Caitlin Scott

I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global Development (DEV) at the University of East Anglia. I have also taught at the University of Cambridge as a Visiting Lecturer in anthropology, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Goldsmiths College in London. My teaching has centred on development management topics such as policy management, project design and management and evaluation methods. I hold a doctorate degree in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, as well an MSc in Social research and an MA in Social Anthropology, both from the University of Edinburgh. My career has also included working the in the development sector. Former positions here include working for Save the Children International, Save the Children UK and Save the Children Denmark in monitoring and evaluation advisor roles, and projects as an independent consultant.

My research interests and expertise  interests focus on how aid is designed and delivered, taking a critical look at tools used in project management and their implications. Recent publications include a book exploring the project as a management system and its associated tools, The Project in International Development: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2023). This explores how the project has become a central and demanding tool in development that enacts systems of governmentality that exert specific forms of control the ways in which development is done. I have  also written on how audit systems draw on systems of morality and ethics rooted in religious understanding of guilt (Critique of Anthropology 2022), and on the challenges around decolonising development management in practice (forthcoming in autumn 2023, Challenging Global Development: Towards Decoloniality and Justice | SpringerLink).

I have also written and continue to work in issues around childhood in developing countries, developing on my doctoral thesis which explored the ways and contexts in which adolescent boys in Medellin Colombia interacted with a residential reformatory run by Catholic priests. With colleagues at UEA I have done research on political views and racism around the Brexit vote in East Anglia, published in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2021).

My research interests are in the areas of the politics and ethics of development practice and management, and in the micro processes of these. As an anthropologist, I am interested in the ways people interact with ideas and technologies for development within organisational settings.

The project in international development

This work explores how projects, widely used vehicles for organising work for funding, function as mechanisms within the aid sector. In this work I consider how technologies used to plan and manage development work, such as logframes and indicator based monitoring systems, effect what is done in the name of development. The histories and effects of these tools have are often overlooked in the teaching and practice of development, but, I argue, constitute a set of disciplining mechanisms within development practice that profoundly shapes what happens today in the sector.  This work is brought together in a book, The Project in International Development; Theory and Practice, to be published by Routledge in June 2023, as well as in a paper on the shaping of ethical subjectivities, published in Critique of Anthropology in 2022.

Tracking the Impact of Advocacy: Investing in Child Rights 

A new area of work, starting in 2023, explores how projects aimed at improving public investment in children can use an adapted form of Process Tracing to track and provide evidence of their impacts. Advocacy and campaign work is notoriously difficult to assess and standard quantitative methods are unsuitable, yet widely demanded in the sector. This work will use ethnographic methods to explore how teams planning interactions with policy makers plan and track their work, and how this might fit with existing reporting requirements from managing agencies and donors. Research is planned in Zambia, Malawi, Serbia and Montenegro.

I am director of the MSc course International Development Management.

I convene modules

• Project Design and Management
• Emerging and Strategic Challenges in Development Management.

I also teach on a range of post graduate and undergraduate modules including:

• Applied Methods in Impact Evaluation
• Development Work Placement
• Media in Development Practice

I have also taught on:

• Advanced Qualitative Research and Analysis
• Engaging Anthropology and Development
• Latin American Development
• Research Methods in Social Anthropology
• Research Techniques and Analysis
• Social Anthropology and International Development