Comfort in complexity: Analyzing an ethnographic research design to illuminate donor-logic technology philanthropists as non-state actors in development

• In Event: Influence and Power: The Evolving Role of Private Actors

Proposal

This paper intends to make a methodological contribution to the field of international and comparative studies. Recent publications in the Comparative Education Review address the challenges facing comparative and international education research. Noah Sobe (2018) discusses the problem of comparison in an era of big data and shifts toward algorithmic and computational creep. He argues that if big data analytics replace theory, reflexivity, and critique, the field is left with sterilized and atrophied comparative education research. Karen Ross (2017) advocates for the importance of conducting comparative studies of educational interventions implemented within the same sociopolitical environment in order to develop context-rich horizontal comparisons of a single environment. She argues this would provide a more comprehensive view of divergent programmatic approaches and outcomes and would allow the field to better understand the agency of actors in an educational realm and the relationship between educational initiatives and the broader sociopolitical context. In a presentation on New Philanthropy, Stephen Ball (2017) emphasized the importance of methodologies that move away from the ‘neatness’ of new typologies and urged researchers to become comfortable with complexity in order to uncover more nuanced implications of emerging non-state actors in the field of education and development.


In the current development landscape, governments increasingly renegotiate the social contract and outsource the provision of services historically considered ‘public good’ and in the government domain. In combination with this trend, there is a rise in the number and type of ‘new donors’ who continue to grow and become influential actors in the education and development policy sector. Donor logic, the process of analyzing or dissecting various institutional rationales to better understand the motivations and actors in the development space, is an established tradition in the field of international and comparative education (Steiner-Khamsi, 2008). While the donor logic of some international actors in education is well documented, the research and literature on new philanthropy and other non-state actors in development is just beginning to gives us the means to understand the role of emerging actors such as technology barons, celebrities, foundations and technology corporations applying market-based approaches to aid. In consequence, there is a demand to deepen collective knowledge of emerging trends to help understand issues of power and institutional isomorphism, social justice and equity, civil society and democracy, governance and the changing relationship between new actors and the state.


Taking into account both discussions of challenges facing comparative and international education research and the rise of non-state actors in development, this paper will present the Guide to Analyzing Non-State Actors, a research design that emphasizes qualitative methods and an ethnographic orientation towards research. The Guide to Analyzing Non-State-Actors is adapted from the Guide to Monitoring eLearning Programs (2011), a research design originating from ethnographers at Intel Labs and further development by Intel Corporation in collaboration with SRI International, EDC, and local research partners. After successfully implementing the research design in a longitudinal and international and comparative analysis of nine (9) large scale eLearning initiatives from 2011 to 2016, the research design has been modified for an analysis of emerging non- state actors in education.


The Guide to Analyzing Non-State Actors is intended to be adaptable to multiple donor analyses, levels of engagement, and levels of resources allocation. The research activities follow a two-step process. The initial phase is intended to develop donor analyses of emerging non-state actors; and the follow-on phase a more conventional data collection set to address the enactment and change associated with specific philanthropic engagements and educational programs. Following a description of the research design, the paper will present findings from a pilot which spans three donor analyses of emerging technology philanthropists in Silicon Valley. While a broad range of non- state actors could have been used pilot this research design (Srivastava & Read, 2018), emerging technology philanthropy was selected based on the researcher’s long academic and professional experience with technology industry giving as well as the recent growth in both scope and scale of technology philanthropists. The pilot research is designed to analyze the emergent donor class of technology philanthropists in order to further define the “giving code” (Culwell & Grant, 2016) and hypothesize about the potential implications of emergent technology philanthropy for development. The session will conclude with a discussion of proposed modifications to the research design, future research, and a connection of the pilot findings to the broader conference themes of the role of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies in reimagining - and remaking - processes of governance, research, and learning, including creative alternatives opened by posthuman futures.


To the field of comparative education, the aim of this paper is to contribute an initial analysis of a new methodological framework, expand the literature on donor logic to include emerging technology philanthropists as non-state actors, and provide an initial platform to discuss the implications of distributed forms of influence and power as non-state actors increasingly become influential in the provision of public services. More specifically, the aim of this paper is to contribute to ongoing research efforts from organizations such as: the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, an organization devoted to the development and dissemination of knowledge to improve philanthropy, strengthen civil society and effect social change; the agence franchise de developpment (AFD), an organization whose research sheds light on the relationship between foundations and official development assistance (ODA); the Foundation Center whose Philanthropy Classification System (PCS) represents a universal taxonomy that describes funders, grantees and the philanthropic transactions between entities, allowing organizations everywhere to communicate in a consistent way; and netFWD, a global network of foundations working for development whose aim is to codify knowledge, enable dialogue, implement partnership and position philanthropy in the broader development context.

Author

• Lara Patil, NORRAG