did it because they have to survive.” An
NGO worker also familiar with the case noted this sort of funding
has “torn the labour union in two”: One part for international
development and the other for the labour movement. She went on
to say that the union’s structure and its accountability to its due-
paying membership were segmented, “torn,” and so was its ca-
pacity to voice the grassroots’ aspirations. Similarly, a campesino
community association with a mission statement to access land
and “class struggle” received financial support from an interna-
tional NGO to create a technical unit, an NGO. While enabling
access to much-needed funds, it also, as one of its organizers
noted, imposed “conditions that undermines some of the work we
have done” as the funder’s development objectives are closely
aligned with the “neoliberal state policies” often critiqued by the
association’s membership.
These examples show how funders’ administrative re-
quirements provide the codes for organizations to change their
governance structure. An NGO worker in Guatemala, noted that at
this point, “the NGOization of the social movement begins.”
Grassroots organizations, formalized or not, are rearticulated as one
type of formalized organization, an NGO, positioned in the inter-
national development assemblage. Significantly, for the labour
union and the rural advocacy organization, as the quotes suggest,
this change also affected their mode of accountability and political
intervention. In the following section we explore the changes in
mode of accountability and intervention through an analysis of the
development project.
4.2.2. Mode of development intervention: the project
Project-level requirements are another form of administrative
standardization. Projects are the primary form of development
intervention; as the director of an international NGO in El Salvador
comments, they “allow us to execute our programmes. We execute
our programmes through the projects.” For a project coordinator at
a Guatemalan NGO: “All social organizations manage international
development projects. We became project designers and
executers.”
The significance of NGOs formulating their interventions
through projects is that it makes their intervention
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
administratively controllable. Project management and accounting
devices17 are used to make projects appear coherent with funding
agencies’ development models and goals. The executive director of
a Guatemalan association of local development NGOs commented:
“Let’s just say that the thinking was different 5 or 10 years ago. Now,
the majority of [aid] agencies have clearly defined their own ob-
jectives. So one has to go and present proposals that fit with those
objectives.” NGOs align their development projects to these ob-
jectives through agency-mandated “methodologies” such as the
Logical Framework and results- and activity-based budgets
(Martinez & Cooper, 2014).
The effects of these requirements are significant and far-
reaching. The Logical Framework’s methodology facilitates the
design of projects that can be readily measured, such as building
infrastructure (Ebrahim, 2005). This view is shared across many of
the organizations we interviewed. For the director of a large in-
ternational NGO:
The Logical Framework is good for constructing buildings and
classrooms, training teachers and things like that. But it is
limited when it comes to capacity building: Engaging with the
community to promote an active citizenry. … For me, it is a tool
that is not very useful for political advocacy where you want to
promote behavioural changes.
Further, a project designer and coordinator at a popular-
education NGO in El Salvador described how the Logical Frame-
work “robs you of the energy and creativity needed for the strug-
gle.” In effect, she notes that: “These are projects that do not
challenge anything … they are not conceived as a means to orga-
nize people towards the formulation of certain demands, but rather
to meet basic local needs, and that is it. There is no political
perspective.”
This does not mean that the aspiration to intervene politically is
completely blocked or disarticulated; it is rather redirected towards
the funder’s goals. These project-level requirements “contribute to
giving form to new versions of the political” (Jensen & Winthereik,
2013, p. 83). We can start to see how disarticulating the social
movement is about articulating a different version of the “political.”
In such settings the political is rearticulated in ways made
possible through funder project management requirements. This
became quite explicit for an NGO working with internally displaced
communities in Northern Guatemala. The director informed us that
one of his funder’s project requirements opened new opportunities
for political intervention:
There is an entry point, because before the political was seen as
that person, a leftist, promoting full-on revolution. But now, all
those political spaces that do not appear to be visible to them,
are there; for example, it is now about governance, democratic
processes, the strengthening of local governments. These make
a number of opportunities [to intervene] available … it is now a
matter of finding that political component.
Agencies have created spaces for a different type of political
intervention. These “political spaces” are made visible through the
project’s general objectives, such as “strengthening of local gov-
ernments” which NGOs operationalize, through the Logical
Framework, into a series of concrete activities. Interventions are
17
These include: Logical Frameworks, budgets for the project and for each of the
activities and results, project timetables, project approval letters, overview of
project activities, mechanisms for the internal evaluation of the project, and as-
sessments of the sustainability of the project.
13
made measureable, tangible, and practical. This is also linked to the
perception among interviewees of little project diversity. This
became apparent to the project coordinator at a Guatemalan NGO:
“There were, without exaggerating, six or seven NGOs working in
the same community … and we were doing the same thing!”
Ferguson (1994), similarly notes that, “many aspects of ‘develop-
ment’ interventions remain remarkably uniform and standardized
from place to place” (258). Thus, while international development
requirements have depoliticized and standardized interventions
(Ebrahim, 2005), we suggest that requirements redefine the scope
of political intervention. To disarticulate the social movement is to
rearticulate its aspiration for political change in a way that is useful
for the international development assemblagedthat is, within its
administratively allotted “political spaces.” To disarticulate, though,
is to also relegate that which does not comply (“leftist, promoting
full-on revolution”) to the outside (with the remaining components
of Antonio’s social movement).
4.3. Creating difference within the assemblage
So far we have documented how coding alters the assemblage’s
content by targeting an organization’s form and mode of devel-
opmental and political intervention. Although organizations accu-
mulate similarities, coding is also a process whereby organizations
are differentiated by placing them in an order. This is noticeable in
the way the asymmetric relationship between the funders and
NGOs becomes more explicit. As Antonio points out, the changes in
requirements “marked the difference between the have and the
have-nots, giving them certain rights over us.” The administrative
and accountability requirements that differentiate funder and
funded also introduce differentiation amongst the funded organi-
zations by arranging them into specialized segments. Differences
are instilled within the territorialized space.
Funding forms and templates make explicit the requirement
that an NGO position itself into a specialized segment, thereby
marking the distinctions among the NGOs themselves. By the 1990s
aid agencies encouraged the segmentation of international devel-
opment in Guatemala and El Salvador into programmatic (e.g. local
economic development, small business, infrastructure, health,
gender, the environment) and geographic sectors (e.g. regions,
provinces, cities). Governments and aid agencies emphasized
managing for results and setting long-term targets for NGOs by
requiring the development of strategic plans, which required them
to define and focus on their areas of specialization.
For a project designer in an El Salvadorian NGO, making their area
of specialization explicit to the agencies means: “We cannot, for
example, ask an agency to finance a water project. We do not have the
ability to implement these types of projects.” Similarly, the director
and project manager at an international NGO with offices in El Sal-
vador noted: “Our funder (a bilateral agency) asks us to specialize in a
determined sector. That is what they promote. If you construct
houses, then only ask to finance houses. And with that there is a loss
of organizational diversity.” For the director of a Guatemalan asso-
ciation of development organizations, the effect of this segmentation
is that: “There is no longer an integration of the different develop-
ment processes in a holistic manner. The one that specializes in
micro-credit does not have time to chat with those working in agri-
culture or in education.” In other words, organizations are arranged
according to specializations.18 These distinctions are managed ac-
cording to expertise, affecting the assemblage’s “organizational
18
We do not want to give the impression that organizations rigidly adhere to the
segments. Some NGOs adapt to shifting agency priorities by changing their area of
specialization.
14 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
diversity” and the type of “integration” needed to execute more
“holistic” development projects. Antonio’s social movement, one in
which “We were all engaged in the same movement” has been
segmented into arrangements based on specialization.
To summarize, components of the war-era social movement
have been enrolled into the emerging international development
assemblage. This enrolment is made possible through shifts in the
notion of accountability: From trust and solidarity to an increas-
ingly formalized administrative code, where, as Power (1997) ob-
serves, different conceptions of trust are produced through
procedures, expertise, and calculations. To operationalize the
enrolment, legal-administrative requirements and accounting and
project management technologies are introduced. These territori-
alize the field and code organizations, thereby giving the emerging
assemblage its content. Our analysis indicates how the agencies’
legal and administrative requirements establish boundaries around
the emerging assemblage, thereby filtering the components that
can gain entryda space of tolerated variations is formed. Compo-
nents are also exposed to legal and project administrative re-
quirements that make them coherent (in organizational form and
mode of development intervention) while also differentiated along
geographic and technical areas of specializationdthereby “orga-
nizing differences according to a hierarchical scale” (Braidotti, 2011,
p. 28).19 The organizational and aspirational components of this
social movement are confronted with a scenario where they either
adapt to the new assemblage’s territory and code or are relegated to
the “outside.” Becoming external is central to the process of
disarticulation. In the following section we discuss how this is
intensified as relations among these territorialized and coded
components are unified, giving the assemblage its expression.
5. Overcoding: regulating relations and reinforcing
boundaries
Relations among the territorialized and coded components are
established and cemented together through overcoding, discour-
aging connections with anything beyond the territorial boundaries.
The disarticulating effects of administrative requirements are made
more apparent at this stage. We show this by emphasizing, first,
how overwhelming NGOs with administrative requirements directs
their attention toward a hierarchical relationship of accountability
with funding agencies. While this is extensively discussed in the
literature on government reforms and NGOs (Oakes, Townley, &
Cooper, 1998; O’Dwyer & Unerman, 2008), we stress how it un-
dermines the capacity to get involved in other relations. Second, we
highlight that requiring specific forms of documentation enables
connections with organizations able to produce “proper” records,
while preventing others. Third, we show that changing financial
flows alters the funding landscape, encouraging competition and
financially motivated relations among NGOs and increasing their
proximity to their local governments. These accountability and
financial requirements reinforce the territorializing and coding
processes and enable relations that give the international devel-
opment assemblage its expression, whereby a whole emerges and
exerts a conduct on its partsda conduct that restricts NGOs’ rela-
tion to the social movement.
19
While similar to Hwang and Powell’s argument that: “foundations are playing a
critical role as carriers of modernity in the non-profits field, rendering a hetero-
geneous mix of organizations more similar” (2009, 293), our emphasis is to show
the way similarities are accumulated and differences are enabled and managed as
an integral part of a larger process of constituting this particular type of assem-
blage. Both similarity and difference are regulated (for more on difference amongst
repetition or variation amongst stability see Deleuze (1994) and Aroles & McLean
(2016)).
5.1. The administratively inundated NGO
Much of an NGO’s operations depend on international funding
and on providing “proper” accounts. Increases in funding re-
quirements have had the effect of requiring NGOs to allocate more
resources (such as time and money) to meet them. This has been
intensified as timeframes have been shortened,20 requiring more
project submissions. Resources are spent submitting proposals
more often while demanding the organization to simultaneously
manage more projects. When asked to what extent they formulate
projects, the director of an international NGO in El Salvador com-
mented: “24 h a day, 365 days a year. This is a project factory.” This
sentiment was also expressed by the director of an El Salvadorian
NGO that provides education services:
We are investing a lot more time formulating projects. We now
submit 20 to 30 per cent more proposals. Also, the proposal is
more demanding, from the design to other administrative re-
quirements … today an agency sends you a list of 25 different
annexes to be included in the proposal.
This is not restricted to the application process. More elaborate
proposals also mean that aid agencies require more elaborate
interim monitoring and final evaluation reports. It is becoming
commonplace for the budgets included in the proposal to include a
detailed cost breakdown of the project’s activities21 and these must
be periodically reported according to a funding agency’s results and
timeframe.
These administrative requirements have the effect of directing
NGOs’ attention toward their relation of accountability with fund-
ing agencies rather than making connections with developmental
and political issues associated with their grassroots activism. The
project coordinator at one Guatemalan NGO commented:
International agencies have forced us into all of that [adminis-
trative work]. So the work we did with advocacy, activism, I’ve
had to put that aside and be dedicated to better accountability.
Look, for a project, 75% goes into administrative work.
While requirements encourage a focus on administrative and
financial accountability to funders (O’Dwyer & Unerman, 2008),
they leave the impression that “advocacy, activism” are beyond the
boundaries of international development.
Overwhelming NGOs and directing their connections towards
funders reinforces the territorializing and coding effects of re-
quirements. Handling a set of standardized templates and pro-
cedures requires a considerable amount of resources and discipline,
which further discourages NGOs from exploring other forms of
political interventions. This is similar to Oakes et al.’s (1998) anal-
ysis of how the introduction of business plans in publicly funded
organizations increases the time managers allocated to revenue-
generating activities, undermining the organizations’ social and
cultural capitals (see also, Ebrahim, 2002).
5.2. Changes in record requirements
While overwhelming NGOs with requirements directs their
20
According to the director of an El Salvadorian NGO: “There were agencies that
approved projects for six or even ten years. … Now the agencies are saying they are
not committing funds to projects over two years.”
21
For instance, project activities previously might include a budget line of $100
for promotional t-shirts. Now, budgets require specifying the number of t-shirts to
be purchased (for example, 50 t-shirts at $2 each).
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
gaze towards funders’ accountability requirements, seemingly
mundane records such as invoices and receipts carve “fixed paths”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 387) that regulate relations among
organizations and reinforce the assemblage’s administrative
boundaries. In what follows we analyze how the requirement to
produce inscriptions discourages certain types of financial trans-
actions. It also encourages community associations to formalize in
order to provide services and proper receipts to NGOs.
Invoices and receipts inscribe financial transactions and are an
important part of NGOs’ accountability practices and reports. These
documents are bound by various rules: some funders require them
in a certain order and with particular seals, some accept photo-
copies while others want originals, some accept till/cash receipts
while others require more formalized receipts, which include tax
identification numbers.22
The requirement for invoices and receipts also enables and
blocks financial transactions that have direct implications on who
can participate and on connections within the international
development assemblage.23 For instance, the requirement has
discouraged connections with organizations that cannot meet the
evidential criteria. NGOs often contract small businesses outside of
the community to provide a service that they would prefer to be
done by the community where the intervention is taking place. For
example, the youth activist organization mentioned previously
points out “we work in communities where people cannot usually
provide them [documents].” The youth organization is also not able
to provide their services to allied local development NGOs that
receive aid monies because they cannot provide formalized
receipts.
An El Salvadorian civil servant whose office received interna-
tional funding for a local community project noted that the
requirement for proper invoices and receipts is frustrating because
it discourages community members from organizing and building
their own community hall. For him an effect is that “the objective of
having the community being involved in its own development is
lost in red tape.” Another interviewee, from an international NGO in
Guatemala, similarly suggested that the development potential of a
construction project was not achieved: “It could have been con-
structed using people from the community. Using a private com-
pany promoted the construction of roofs, but not community
development. I am interested in forty community members
partaking and learning so that they can have sources of income.”
The quotes illustrate that the requirement for particular types of
documentation discourages grassroots and community organiza-
tions from intervening around the project, or at least alters their
type of involvement. These inscriptions do, however, create an
administrative space that facilitates cooperation with organiza-
tions, such as businesses, who are able to provide proper invoices
and receipts (further discussed in the following section).
Documentation, such as receipts and invoices, help systematize
connections among administratively consistent organizations
(NGOs, business, the state), while restricting financial connections
with organizations that do not meet the requirements (i.e. grass-
roots social movement organizations). This sort of criteria for
“proper” financial records serves to identify the international
development assemblage’s boundaries and strengthens the finan-
cial ties among organizations in the assemblage. It also, however,
22
The emphasis on invoices and receipts is linked to government initiatives to
regulate the informal economy. As the state formalizes the economy, international
agencies are better able to enforce stricter receipt and invoicing policies since more
businesses are able to provide proper documentations for transactions with NGOs.
23
The role of paper trails in enabling and discourages certain forms of account-
ability (especially combating or facilitating fraud) is discussed in Neu et al. (2013).
15
serves to exclude organizations that do not meet the requirements.
5.3. Changes in funding flows
Changes in funding flows since the 2000s have also altered re-
lations among the assemblage’s components through changes in
international agencies’ funding priorities in Guatemala and El Sal-
vador and through the shift to direct government support whereby
aid is provided to governments for them to disburse. These changes
had an impact on organizations’ financial and political connections.
That is, they increased both financial uncertainty and competition
and alliances among NGOs; they also prompted financial exchanges
between NGOs and governments, which jeopardized the former’s
autonomy.
NGOs have been affected by the reduction of funds entering the
region (see Appendix B).24 A Guatemalan NGO that works in the
area of human rights witnessed a significant reduction of staff from
20 to 4. Reductions have increased tensions among NGOs and
increased competition among them. For the director of one NGO:
“There are fewer resources from international agencies and
increasingly the project approval process is more competitive.”
Competition has also intensified as international NGOs register and
set up offices in the region, effectively competing with local NGOs
for the same pool of resources (see also Agg, 2006). The project
coordinator for a Guatemalan NGO referred to relations among
NGOs as increasingly “protective” and “territorial” given the
competition. Reduced financial resources enable a certain expres-
sion to emerge: the assemblage is developing a technical-
administrative and competitive identity that instils a competitive
dynamic among the assemblage’s content.
International agencies have encouraged the formation of “con-
sortiums,” alliances among project-implementing organizations.
While a means for NGOs to work together toward a common goal,
these have been criticized as alliances mainly based on accessing
funds. A project technician for a Guatemalan rural development
NGO observed:
Often organizations form consortiums and remain divided as
they execute the same project. There is the “if we unite we have
funds” mentality among some organizations and we think that
it should not be only about accessing resources. As an organi-
zation we have to ask ourselves: “What common vision do we
have with the others?” Because we have learned from this
experience that if each organization is doing its own thing, the
consortium does not work. The agencies are making it quite
clear though: “there are no funds unless you unite as a
consortium.”
Her comments not only reveal a cautious stance towards these
funding opportunities and the fragility of some of the alliances, but
also the opportunistic approach to access funds. Some consortiums
do create fruitful connections among organizations (including for-
profit enterprises) that were “once not part of our group of
allies.” But, as the project coordinator for a Guatemalan NGO noted,
NGOs with different political backgrounds and relations to com-
munities are grouped together in these “unnatural alliances …
forced by the funding agencies.” Political and historical differences
24
This reduction may be explained by changes in funders’ development priorities.
For example, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
no longer includes Guatemala and El Salvador as priorities. Another explanation
may be related to the financial crisis: “This decline represented nearly USD 2.3
billion in real terms and mostly affected countries in Central America” (OECD,
2012).
16 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
(for instance, based on NGOs’ historical affiliation with guerrilla
organizations during the war) are administratively overcoded
through consortiums. For the project coordinator, consortiums
oblige these organizations:
To sit at the same table, and that gets complicated in our com-
munity [of organizations]. We have had a similar trajectory, but
we are connected in different ways. One connection is with the
revolutionary organization that one belonged to during the war.
This type of connection has had its own segmenting effects.
NGOs with historical linkages to revolutionary groups would still
find themselves, on occasion, operating along the rebel groups’
historical geographic areas:
That happened a lot when we worked in the northern region of
the country, which was a FAR (in English: Rebel Armed Forces)
area, and there were many [NGOs] with historical connections
to them that worked there. But we were an organization that
belonged to the ORPA (Revolutionary Organization of the People
in Arms). We would get asked in the North: “What are you doing
here? ORPA operates in between the highlands and the coast.”
For her, consortiums put these NGOs “at the same table,” over-
coding some of the historical guerrilla affiliations that existed
among organizations. Disarticulation in this regard is also about
subsuming relations that date back to the war by superimposing
technical and administrative codes.
Financial uncertainty has been created through funding
agencies that provide direct support to the Guatemalan and El
Salvadorian governments. NGOs send proposals to government
offices that manage the funds. Although this is intended to
strengthen the state, there have also been concerns about the
implication of working for the government. For a Guatemalan NGO
project coordinator:
The agencies are now telling us: “We are strengthening your
government through budgetary support.” So they tell us to go to
the government ministry responsible for those projects and we
end up being subcontracted by them … we become employees
of the government. Our role as autonomous organizations
disappears.
The budgetary support approach situates the NGO closer to local
components of the state it once directly resisted during the war.
The feeling of working “for the state” is especially disconcerting for
NGOs with a connection to the social movement’s political struggle
in the war.25
In this section we analyzed the way accountability requirements
and changes in funding flows cement relations among the assem-
blage’s components. We have identified three interrelated ways in
which these overcoding processes seem to happen: Inundating
NGOs in administrative work, requiring organizations to “properly”
inscribe transactions, and changing funding flows. Whereas terri-
torialization and coding creates assemblage-level boundaries and
alters the organization’s form and interventions through legal and
project management and accounting technologies, these over-
coding processes reinforce the territorial boundaries by encour-
aging the newly included content to direct their accountability
25
An administrator for a Guatemalan NGO investigating human rights violations
during the war expressed concern about submitting proposals to the government
because the NGO is preparing court cases against officials and military personnel
that continue to have close linkages with the government.
relations within such boundaries by administratively over-
whelming and regulating financial flows. Social movement prac-
tices are discouraged within the international development
assemblage, as are connections to social movement organizations
that now lie outside it. Intervening in the assemblage’s content also
results in the contents’ (political and even historical) expression
being subsumed, and disarticulated, by the assemblage’s own
emerging expressiondit conveys a conduct to its component parts,
one that is increasingly competitive and financially motivated.
6. Discussion and conclusion
The starting motivation for this study has been to empirically
and conceptually examine a concern voiced by some of our in-
terviewees over the way funding agencies’ accountability re-
quirements are implicated in disarticulating the social justice
movement in Guatemala and El Salvador. As we embarked on this
study we learned that there was an important history being
mobilized among interviewees whose experiences with interna-
tional development date back to the war. We represent this col-
lective history through Antonio. His narrative portrays the social
movement as a historically specific assemblage with unclear
boundaries: As a dynamic and heterogeneous composition of
organizational forms, modes of intervention, and politically
informed commitments and accountability relations that at one
time co-existed with their funders’ own aspirations. This compo-
sition, though, is intervened and segmented. Funding agencies’
accountability requirements, which include a host of project
management, legal, and financial devices, intervene in specific
ways to create boundaries and compose international development
out of the social movement’s components by altering their form,
mode of intervention, and their financial and political relations.
Our analysis shows how a governable space is constituted out of
another. We describe how a boundary is created that allows se-
lective inclusion into this space by organizations able and willing to
comply with requirements. By taking this “leap” into the new ter-
ritory, previously non-formalized grassroots organizations are
transformed into NGOs with a “proper” governance structure and
project management expertise in a particular geographic and pro-
grammatic area of specialization. The formation of a territorialized
and coded content then enables the regulation of their relations,
which is done by administratively overwhelming, requiring the
provision of invoices and receipts, and changing the flow of funds
into the region. To study disarticulation, is to study how a space of
operation is created out of the components of another that is now
exterior.
Disarticulation, though, is also about regulating the aspiration to
forge connections to this exterior by directing this force towards
funders’ developmental goals. As we learned from Antonio, the
desire to “promote social change” based on an accountability of
“solidary and trust” still finds its way into current international
development discussions. This aspiration acts “as a creative force
that gives the ‘wretched of the earth,’ as Fanon put it, a head start
toward the world-historical task of envisaging alternative world
orders and more humane and sustainable social systems”
(Braidotti, 2011, p. 32). But “memories need imagination to
empower the actualization of virtual possibilities in the subject”
(Braidotti, 2011, p. 236). Imagination and experimentation, borne
out of necessity in the social movement during the war, however,
are confined within the legal, accounting, and administrative
boundaries of the international development assemblage. The
point is that these boundary-making accountability requirements
disarticulate the social movement by (a) altering its components
and their relations as they are plugged into another composition
and (b) channelling a force, the social movement’s political
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20
aspirations, into relations and goals that are technically and polit-
ically useful for the international development assemblage.
We are not suggesting that there are currently no social move-
ments in the region. Far from it (see Granovsky-Larsen, 2013). But
as the quotes by the two community organizers in the introduction
and Antonio’s narrative at the beginning of the article suggest, a
historically specific social movement has been disarticulated. We
do not comment on the extent to which this is the case, but our
account joins others, such as Morales Lo
pez (2010), that write: the
“disarticulation of the Central American social movement with the
characteristics of the previous decades, […] left a vacuum tempo-
rarily occupied by non-governmental organizations” (103, own
translation).26
What the preceding shows is how accountability requirements
bring both account givers and the assemblage in which they
operate “into being” as the international development assemblage
(Woolgar & Neyland, 2013, p. 58), but also how these requirements
restrict the social movement that made it out of the war from
operating, by disarticulating it. This has broad implications for the
study of how fields of governance are assembled.
The governmentality-inspired literature has mainly focussed on
how a complex of rationales and practices and a field of actors are
constituted (Miller, 1990; Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Neu et al., 2006;
Rahaman et al., 2010). Miller (1990) shows “how changes in the
constitutive components of one complex make possible the emer-
gence, articulation or transformation of the other” (316). This
observation prompted our microanalysis of how this dynamic is
articulated and experienced by actors in the field. The international
development and social movement assemblages are intersecting
and mutually constitutive. But by using a set of related concepts we
can explain how these once overlapping complexes are differenti-
ated and the accountability-driven processes through which one
assemblage gives way to another.
Processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding demon-
strate how accountability is implicated in making a heterogeneous
mix of organizations administratively consistent as proper content,
through the formulation of territorial boundaries and the coding of
organizations’ form and their modes of development intervention.
The contents’ relations to one another are then regulated, cemen-
ted to form a unity, giving the assemblage an expressiondone
where the aggregate’s emerging identity (of dependence, compe-
tition, and financially-motivated and administratively-mediated
linkages) overcodes the contents’ political and historical expres-
sion. These processes, like the package of accountability re-
quirements, overlap, alter, and reinforce each other (i.e., overcoding
reinforces territorial boundaries). The significance is that these
processes enable us to study the way assemblages intersect with
one another. Specifically, how a governable assemblage comes into
being by subsuming parts from another and how relations between
the two are regulated.
In analyzing these assemblages, we learn that heterogeneous
grassroots organizations become project-implementing NGOs. In
so doing, we compliment organizational level studies on the effects
of funder requirements on NGOs and their beneficiaries (O’Dwyer &
Unerman, 2008; O’Leary, 2016) by examining how requirements
alter not just organizations but also the field in which they operate.
This resonates with accountability studies which focus either on
the construction of the organization as an accountable self
(Messner, 2009; Roberts, 1991) or the construction of a broader
“accountability regime” (Mehrpouya, 2015); we, in contrast,
26
pez & B

For the specific case of Guatemala see Morales Lo a Tiul (2009). For other
accounts of disarticulation through the “NGOization” of social movements see
Alvarez (2009) and Roy (2004).
17
propose that these are interrelated by documenting how making
the organization accountable as project implementing NGO is part
of bringing the new governable assemblage of international
development into being. Importantly, while these studies have
analyzed a process of construction, for us, accountability is as much
about disarticulation as it is about construction.
The disarticulating aspect of accountability helps us address
calls for studies on how funding agencies’ funding and account-
ability requirements affect NGOs’ mission (O’Dwyer & Unerman,
2008) and how NGO’s “involvement in advocacy, political mobili-
zation or community engagement is dampened by widespread
adoption of evaluative metrics” (Hwang & Powell, 2009, p. 293). We
show how conditions are created where NGOs’ emancipatory as-
pirations and their objective of working with communities and
other components of the social movement are regulated. This ex-
tends other work critiquing how NGOs and grassroots organiza-
tions are “too close for comfort” with aid agencies, undermining
their innovativeness, flexibility, legitimacy, and accountability to
broader stakeholders (Edwards & Hulme, 1996; Ebrahim, 2005;
Mitlin, Hickey, & Bebbington, 2007). This also develops Alvarez’s
(1999) thesis that it has become increasingly more difficult for
NGOs to operate in both international development and the social
movement. We posit that these challenges are part of larger pro-
cesses, and as such, the effects are not restricted to international
development NGOs but also the social movement. This again shows
the benefit of examining assemblages in relation to one another; of
tracing where components parts come from, where they are going
to, and what are the effects of doing so.27
The project coordinator for an international funding agency,
reflecting on over 30 years of work in the region, noted:
The social movement’s capacity for autonomy in its finances and
directives has been lost. The project and the NGO has consumed
them and I think all of us involved in this have to assume that
responsibility and find a way to provide support without
inserting them in such dynamics.
While far from a rosy picture, the reflection provides inspiration
for this study and can do so for future studies. One question it elicits
is: what type of “support” can be provided to the social movement-
inspired organizations that are inserted in the international
development assemblage?
Although at some cost, plugging into the international devel-
opment assemblage has provided grassroots social movement or-
ganizations with the financial, political, and administrative
resources to continue some version of their work. Some of these
organizations develop strategies to contest these accountability
requirements and actualize their aspiration for social change. Li
(2007, 264) notes that there is acknowledgement that the expan-
sion of governance is met with contestation and division (e.g. Rose,
1999, p. 51), and yet there has been little attempt to explore how
contestation is manifested. And, while the focus of this study was
mainly on the way funding and accountability requirements
constitute international development out of social movement
components, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at how the
social justice movement operates. That is, to what extent and how
are management and accounting devices implicated in social
movement assemblages “composed of innumerable elements that
remain different, one from the other, and yet communicate,
27
We suspect that our findings detailing international development’s relation to
the social movement are not restricted to international development in El Salvador
and Guatemala since state funding agency requirements are adapted by NGOs
seeking financial support throughout the developing world..
18 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20

collaborate, and act in common” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 140)? This
would also offer a space for studies on the construction and oper-
ation of other forms of accountability that contest neo-liberal ver-
sions (Kamuf, 2007; McKernan & McPhail, 2012).
Acknowledgements
Este estudio fue posible gracias a las personas en Guatemala y El
Salvador que compartieron conmigo sus experiencias. Les agra-
dezco su generosidad, paciencia, e intere
s. This paper benefited
from comments by Afshin Mehrpouya, Simon Granovsky-Larsen,
Keith Robson, Jeremy Morales, Eija Vinnari, Kari Lukka, Darlene
Himick, Sebastian Becker, and the participants at the 2012 AOS
workshop on Accounting, Non-governmental Organizations and
Civil Society, the 2014 Critical Perspectives on Accounting Confer-
ence, the 2015 EIASM New Directions in Management Accounting
conference, and those at seminars at the Universities of Saskatch-
ewan, Canada, and Turku, Finland. We would like to give special
thanks to the editors and the reviewers for their suggestions and
guidance. This study was financed by the Social Science and Hu-
manities Research Council (SSHRC) grant number 410-2010-0379.
Appendix A. List of interviews conducted 2010-11

Domestic organizations

# Organization-type Persons interviewed Trip # Interview #

NGOs
1 Popular education SV Executive director 1 1, 40
2 Rural development SV Executive director/project planner 1,2 2, 44
Accountant 1 13
3 Urban development SV Project designer /technician 1 4
Administrator 1 5
4 Women’s/feminist SV Project designer/coordinator 1 6
5 Administrative support SV Executive director 1 7
6 Rural development SV Accountant 1 9
Regional manager 1 11
Regional administrator/accountant 1,2 15, 41
7 Popular education SV Accountant 1 12
Project coordinator/designer/technician 2 43
8 Women/feminist SV Project/programme coordinator/technician 1 16
9 Under process of incorporation GT Director/manager 1 18
10 Democratic governance GT Executive director 1 21
11 Rural development GT Project coordinator 1 22
Accountant/administrator 1 23
12 Human rights GT Administrator 1 26
13 Campesino rural GT Project technician 1 27
14 NGO coordination/support GT Project coordinator 1,2 30, 58
15 Youth and arts GT Director/manager 1 31
16 Democratic governance GT Director 1 32
17 Women/feminist GT Founder/director 1 36
18 Displaced communities GT Senior manager 1,2 35, 53
19 NGO coordination/support GT Director 1,2 37, 52
20 Ecology/Agriculture GT Manager 1 55

Non-incorporated organizations
1 Human rights/youth GT Community organizer 1 25
2 Human rights/campesino GT Community organizer 2 62

Municipal government
1 International development office SV Manager 1 10
2 Arts and culture SV Manager 1 14

Consultants
1 Consulting firm GT Junior consultant 1 20
2 Independent consultant GT Senior consultant 1 24, 27
3 Consulting firm GT Senior consultant 2 50
4 Independent consultant GT Senior consultant 2 57

International Organizations

# Headquarters Person interviewed Trip # Interview #

International NGOs
1 Europe SV Director and project manager 1,2 3, 39
2 Europe SV Accountant/ administrator 1 17
3 North America GT Managers 1 19
4 Europe GT Project coordinator 1,2 36, 61
5 North America SV Director 2 47
6 Europe GT Programme manager (evaluation) 2 54
7 Europe GT Administrator 2 56
8 North America GT Director 2 59

International funding agencies

1 European bilateral agency SV Project coordinator 1 8
 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20 19

(continued )

Domestic organizations

# Organization-type Persons interviewed Trip # Interview #

Project administrator 2 42
2 European bilateral agency GT Executive director 1 29
3 European bilateral agency GT Project coordinator 1 33
4 North American bilateral agency GT Director 2 38
5 European bilateral agency SV Project coordinator 2 45
6 Multilateral agency SV Programme coordinator 2 46
7 Multilateral agency GT Monitoring & evaluation specialist 2 48
8 North American bilateral agency GT Senior manager 2 49
9 Multilateral agency GT Technician 2 51
10 Multilateral agency GT Programme manager 2 60

Appendix B. Changes in international funding in the region

Fig. 1. International Funding to Support National NGOs: Guatemala.

Source: AidData.org using data from the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System. The chart is based on a total of 100 projects from 15 funding organizations for a total of $24.5 million
from 1995 to 2011.

Fig. 2. International Funding to Support National NGOs: El Salvador.

Source: AidData.org using data from the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System. The chart is based on a total of 62 projects from 11 funding organizations for a total of $16.7 million from
1995 to 2009.
20 D.E. Martinez, D.J. Cooper / Accounting, Organizations and Society 63 (2017) 6e20

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