The Role of Fairness Concerns in Social Protection and Poverty Reduction
Ben D’Exelle and Tom De Herdt
Institute of Development Policy and Management - University of Antwerp (Belgium)
DRAFT VERSION
Abstract
When studying how to enhance social protection or to reduce chronic poverty, fairness concerns come
into the picture. However, there is often little consensus on what fairness means. Both policymakers and
the potential beneficiaries might have different notions of fairness. Cognitive aspects of fairness
undoubtedly influence individual behaviour, human interaction and thus also the outcome of initiatives of
social protection and chronic poverty reduction. This might result into unwanted and unforeseen
behaviour by one of both parties or even into open conflicts. What actions policymakers should take to
deal with this problem is not obvious. Fairness notions are not only important within the game played
with external actors. They are also important in other games local people participate in, but external
actors do not. The latter games, however, might substantially influence the decision making of local
people in the interaction game they play with external actors. This means that external actors should look
for information on these other locally important games. Information on these other important games,
however, is often only partially accessible. The power relation that any initiative of social protection or
poverty reduction smuggles in tends often to create a gap between a public and a hidden ‘transcript’ of
local people. Moreover, cultural distance between external actors and local people is often so large that it
becomes very difficult for external actors to identify and understand these other locally important games.
We will use two case studies to illustrate our findings, respectively for a social protection and a poverty
reduction initiative. A first case study illustrates the influence of fairness issues on local (auto)-exclusion
of a humanitarian aid programme in urban R.D. Congo. A second case study studies a micro credit
programme in rural Nicaragua that wants to construct sustained credit relations with local people.
Paper to be presented at the “Social Protection Conference”
(23-24 February 2005)
Institute for Development Policy and Management, Manchester
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1. Introduction
The question as to how (scarce) goods should be allocated among a heterogeneous pool of
people is at the core of the design of social protection and chronic poverty reduction initiatives.
But this question is intricately, albeit not often explicitly, related to a certain vision of fairness.
Moreover, we can expect that fairness concerns do not only play a role in the deliberations of
policymakers but also in the decision making of other actors involved: the ‘experts’ delivering
a particular service or distributing the goods, for example, not to mention the beneficiaries
themselves. The latter will take a different position vis-à-vis external actors depending on
whether they consider their own predicament as ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ – whether they blame
themselves or others of their current situation – but often irrespective of the opinion of external
actors whether they ‘deserve’ or not to be helped. The effectiveness of externally designed
social protection systems or poverty reduction initiatives depends, then, on the way in which
these are able to tune into pre-existing and evolving local structures (Bastiaensen and D’Exelle,
2002; Khwaja, 2000; Klitgaard, 1994) and accompanying visions on fairness.
To construct a theoretical framework that may help to reflect on these issues, we start with a
short review of the experimental literature on fairness, which has made interesting
contributions to the study of human interaction and its relation with the cognitive aspects of
fairness. Then, we propose three important shortcomings of this literature. First, the
experimental literature being focused on ‘proving’ the existence of fairness concerns in
addition to self-interested motivations, it almost exclusively analyses situations with a unique
fairness norm. Many real-life situations do however suggest the relevance of situations
characterised by a set of different fairness norms. When there are many different criteria to
assess fairness, it is not surprising that there is often little consensus on what is fair. In casu, the
presence of a mismatch of fairness notions among local people and between local and external
people is the rule rather than the exception. Second, most structured bargaining experiments in
the experimental literature limit themselves to a set of discrete choices within a pre-specified
game, whereas, in reality, people may also opt out of the game itself or challenge some of its
rules – an option which must of course be ruled out per definition in a well-controlled
laboratory setting. Third, in classical game approaches only one game is studied, without
paying attention to how the outcome of one game might affect another game. In reality people
participate in an ‘ecology of games’ (Norton Long, 1958; Cornwell et al., 2003), a set of nested
(partly overlapping) games that are played simultaneously by a changing pool of players. The
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outcome in one game might affect the decision-making in another game. It will be argued that
by analysing games in a ceteris-paribus way, one runs the risk to miss some essential aspects of
the concatenation of games played and simultaneously re-negotiated in the process of social
protection and poverty alleviation.
Taking account of these theoretical extensions, it becomes clear that to tune into local
structures and fairness notions is a cumbersome task for external actors. First, external actors
do not have complete information on all the evolving games in which local people are engaged.
These games can however affect the decision-making of local actors in the game they play with
the external actors. Second, even if external actors explicitly look for knowledge on these other
games local people play and how they interact with each other, there will often be some games
that are difficult to identify or to understand. Cultural distance between external actors and
local people is often so large that it becomes very difficult for external actors to ‘read’ the local
ecology. Moreover, the power relation that any initiative of social protection or poverty
reduction smuggles in often creates a gap between a public and a hidden ‘transcript’ of local
people. This tension between public and hidden transcripts can suddenly come to the surface
and erupt into open conflict. It is therefore important to identify these tensions at the earliest
possible stage. This means that external actors should continuously give attention to signs of
possible incongruity. Studying past interactions with other actors or in others settings can be
extremely helpful for this.
After this conceptual reflection, we present two case studies to illustrate our findings. One
study focuses on social protection while the other focuses on poverty reduction. A major
challenge for social protection initiatives is how to reach the target group. For this we use a
case study that illustrates the influence on local (auto)-exclusion of the discrepancy between an
external fairness concept of a humanitarian aid programme in urban R.D. Congo and local
notions of fairness. For initiatives of poverty reduction how to establish sustained relations with
local people becomes an additional important challenge. To illustrate this we use a second case
study on a micro credit programme in rural Nicaragua. It focuses on the influence of differing
fairness notions on the capacity of the programme to construct and maintain sustained relations
with local people.
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2. Local fairness and individual decision making
When addressing social protection or chronic poverty reduction several ‘stakeholders’ may be
distinguished. Elster (1992: 139-143) for example distinguishes three standard levels of
decision making in allocation processes: First-order decisions are all decisions that influence
the total amount of goods that is to be allocated, which are mostly taken by political authorities.
Second-order decisions refer to how the resources have to be allocated; it is often experts who
take these decisions. Third-order decisions are taken by potential recipients to affect their need
or the probability of receiving the good. In this article we will study how the different levels of
decision making interact with each other and how this interaction influences the final outcome
of initiatives that aim at social protection or chronic poverty reduction.
At each of these levels decision-making is influenced by certain behavioural rules, of which
fairness is a very important one. Within their continuous interaction with other actors people
assess past and present actions on the basis of their personal standards of what they understand
as ‘fair behaviour’. This assessment influences their future decisions and thus how human
interaction and local structures evolve. The influence of fairness notions on human interactions
has been demonstrated by a growing experimental literature. Large part of this literature
consists of structured bargaining experiments, such as dictator and ultimatum games. In the
ultimatum game (Güth, Schmittberger and Schwarze, 1982) one player (the Proposer P)
receives a fixed amount of money that he has to distribute between himself and another player
(the Respondent R). R can accept or reject and when she rejects both players will not receive
anything. Experimental results typically show that average offers are around 30-40% of the
available amount and most P’s offer half of the available amount of money. At the same time,
most offers of less than 20% are rejected by R (Camerer and Thaler, 1995). P’s behaviour may
be interpreted in either of two ways: either she’s ordinary self-interested but she anticipates R’s
bent for a fair outcome, or she’s concerned with fairness herself. Eliminating the rejection
possibility R converts the game into a dictator game. This setting eliminates any strategic
considerations of P and as such singles out the other-regarding concerns of P. Also in most
dictator games a considerable amount of non-zero offers are made, although the offers are
significantly lower than in ultimatum games. Taking together the empirical evidence of dictator
and ultimatum games, the direct behavioural influence of both fairness considerations and
strategic anticipation of fairness considerations in issues of distribution is confirmed (Davis and
Holt, 1993).
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When considering the fairness of a certain situation people compare their individual situation
with the situation of other people. They seek a situation that is fair for both themselves and the
other. However, what a person considers as fair vis-à-vis the other party is not always
considered as fair by the other party itself. Notions of fairness can differ a lot between different
actors. In the remainder of this section we will study how locally differing notions of fairness
emerge and how they influence local interactions.
Within the literature, we find two ways to look at fairness as a determinant of human
interaction. First, people want to have fair outcomes in terms of a certain allocation criterion.
There are several allocation criteria that can be used to assess the fairness of the outcome of
resource distributions. Resources can be equally divided between all, they can be divided
according to the effort of each person (equity) or according to need.
Second, the features of the distributional process are also important when assessing fairness
(Camerer and Thaler, 1995; Camerer and Fehr, 2004). An important type of process-based
theories of fairness focuses on reciprocal fairness. This theory indicates that intentions that are
signalled by the other party during the process are very important for individual decisionmaking. There is ample evidence that people reciprocate good or bad intentions with
respectively kind or unkind actions (Bereby-Meyer and Niederle, in press; Andreoni et al.,
2002; Fehr and Gächter, 2000; Fehr and Schmidt, 2001; Rabin, 1993).
For each of these two general ways to look at fairness it is all but evident that people agree on
what should be fair in a specific situation. There are a lot of motives that people invoke to
justify an unequal distribution of economic resources or an unequal treatment. People have
different abilities and needs, different social relations and different information at their
disposal. It is these asymmetries created by local heterogeneity that lead to different co-existing
notions of fairness and kindness (Young, 1998). We briefly elaborate on two of these local
asymmetries: information and social distance.
With respect to information Sen (1970; 1999) explained that richer information increases our
ability to make social judgments. He gives the example of a division of a cake between three
persons and illustrates that the majority rule does not form a sufficient informational base. To
increase social justice, information is needed on poverty, income or assets inequality, how the
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pie is obtained and divided, etc. One thing is the aggregate amount of information used to judge
fairness. Another thing is the asymmetry in access to this information. Since information at the
individual level influences individual views on fairness, an unequal access to information
creates a situation wherein different views on fairness co-exist. It is especially interesting to
study the influence of this asymmetric information on the probability of agreement.
Asymmetric information is highly common in our research topic. Most agents do not have
much information on how many resources and under what conditions aid interventions channel
them neither how these resources are distributed, while a limited number of local powerful
agents do have full access to this information. Sometimes local people even do not know
whether external development programs are operating in their neighbourhood. They acquire
this type of information through their interaction with other people. Some experimental social
scientists have demonstrated the influence of asymmetric information on individual strategies
in ultimatum games. Straub and Murnighan (1995) have shown that when R does not know the
amount being divided in an ultimatum game, P offers less and R accepts less. When the size of
the pie is known, but R does not know the shares of the other R’s, P will offer less in an
ultimatum game (Güth and Van Damme, 1998).
Social distance between people is a second important source of local heterogeneity, which
influences individual fairness judgements. Several authors have demonstrated how social
distance influences other-regarding behaviour (Cason and Mui, 1998; Bohnet and Frey, 1999;
Hoffman et al., 1996). Hoffman et al. (1996: 654) defined social distance as “the degree of
reciprocity that subjects believe exists in a social interaction” and studied its influence on
dictator games. They manipulated the instructional language of the dictator game in order to
vary the dictator’s social distance with the experimenter and the recipients, and with it her
association of the experiment with her pre-laboratory reciprocity experience. The more the
instructional language resembles that experience the more the dictator will behave in
accordance with her reciprocity experience and so will be more other-regarding. We expect the
results of these laboratory experiments to apply also to the more realistic situation characterized
by differentiated degrees of reciprocity between local people, i.e. where reciprocity is not the
same towards each player.
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Besides these heterogeneity-based motives that people use to justify an unequal distribution of
economic resources or an unequal treatment, people also have a psychological self-serving bias
when interpreting their situation vis-à-vis the others (Babcock et al., 1995). People tend e.g. to
overestimate their contributions to household tasks and to underestimate the faults their
favourite soccer team commits against the other team (Babcock and Loewenstein, 1997). This
self-serving bias creates a heterogeneity ‘in the mind’ of people, even if a neutral third-party
would not observe any large form of heterogeneity. This self-serving bias increases the
probability of non-agreement, and the higher this self-serving bias the higher the probability of
non-agreement between both parties (Thompson and Loewenstein, 1992). At the same time
these authors show how the complexity of the negotiation process increases the occurrence of
self-serving assessments.
The presence of different notions of fairness is the rule rather than the exception. The existence
of locally different notions of fairness makes that people have different focal points – a concept
that was first introduced by Schelling (1960) more than four decades ago in bargaining
theories. It is a common hypothesis that in case of a multiplicity of focal points the probability
that the bargainers will fail to reach agreement increases (Roth, 1985; Young, 1998). Moreover,
when people face several several possible focal points, each related with a specific fairness
notion, the particular focal point people choose is oftentimes the one that privileges self-interest
(De Herdt, 2003a).
3. Hidden resistance: between acceptance and rejection
In the structured bargaining experiments only rejection and acceptance responses are allowed.
As we have seen in the previous section, in some of these time-bound experiments people are
not even allowed to react to the decisions of the other player. The dictator game for instance
does not give any opportunity to the respondent to react, in the sense of accepting or rejecting
the offer. The absence of a possibility to react, however, does not mean that people agree with
the resulting allocation. In reality people have always a set of options available to express his or
her disagreement. People might look for ways to react in other games (see next section on
nested games), or by means of more subtle actions. Scott (1990) describes several ways in
which people can respond in case they disagree with something they simply have to ‘accept’ in
a public game situation characterized by power differences. In addition to possible strategies of
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open rebellion (rejection) or accommodation (acceptance) people who disagree can resort to
strategies that enable them to cope with their disagreement in a more subtle way, so as not to
affect future interactions with the other party.
A first possibility is to express disagreement ‘offstage’, out of the sight of the public eye.
Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments where volunteers are asked to administer electric
shocks to subjects apparently in pain (Scott, 1990: 110) demonstrate in what way the presence
or absence of the experimenter may significantly alter the experimental results. The difference
between public action and offstage discourse depends on the severity of the power relations.
The larger the power differences the more the dominated will differentiate their behaviour ‘on’
and ‘off’ stage. Secondly, Scott emphasises the importance of the grey zone between hidden
and public transcripts: People may create a misleading appearance of acceptance but by
cheating and manipulation they try to change the rules of the game to their advantage.
Scott argues that hidden transcripts are the result of the ‘indignities’ faced by the weak.
(In)dignity as used by Scott is not so dissimilar from the concept of (un)fairness as we used it in
previous sections. These indignities are more than just the physical deprivation of material
goods:
“The very process of appropriation unavoidably entails systematic social relations of
subordination that impose indignities of one kind or another on the weak. These indignities
are the seedbed of the anger, indignation, frustration, and swallowed bile that nurture the
hidden transcript. … Resistance, then, originates not simply from material appropriation
but from the pattern of personal humiliations that characterize that exploitation.” (Scott,
1990: 111-12)
Sen (1995: 13; 1999: 136) makes a similar point when he describes the ability to appear in
public without shame as one of the important constituents of well being, in response to John
Rawls’ classification of ‘the social basis of self-respect’ as a primary good. Poverty is more
than material deprivation. It is clear that not only material resources but also restrictions on
one’s identity and humiliations imposed by the social environment are important in this respect.
Without doubt fairness is a concept that is often politically exploited. “Local societies are
involved in permanent, on-going discursive struggles and negotiation processes between local
actors and between local and external actors. This implies that the discursive shaping of
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‘realities’ is a major strategic device in this ongoing struggle” (De Herdt et al., 2004). Resorting
to fairness, then, provides often a strong argument within this discursive shaping of realities.
This brings us to a particular application of the self-serving bias on fairness perceptions. Neale
and Bazerman (1992: 162) state that:
“An individual’s selection of a particular allocation norm often reflects his or her relative
power in the negotiation. That is the selection of an allocation norm is often instrumentally
motivated - the individual will choose a particular norm that maximizes his or her portion
of the valued resource.”
This entails that in many cases the less disadvantaged look for some justification for their
relatively better living conditions. As Sen (1992: 107) indicates they need “the consciousness
that they have earned their good fortune, the right to happiness”.
The less privileged persons, on the other hand, are often not given the opportunity to express
their fairness judgements and to influence local distributive processes. They might consider
their situation as unfair, but their opinion is often not taken into account. In some cases even if
they were given the opportunity to express their discontent with the current situation, they
would refuse to do so because of lack of self-confidence or because of fear to openly enter in
conflict, which could make them worse off (Scott, 1990).
It is important to acknowledge, however, that ‘hidden’ transcripts can be conceived as some
kind of safety valve, a safe place where the subordinates can express their disagreement, which
would then release the energy they could have invested in opposing the dominant. Scott sees
hidden transcripts instead as social spaces ‘already liberated’ from the dominant party’s
surveillance, and therefore as a basic infrastructure for further contestation. Therefore, the
appearance of public agreement might in many cases be a misleading one, preventing us from
looking at and studying more hidden contradictions. For external actors who want to enhance
social protection or poverty reduction the timely identification of these contradictions is
important before they become open conflicts, which are then difficult and costly to remedy.
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4. Interdependence of decision-making within nested games
A final theoretical adjustment to the classical game-theoretic approach refers to the interaction
between different but interdependent games. In classical game approaches and also in most
experiments only one game is studied. Little attention is paid to how the outcome of one game
might affect decision making in another game. In reality, however, people participate in a set of
nested (partly overlapping) games that are played by a changing pool of players. Referring to
such a setting Norton Long stated already in 1958 “people occupy many social positions during
their lives, and therefore find themselves faced with a variety of responsibilities on a daily
basis” (Cornwell et al., 2003: 122).
We distinguish two ways by which the outcome in one game might affect decision-making in
another game. First, different games might be played between the same players. When the
same players are confronted with each other in different games, the outcome in one game might
influence the decision-making in another game. Retaliation, reputation or learning effects might
substantially influence individual decision-making. For instance, people who cannot openly
show their disagreement with respect to the outcome in one game and have to rely to a more
hidden transcript might take this into account in other games where disapproval is less
offending. Another example refers to the ‘social distance effect’ (see above) between two
players. Social distance is the result of previous interactions with each other. People prefer to
interact with people they have had a satisfying interaction with before. People who have
frequent face-to-face contacts tend to consolidate their relations by extending them towards
other areas, so that these attain a more multi-stranded character. At the same time this increases
their capacity to act collectively in different domains as it increases the cost of giving up these
relations (Uphoff, 1993; Abraham and Platteau, 2001). The flip-side of this is that people
cannot simply change their social networks at will, and therefore, multi-stranded relationships
can also be instruments to take hostages, causing a lot of frustration to be ‘swept under the
carpet’ and to feed gossip practices (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 1998).
Second, the same game might be played between different actors. The interaction between two
people might affect the decision-making of a third person. Multilateral reputation mechanisms
or indirect reciprocity mechanisms, for instance, are based on this mechanism. These
mechanisms are considered to be very important means of social influence in the context of
fairness notions. They form a third way by which fairness considerations influence individual
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decision-making, besides those revealed by dictator and ultimatum games. By this mechanism a
person A who undertakes an action that affects a person B, takes consideration of the
(un)fairness of previous actions of B towards another person C (Kahneman et al., 1986). This
makes that what an individual decides affects his or her social status and with it the future
actions of other actors that affect his or her situation. Nowak and Sigmund (1998) have given
theoretical support for this mechanism, for which Seinen and Schram (2000) have provided
experimental evidence afterwards. It is clear that indirect reciprocity only influences individual
decision-making to the level that information is available on previous interactions between
other players and thus the social status of other persons. As we have seen before, in reality
people do not have full information. As it is social networks that transmit information, the
influence of social status is bounded by social networks. It is these mechanisms that are central
to the evolution of moral systems. Social status and indirect reciprocity are important driving
forces for the evolution of local norms (Alexander, 1987). This brings us to the observation that
although individuals can have substantially different notions of fairness, there can be some
groups of interacting people for which there exists certain mutual understanding on what is
considered as fair. Moreover, as social distance is lower within these groups the generosity
towards the other members of the group will be higher than vis-à-vis non-members.
5. Case-studies
After this conceptual reflection, we present two case studies to illustrate our findings. A first
case study illustrates the influence on local (auto)-exclusion of the discrepancy between an
external fairness concept of a humanitarian aid programme in urban R.D. Congo and local
notions of fairness. A second case study focuses on the influence of differing fairness notions
on the capacity of a micro credit programme in rural Nicaragua to construct and maintain
sustained relations with local people.
5.1. Inclusion and exclusion: a Food Emergency Program in Kinshasa
In the wake of the 1991 plundering of Kinshasa, the Belgian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF) started up a Food Emergency Programme in the capital, thereby making apt use of the
existing network of local health centres. The idea was not only to give a specific food
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concentrate to malnourished children, but also to distribute food aid to their families. It was
thought that the malnourishment of the child was in fact caused by the poverty of the whole
family. The case study was reported elsewhere (De Herdt, 2003b). Here we discuss it in
relation to the framework presented above.
The following argument of one of MSF’s (and, by extension, the organisers of emergency food
aid’s) collaborators may be a suitable starting point for our discussion:
“The supplementary feeding programmes may be considered to be based on a tacit contract between the
beneficiary’s family and the centres. This contract stipulates that the centres should commit themselves to
following up each child and to providing food at regular intervals, in return for the family’s regular participation
and commitment to the child’s health (to feed a malnourished child requires time and patience). It is quite
understandable, then, that in the case of marginalised families, this contract is not honoured” (Vautier 1995: 10,
author’s translation).
The problem as understood by MSF resembles a so-called ‘trust game’ (Dasgupta, 1988; Berg,
Dickhaut and McCabe, 1995), where a nutritional centre (NC) can choose between offering a
family package or not. For NCs, offering a food package will only be more interesting than not
offering such a package if they can trust the mothers to be fulfilling their part of the deal, i.e.
make an effort that their children be cured as soon as possible.
Figure 1. The food aid game
NC
offer family food package
Mother
do not intervene
negligent
caring
Payoffs:
Nutritional Centre
Temporarily poor
Chronically poor
0
0
0
-1
1
2
1
2
1
In MSFs mind, this strategy would be chosen by a class of ‘temporarily poor’ households, those
who would need the emergency food aid to bridge the temporary unemployment caused by the
plundering of Kinshasa. The NCs do also know, however, that some people cannot be trusted to
respect their part of the deal: it is supposed that the care-takers of ‘marginalised families’ or
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‘chronically poor’, while maybe valuing the child’s welfare, in any case give priority to other
family needs, having nothing, or only indirectly, to do with the child’s nutritional status. For
them, it would be more rewarding not to give appropriate care to their malnourished child and
consider it as a ‘meal ticket’1 as long as possible (see figure 1).
Multiple fairness criteria
The evidence of the food programme suggests that the terms of the tacit contract are not
respected by a significant number of beneficiaries. One of the most telling variables in this
respect is the average period the children ‘need’ to be cured from malnutrition. This period
fluctuates around 100 days, which is way too long considering the ‘normal’ time children need
to recover from malnutrition. The forms, used in the centres to follow-up the children, are
designed for a maximum stay of 13 weeks (91 days). The grassroots health care workers are
therefore constantly reminded that something seems to be wrong for some families: why are
their children not recovering, despite such long periods of assistance? Are the mothers
“negligent” 2 (Vanrie, October, 1994: 4)?
Given the structure of available options and incentives and given the available evidence we can
only conclude that most beneficiaries of the food emergency programme prefer the family food
package to at least one of their children’s well being. The debate, however, starts at the moment
we try to interpret this phenomenon. The idea that the difference in behaviour (caring versus
negligent) correlates with the distinction between “temporary” and “chronically poor”
households is neither empirically nor theoretically founded, but simply taken for granted by the
programme officers. Vautier (above) describes the correlation as fort compréhensible, without
further explanation. Another collaborator of MSF put it this way: “If I lived there, in those
circumstances, I probably would do the same thing: keeping one of my children just under the
exit-criterion, just in order to be able to feed the other four without too many difficulties”. This
explanation clearly espouses an alternative definition of what ‘fair behaviour’ can also mean in
such an extreme context. It would be a conceptual mistake to consider the caretakers who
1
See also Sen (1999) for further evidence on this reasoning.
Note that we define “negligence” here not as a characteristic of the mothers themselves, but as a label of the
behaviour of the mothers vis-à-vis their malnourished child. It is by exhibiting negligent behaviour that they will
not cure their child as soon as possible and be entitled longer to a family food package. The second consequence
may stimulate them to behave negligently, the first one may induce them not to choose this option. Some MSF
documents use the term “negligent mother”, which risks confusing a mother’s behaviour with a character trait.
2
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would not respect the terms of the tacit contract with the health centre as ordinary
‘opportunists’. Even if, in at least one respect, there is a self-serving bias in this definition of
fairness3.
More game options
However, things are more complicated than that. The above interpretation cannot explain why
the percentage of severely malnourished cases within the group of newcomers incessantly
increased: why wait until your child is severely malnourished, if a much smaller degree of
malnourishment would already be enough to become entitled to a bag of food? One could call it
a characteristic of the “chronically poor”, of the “negligent” mothers that they neglect their
children even before they send them to the NC but, in that case negligence would rather be of
the non-strategic kind.
Table 1. Actual and potential population of nutritional centres4.
Year-Month
1992-9
1993-3
1993-9
1994-3
1994-9
1995-4
Cases under treatment % of 6-59 months old
by MSF-sponsored
acutely malnourished or
Centres
with oedema in Kinshasa
2873
5,1%
3712
8,9%
3538
4,6%
4080
10,7%
4034
7,5%
2689
5,9%
Estimated number of 6-59 % treated/
months old acutely
malnourished
malnourished in Kinshasa
37679
8%
69145
5%
35738
10%
86667
5%
60748
7%
49985
5%
Source: own calculations, based on various reports of MSF, and on demographic data by Ngondo et al. (1993).
Further, as is shown by table 1 the nutritional centres financed by MSF never covered more
than 10% of the potential population it was targeting. It is a fact that virtually only the
3
In the sense that it legitimises an action that, besides being other-regarding (to the other-children), does serve
one’s self-interests in that it brings the food package to the household.
4
The figures of Table 1 should be considered with great care, and only as indicative. To begin with, there are
some disputable differences in the definition of “malnutrition” between the two series of data. The representative
survey considers as malnourished each child weighing less than –2z-scores than the average child of the same
height and sex. The use of the criterion of 75% of the median child of the same height and sex is considered less
exact, though this criterion continues to be used in almost all health centres the world over for pragmatic reasons.
Further, given that one can count 1 standard deviation as ca. 10-11% (Mosley and Chen, 1984), the criterion of 2
z-scores is somewhat more tolerant than the criterion of 75%. However, the children participating in MSF’s food
program are weighing up to 85% of the median child (the exit-criterion applied by the food centres). Hence, the
estimation of the number of malnourished children as published in the table can be considered as very
conservative. Further, they overestimate the number of children assisted because some children were registered at
different centres at the same time. This problem was known, and one tried to evade it by only accepting children
living in the zone in which the centre was implanted (from October 1994 onwards) (Vanrie, 1994: 2). In March
1995, however, it was observed that “apparently”, this measure was “not really applied” (Vautier, 1995: 8).
14
nutritional centres covered by MSF were offering an “abundant” family food package. It can be
added here that the package contained also a portion of beans. Beans are relatively costly in
Kinshasa, as they come from the Kivu region, by plane. The food programme was in fact
distributing a subsidy equivalent with average per person food outlays, to the tiny part that was
reached (Vanderhaegen, 1998: 4)5.
In the terms of the initial game structure (figure 1), these elements suggest that the game
structure should allow for a third option, open to the mothers. Indeed, the majority of them
apparently opted not to present themselves at the centre at all.
More games
Why were too many people reluctant to attend the program, given the high material as well as
immaterial rewards tied to participation in it? If (at all) such reluctance could still be, in some
measure, regarded as fair, it would to a considerable respect be a very costly kind of fairness.
Unfortunately, the MSF-data as well as the evaluative reports, do not give much information to
discuss these issues6. Monganza (1997) did some interesting work on the representation of
malnourishment in Kinshasa. Further, our own research team organised some interviews among
a subset of households we had identified as “poor” according to the income-criterion (Luzolele
and De Herdt, 1999: 52-63). These sources were used to construe the contours of the ‘ecology
of games’ in which malnourished children were involved.
One of the salient elements showing up time and again in interviews with poor kinois is the
frequent use of expressions like “we eat by the horoscope” and “we eat by miracle”. With a
modern mind we interpret them as pure signals of crisis, but these expressions also emphasise
the religious underpinnings of good health: someone is able to be in good health and feed
himself and his or her family because he or she is blessed by the gods. Whatever game they are
The “total cost” of 632,000 US$ was calculated excluding personnel and transport equipment. The “subsidy” was
calculated by only considering the price of a monthly food package. Vanderhaegen compared it to average per
person food outlays as calculated and published by De Herdt and Marysse (1997: 65) for the zone of Matete.
6
It is well known that the local field organisations measure a programme’s efficiency by their impact on those
who are reached rather than by their effect on the problem in general (Elster, 1992). Concomitantly, they assemble
information in function of bettering “local” efficiency rather than global efficiency. They are also concentrated
more on “local” than on “global” fairness: the moral reprehension of the “negligent mothers’” by the health
personnel should be contrasted with our astonishment when we detected that the whole MSF-programme, costing
more than 600 000 US$ per year, was anything but effective in covering the population of malnourished children.
5
15
playing here and now, they are at the same time playing a game with them. If survival is seen as
a miracle, the absence of survival will in the first place be interpreted as a conflict with the
gods, and, by inference, as a punishment for something that must have upset them. The options
available when confronted with malnutrition do not form an exception here. Monganza
specifies in detail that the first symptoms of malnutrition are, first and foremost, interpreted in
terms of ‘catching the evil eye’, or as a punishment for transgressing determinate social norms.
Now, whatever may have been at their origins or explain their dynamics, to the degree
malnutrition is connected with transgressions of social norms by the malnourished’ (foster)
parents, the spectre of “cures” is of course of a totally different character than if the symptoms
of malnutrition are ‘simply’ seen as malnutrition.
Let’s listen now to a mother interviewed by Monganza in Kingabwa:
“I’m not happy at all when I see an enfant de l’Etoile, it disturbs me. It’s not good, not good at all. It’s the fault of
the parents, above all the mother, since the mother has to watch over the health of her children, if one accepts to
bear a child, one has to take responsibility for it. So I do understand very well the neighbours who forbid their
children to play with the enfants de l’Etoile, and even to come near to them. In any case, it’s a shameful disease,
the mother is knowing very well what she’s doing, it’s a dishonour to the whole family. One criticises the whole
family, one qualifies it as poor. We are really afraid, as it is contagious, and our children?” (cited in Monganza,
1997: 80, author’s translation).
Note that the term enfants de l’étoile is specific for Kingabwa, one of the popular communes of
Kinshasa where Monganza did her fieldwork. The first missionaries had named their health
centre “L’étoile”, suggesting the association between “what catches the eye” and a state of
health which should be looked after. However, the people themselves appear to associate “what
catches the eye” rather with a physical state that suggests irresponsibility and negligence
(Monganza, 1997: 79). In this case, the nutritional state of the child stigmatises the whole
family and more particularly the mother. Curiously, the disease is even seen as contagious.
When we turn to the poor themselves, several interviewees expressed their reluctance to go and
beg for food:
“We don’t like to beg, as tomorrow they will say ‘he came here to beg’. The next visit, you might have
gone there for a different reason, but they’re going to think that you have returned to ask for money again.
This is why we don’t do it. To expose everyday problems or basic needs outside the home is almost
taboo; to ask for something basic brings shame and it disrupts social ties.” (cited in Luzolele and De
Herdt 1999: 58, authors’ translation).
The point of this respondent is not so much that a good relationship must be a reciprocal
relationship, where a gift is returned in due time, and where there is an over-all balance of gifts
16
and counter-gifts7. Rather, her point is that asking for food would “spoil” the relationship in the
sense that the beggar cannot perceive the social relationship as a truthful one anymore: once the
relationship has been turned into an instrumental one, doubt will set in, which will undermine
every attempt to turn it again into an intrinsically valuable one.
Taken together, these testimonies suggest the following hypothesis: as the symptoms of
malnutrition point to wrongful behaviour by the care-taker or the care-taker’s immediate kin,
people will first try to come to terms with it by solving the matter in private. Going to the
health centre would mean adding shame to guilt, both because it would mean that one avows to
have ‘misbehaved’ and that one is obliged to ask for food. This shame would of course
disappear again whenever one can blame a child’s malnutrition on irresponsible behaviour of
others, or even on the child itself. If e.g. one can say credibly to oneself that the malnourished
child is bewitched, and hence already socially dead, there is no need to feel ashamed. It may
even be that going to the centre with such a child will be interpreted, by the “general public” as
an act of humanity. Similar arguments apply to other types of children. One of the expressions
used in this context is “mwana na mwana na tata naye” (“every child has its own father”). It
may be used as an excuse by a child’s extended family members (mother’s side) to refuse any
responsibility for its health.
To sum up, the paradox of the implicit contract between the health care workers and the
care-takers of malnourished children is this: those who would be interested ex post in
respecting the terms of the contract prefer in fact not to sign it ex ante, while those who
are inclined to agree ex ante do so for the same reasons which will lead them not to
comply ex post. Precisely because the supplementary feeding programme targets the
malnourished enfants de l’Etoile, it will not attain the malnourished with “caring parents”
because these parents want to avoid exhibiting signals of carelessness. Thus, the child’s
predicament will be decided by the way in which its care-taker is involved in the concatenation
of games she is playing against the gods, the neighbours, the health centre and, ultimately, the
child itself.
7
In terms of the vocabulary of the gift-economy, the fact of asking food implies that the gift cannot anymore be
given freely, and that, therefore, it is not anymore a gift that brings people together.
17
5.2. Sustained relations: credit services in rural Nicaragua
In this section we study a rural micro-credit programme that has repeatedly been confronted
with local protest movements against repayment of the pending loans or due interests.
Especially in pre-election periods, after natural disasters or when large donations are
channelled by other programs in the region, the modus operandi of the programme is
challenged. In these situations the market logic behind the finance transactions tends to run into
conflict with local notions of what should be fair, which rule in other locally important games.
We start with a description of the ‘credit market game’. Then, we study the processes behind
these local protest movements against repayment. We focus on two villages where the
programme has faced local movements of protest against repayment. In the first village the
programme has never achieved a satisfactory and sustainable functioning. We attribute this to
the influence of other locally important games on the decision making within the credit market
game. In the second village, in contrast, while the programme has constructed exceptionally
solid local support for the programme with excellent repayment rates, local people have
suddenly turned against the program. Here we are especially interested in the sudden character
of the movement. The movement undoubtedly surprised the programme, which was largely due
to a gap between local and public transcripts.
The credit market game
Micro credit programmes that care about repayment rates clearly have a market logic. This
means that people always have to pay for financial services delivery and loans should always
be repaid. Because of the non-simultaneity of the duties of both parties, an important insecurity
for the credit programme smuggles in. Loan repayment and payment of interests are due only
after a period of time. This means that once the loan is disbursed the programme does not
dispose of a lot of means to enforce the compliance of the clients’ duties. In this way the game
has a very similar structure to the trust game (and thus also the food aid game in the R.D.Congo
case).
To increase incentives for local people to comply with their financial obligations credit
programmes often elaborate a mechanism that is based on the repeated character of the game.
Market exchanges implicitly entail a ‘reciprocity’ logic in the style of “if you don't cheat me, I
18
will continue to do business with you”. Micro credit programmes often make this reciprocity
rule explicit. If people duly repay their loans and pay the interests, a new loan will be
automatically approved. This is often accompanied with a gradual increase of the amount of the
loan. The first loan typically consists of an amount that is substantially lower than requested by
the loan applicant. Thus, optimally this mechanism provides two incentives. If the loan is
repaid, not only a new loan will automatically be approved, but this loan will also be
substantially higher than the previous one. This mechanism is based on direct reciprocity and
enables to build trust between both parties.
Local people, however, do not always agree with a repayment obligation in all circumstances.
In case of external shocks that affect their economic capacity and thus also their capacity to
comply with the credit contract terms, some people expect the credit programme to alleviate
their financial obligations. Credit programmes are often prepared to make arrangements on an
individual basis. To what extent the credit programme should share the financial losses with its
clients and thus what should be a ‘fair’ outcome forms undoubtedly the basis of a lot of
disagreement. While credit programmes will often not be prepared to do more than a mere
restructuring of debts, local people often expect the programme also to condone part of the
debt.
Ecology of games
Local people simultaneously interact with each other in different games. That is why both
bilateral and multilateral reputation is very important. People truly care about their social status
towards other people as other people – even people they have not interacted with before – take
account of their social status in their decision making which might determine their payoffs in
important local interactions.
Many micro credit programs recognize that besides the bilateral reputation mechanisms they try
to construct within the direct interaction with local clients, multilateral reputation mechanisms
– which are based on indirect reciprocity – can substantially improve local incentives to comply
with financial obligations towards external actors. Micro-credit programmes often make a
public list of defaulters, hoping that this would force defaulters to repay by means of indirect
reciprocity mechanisms. For this to be possible, however, the reciprocity logic with the micro
19
credit programme should be sufficiently internalised by a sufficiently high number of people.
This is often a mayor challenge for external actors8.
The fact that local people participate in multiple games, however, can also turn against the
programme. Each of the games local people play has its own logic, in terms of what is expected
to be a fair outcome and a kind treatment. They potentially compete with each other. Rural
micro credit programmes have to compete with other local logics, each with their own fairness
rules, which are often incompatible with their market logic. Their perspectives to construct
sustained relations with local people depend then on their capacity to impose their marketexchange logic and especially to convince local people of the fairness of this new logic.
In several villages of the country the Nicaraguan rural micro-credit programme we studied has
faced local resistance towards this ‘new’ market logic. We identified several locally important
interaction games that in a combined way were at the basis of this resistance. We believe that
particularly interactions during the agrarian reform have entailed implicit fairness norms that
until long after the end of the agrarian reform itself have been affecting decision-making of
local people.
This agrarian reform, which was implemented by the Sandinista government in the 1980s
conditioned land transfers upon the formation of production co-operatives with collective title
and production. The members hardly possessed any autonomy with respect to production
decisions, but this was compensated for by the almost complete absorption of the risk by the
co-operative (fixed salaries) and the state (periodic remission of debts and free access to
education and health as compensation for the artificially low production prices). This support
was mediated by the local political leadership that managed the relations with the state, and as
such was also used to safeguard local political support for the Sandinista project. The members
of these co-operatives enjoyed an easy access to abundant and cheap finance. These cooperative structures disappeared after the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas and the
drastic reduction of state support (including access to credit). Productive risk absorption by
external actors, however, remained part and parcel of local fairness notions in several of the
villages that were highly affected by agrarian reform (Bastiaensen and D’Exelle, 2002).
8
See also Platteau (1994) on generalised reciprocity as necessary condition for markets to function properly.
20
San Ramón is one of these villages that were highly affected by the agrarian reform. The microcredit programme we studied started operations in this village in 1991 and channelled
considerable resources to this village. When the village was afflicted by drought, however,
clients expected the local credit committee, which consisted of the former Sandinista
cooperative leaders, to negotiate a collective remission or at least a restructuring of their debts,
as was customary during the Sandinista period. The persistence of the local fairness norms
established during the agrarian reform and the presence of high production risks contributed to
the persistence of this perception about credit. Moreover, the poor diversification of the local
economy (most agrarian reform beneficiaries face severe problems to accumulate the necessary
basic capital to guarantee sustainable production) and the low presence of informal insurance
mechanisms resulted in a high demand for risk sharing with external actors.
We also identified two other types of local interaction games that reinforced this local fairness
notion vis-à-vis the micro-finance programme. First, local resistance to the programme sharply
increased during the political campaign for municipal elections. The Sandinista mayor in an
endeavour to safeguard his votes in this village declared that the micro credit programme was
not entitled to claim repayment from the clients in the village. Second, now and then new
charity-minded aid projects that were linked with the persisting Sandinista networks arrived at
the village. These projects followed a similar logic as the previous Sandinista state: external aid
as subsidies and protection for local poor peasant production. At the moment of increasing
local resistance against the micro credit programme the arrival of one of these programs
reinforced the prevailing local fairness norm in favour of debt remission and subsidies. With
the presence of these programmes it became completely impossible to construct a reciprocity
logic with local people: people can just shop between different projects, so why should they
bother about good relations? This strategy is also identified by Dercon (2004, when referring to
Banerjee, 2001). Poorer people and/or people with alternatives when caught defaulting tend to
default more than other people, eventually excluding themselves from the credit market.
Without doubt, in the San Ramón village both conditions were present: people are very poor
and have alternatives when defaulting.
So, in this village as was the case in several other agrarian reform villages in the country, the
programme did not even get the opportunity to implement direct reciprocity mechanisms, not to
mention indirect/generalized reciprocity that should favour their operations and thus the
capacity to build sustained relations with local people. We attribute this to the lack of
21
information of the programme on the logic of other locally important games that people play. A
better knowledge on these games could have improved the programme’s capacity to construct
sustained relations. However, as we will see in the next session, even if the programme would
look for knowledge on these other games, there will often be some games that are difficult to
identify or to understand. The power relation that any initiative of social protection or poverty
reduction smuggles in tends often to create a gap between a public and a hidden ‘transcript’ that
local people manage. This brings us to a study on the experiences the same programme had in
another of its local bank offices.
From hidden resistance to open conflict
In the La Carreta village the programme managed to construct very harmonic relations with
local people, leading to excellent repayment rates. This village is a very traditional village that
was not affected by the agrarian reform. Political brokerage is lower and dense local mutual
support networks are highly present (Molenaers, 2002) so that economic vulnerability is more
limited than in the agrarian reform villages. Few alternative aid programmes are present in the
village so that it would be costly to spoil the rare opportunity that this micro credit programme
offers. New clients of neighbouring villages entered the bank and followed – probably
stimulated by a kind of multilateral reputation effect – the ‘good pupil’ example of the La
Carreta villagers. However, while in other bank offices in the region repayment rates were less
optimal but still satisfactory, exactly in this bank office a movement of local protest against
repayment was organized, which drastically dropped repayment rates below the levels of the
other bank offices. We could definitely wonder why this success story changed so unexpectedly
and quickly into a nightmare (Vangerven, 2003).
An important element that created incipient but hidden resistance against the programme was
the policy change of the programme in 1998. The programme managed to build a very large
and solid portfolio. To increase its portfolio still more, however, it had to follow the rules of the
Supervisory Banking Committee. This Committee considered the shares that the clients
maintained of their local bank as hidden savings for which the programme should build
reserves according to national Banking rules. When the programme was smaller, it was less
visible for the Committee and this was not considered as a problem. Because building reserves
would force the programme to sharply reduce its portfolio, which it wanted actually to increase,
22
the central programme authority decided to buy all shares and deprive all local committees of
the decision power they had before (Rocha, 2002), including the La Carreta Bank committee.
This created miscomprehension among the La Carreta villagers who had always been intensely
involved in the management of their bank. This miscomprehension quickly turned into distrust
and deception. Since reciprocity presumes you treat people in the way you feel treated by
them9, this opened the gate for unexpected unilateral actions from the peasants themselves
towards the programme.
This forms undoubtedly an illustration of the contradictions that often exist between global and
local fairness. Higher global fairness could be reached by increasing outreach so that more
people could benefit from the services of the programme. However, this could only be attained
at the cost of local fairness. Local people found this policy change very unfair. They had
contributed to the success of their bank and now the central programme authorities bought out
their bank so that from now on they are excluded from any participation in decision processes.
This lack of complementarity between local and global fairness was felt by the programme as a
tension between a need for policy standardization and a need to adapt its policy sufficiently to
local characteristics.
It was especially after the losses caused by the hurricane Mitch in the same year that this
exclusion from local participation in decision processes became a serious problem. Although
the hurricane did not have the devastating impact it had in other regions, all peasants lost their
crops. The central programme authorities restructured the pending debts, but they did this
without any consultation of the local population. As a result the programme did only a very
light restructuring of the debts and refused to condone (Gómez, 2000).
As people did not have any means to influence decisions (now they were actually forced to
accept the decisions of the central authorities), in line with Scott’s suggestions, this created a
reaction of hidden opposition. The social space for the emerging hidden transcript centred
especially around local moneylenders. The latter were economically stronger peasants who lent
considerable amounts of money from the programme to offer informal financial services to
smaller peasants who because of lack of collateral only received small loans of the programme.
9
Direct reciprocity has not only been important as a means for the programme to enforce repayment, but it has
also been important with respect to the general human treatment local people received: “if you treat me good, I’ll
treat you good”.
23
Because of the crop losses the small peasants faced difficulties to repay to the informal lenders,
who then got problems to repay their debts to the programme. The latter convinced the smaller
peasants who had loans from the programme to default too. Within the hidden transcript of this
growing protest movement the leaders pointed to the large donations that the national
government received from international donors after the hurricane Mitch and which was
destined to the peasants who suffered losses. Although the programme did not receive any
support of the government, within the hidden transcript this discourse increased the feeling of
unfairness of the situation.
When the programme officers visited local clients to collect payments, these clients openly
refused to comply with their financial obligations. The organised protest movement came as a
surprise to the programme, which saw no other way out than to take legal steps. When it
wanted to legally claim the collateral, however, it bumped into violent and collective resistance
from some clients. The movement looked for support at higher political levels and enlisted the
help of a lawyer. The national Sandinista party in full presidential electoral campaign supported
the movement so as to safeguard local votes. The conflict was even covered by the national
press.
The protest movement received a lot of support in the surrounding villages. In La Carreta
village itself, support was less pronounced. Most people remained loyal to the programme and
complied with their financial obligations towards the programme. Social pressure to repay in
the village remained very high. People realized that the future of the bank depended on their
repayment. Moreover, some of the bank staff lived in the village and would loose their job with
the bankruptcy of the bank. Eventually the programme managed to suppress the movement by
making greater concessions and was helped by the defeat of the Sandinista party in the
presidential elections, which reduced its support to the movement. Nowadays the operations in
the bank office are normalized but the memory on this conflict will linger on for a long time.
As our case study shows there is often a lot of disagreement between the programme and local
people as to how far the programme should go in softening its conditions in situation of
economic adversity to have a fair settlement. Credit programs that carefully watch their
financial sustainability and thus also repayment rates are reluctant to offer a kind of risksharing service, which a lot of small peasants need. Often these programs offer the possibility
24
to renegotiate and restructure debts in case of individual default, but they certainly will not
make any gifts. Although these programs indirectly offer social protection by offering the
means to local people to accumulate an asset basis themselves, they certainly do not offer any
direct social protection. Local people often see a contradiction between the market logic of
micro credit programmes and the “development logic” promoted by local political patronage
and humanitarian donations programs with which they are more familiar. In villages with a
high presence of political patronage and humanitarian donations and a minimum level of local
collective action capacity, this disagreement on fairness can quickly turn into local protest
movements against repayment10. If the mismatch between fairness notions would be clear from
the start a lot of people would be reluctant to enter into risky business with micro-credit
projects. However, such a mismatch is not always immediately visible.
6. Conclusions and policy recommendations
In this article we have studied how the existence of different notions of fairness between
external and local people affects the effectiveness of social protection systems and initiatives of
poverty reduction. For systems of social protection, effectiveness is related to targeting
problems, while for poverty reduction initiatives effectiveness is also related to the extent to
which relations with poor people are maintained. To illustrate our findings, for each of both
types of interventions we used a case-study, respectively of a humanitarian aid programme in
urban R.D. Congo and a micro finance programme operating in rural Nicaragua.
In both case studies we demonstrated that to tune in to local structures and fairness notions is a
necessary but cumbersome task for external actors. External interventions should have an eye
for local notions of fairness. They should be extremely cautious as to how they approach local
people and how their presence and operations are locally perceived. The same case studies,
however, have also shown that more deliberate action to deal with the problem of conflicting
fairness concerns is often made difficult for policymakers and this for two reasons. First,
fairness notions are not only important in the interaction between local people and the external
intervention. They do also play an important role in other local games people play. People
simultaneously participate in different games, and the outcome in one game might influence
their decision making in other games, such as the interaction game they play with external
10
As to their capacity to react collectively to a common threat these villages are actually not so bad in terms of
25
actors. For external actors, access to information on both the rules and the players of these other
games, however, is not obvious. This makes it difficult to anticipate the end-results and
endangers the effectiveness of their actions.
In the R.D.Congo case, we studied a humanitarian programme that wants to improve the
nutritional status of malnourished children through local health centres. Local people face two
important decisions within this food game. First, they have to decide whether to accept the food
package of the program. Second, if they accept the food package they have to decide whether to
make an effort that their children be cured as soon as possible. This decision-making, however,
is closely interlinked with other important games they simultaneously play with the gods, the
neighbours, and ultimately the child itself, the latter being the focus of the local health centres.
In the Nicaragua case we studied a micro credit programme that wants to construct sustained
credit relations with local people. Here too, decision-making by local people within their
interaction with the micro credit programme - especially the decision of local people whether or
not to comply with their financial obligations - is interlinked with other locally important
games, particularly games of political exchange and games of aid provision by charity projects.
This has often created substantial disagreement between the programme and local people as to
how far the programme should go in softening its conditions in situation of economic adversity
to have a fair settlement, making it difficult for the programme to sustain local credit relations.
Policymakers who want to anticipate local decision-making should look for information on
these other locally important games that influence local decision-making.
Second, even if external actors explicitly look for knowledge on these other games local people
play and how they interact with each other, there will often be some games that are difficult to
identify or to understand and this is so for several reasons. A first important reason relates to
the power relation that any initiative of social protection or poverty reduction smuggles in, and
which tends to create a gap between a public and a hidden ‘transcript’ of local people. In the
Nicaraguan case, this was illustrated by the protest movement, which was based on a structure
and transcript that were intentionally hidden for the external micro credit programme. A second
reason refers to the large social distance between local people and external actors. In the
R.D.Congo case local people did not only interact with each other but also with actors which
are less observable by the external world, such as the gods and even the children that were to be
cured. This lack of information results often in a considerable amount of unpredictability about
local social protection.
26
the effectiveness of poverty interventions. This means that external actors should continuously
pay attention to signs of possible incongruity. Studying past interactions with the same actors in
different settings (games) and with other actors in similar settings can be extremely helpful for
this, but does probably require more time and energy than the aid industry is used to invest in
such issues.
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