Truth in Translation: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Everyday Practices of Monitoring in a Senegalese Sustainable Development NGO
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article, based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Saloum Delta, in Senegal, investigates the relationship between Results-Based Management (RBM) and the difficulties, faced by many NGOs, to understand the needs and desires of the communities with whom they work. The article follows the day-to-day monitoring practices of one sustainable development NGO, and highlights the influence of RBM on the possibility of ‘knowing the truth.’ The article shows how the culture, language, and tools of RBM impact the ecosystem of relationships surrounding the NGO, creating a culture rooted in evidence production, justification, and suspicion. By taking an interactional and linguistic approach, the article also shows the limits and possibilities of producing coherence and success within monitoring activities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it