IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/recgxx/v94y2018i2p166-187.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The New Gold Standard: The Rise of Randomized Control Trials and Experimental Development

Author

Listed:
  • Sophie Webber
  • Carolyn Prouse

Abstract

Development economics and institutions have a new gold standard: the randomized control trial (RCT). An RCT is an evaluation technique that draws from experimental design in order to measure the impact of a development project. Due to randomization—randomly distributing people or communities to receive either control or treatment—advocates suggest that it is possible to measure the impact of an intervention, and attribute a causal relationship between the intervention and its outcome. As such, proponents claim that RCTs are able to get to the heart of what really works for development interventions. This article charts the rise of RCTs within two major development institutions: the World Bank and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Drawing from fieldwork at these two institutions, we follow RCTs as a technology of development, finding that they take divergent forms at each of the institutions. The article examines the contested and uneven paths of RCTs as they have proliferated throughout development economics scholarship and practice, and teases out the new problems, subjects, spaces, and governance regimes of development that RCTs engender. We build on existing economic geography research concerned with the rise of behavioralism within development. By centering the methodology of RCTs, we find institutional and geographic variation as well as a reconfiguration of development governance through experimentation.

Suggested Citation

  • Sophie Webber & Carolyn Prouse, 2018. "The New Gold Standard: The Rise of Randomized Control Trials and Experimental Development," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 94(2), pages 166-187, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:94:y:2018:i:2:p:166-187
    DOI: 10.1080/00130095.2017.1392235
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00130095.2017.1392235
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00130095.2017.1392235?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vincent Guermond, 2022. "Contesting the financialisation of remittances: Repertoires of reluctance, refusal and dissent in Ghana and Senegal," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 54(4), pages 800-821, June.
    2. Parker, A. Rani & Coleman, Eric & Manyindo, Jacob & Mukuru, Emmanuel & Schultz, Bill, 2020. "Bridging the academic-practitioner gap in RCTs," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    3. Vikram Tyagi & Sophie Webber, 2021. "A rusting gold standard: Failures in an Indonesian RCT, and the implications for poverty reduction," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(5), pages 992-1011, August.
    4. Wintrup, James, 2022. "Promising careers? A critical analysis of a randomised control trial in community health worker recruitment in Zambia," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 299(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:94:y:2018:i:2:p:166-187. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/recg .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.