Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

the point made by critics of the program that an attachment to the idea of success is, in fact, the central feature of dairy development. According to Doornbos and others (1990), a “politics of evaluation syndrome” is strongly associated with dairy development, making an objective analysis of success that much more difficult. In their words,

In other words, meanings of success have to be sought in the official histories of the program itself and not in its replication in rural contexts.

A prominent study of the politics of evaluation associated with development was provided by Ferguson (1994). By way of a livestock development program in Lesotho in southern Africa, Ferguson sought explanations for the continued implementation of development programs in the face of their failure to achieve stated aims. Ferguson's main argument was that measuring failure on the basis of differences between the articulated objectives and visible implementations of development misreads the ways in which the power of development is actually reinforced through failures, to the extent that such failures serve to justify a return to development in search of solutions, instead of addressing the power relations within which social and economic inequalities are produced. The larger aim of development, therefore, is the production of “antipolitics,” which in effect suggests technical solutions for what are political problems.