Abstract International development practice has increasingly been shaped by professionalization and managerialization. This trend has intensified in the last decades, driven by a governance paradigm centered on results and evidence. As a consequence, standardized planning tools, monitoring mechanisms, and evaluation methods have become prevalent. Foundational for these practices is documentation—especially templates which provide instructions and guidelines for documenting development work. Drawing on insights from anthropological scholarship on the transformative capacities of documents, this article denaturalizes templates as neutral forms of documentation, and examines how they shape development practice. Using templates and interviews with development professionals working in Swedish-funded peacebuilding projects, I mobilize the concept of affordance to analyze the possibilities for action rendered possible and impossible by templates. The analysis demonstrates how templates enable an affordance of visibility, making development interventions visible as projects composed of separate, discrete components. Moreover, templates carry colonial affordances, functioning as vehicles for the perpetual problematization and categorization of the developing world as an object of improvement. The article concludes that templates subtly sustain coloniality as a structure of power that outlives formal colonialism, and calls for greater attention to the colonial affordances embedded in everyday bureaucratic objects and artifacts in international development.
D. S. Scott (Tue,) studied this question.