Research programme · ICGT · 制度能力梯度

Capacity, negotiated.

How the terms of rule are negotiated among states, the people they govern, and the outsiders who arrive to help — in places where the textbook prerequisites of state capacity were never on offer.

An anthropology of how “capacity” is made, claimed, scored and contested. Pursued through archives, fieldwork and administrative records, in Rwanda and beyond.

Zhijun He · Council on African Studies, Yale University · Revised September 2026

The object

“Capacity” is a native category.

In the world of development, capacity is everywhere. States are said to lack it; projects promise to build it; lenders score it and lend by the score. The word travels from ministries to donor offices to village committees, and at each stop it does work: it explains failure, justifies supervision, and sorts countries into those that may borrow and those that must be advised.

Anthropology has a long habit of treating such words the way it treats any powerful local category — not as a neutral description to be accepted or rejected, but as something people use, with consequences. This programme takes “capacity” in that spirit. It asks how capacity is made to appear, who gets to say that it exists, and what is being negotiated when it is said to be absent.

Why the name is kept. Institutional Capacity Gradient Theory began in 2025 as a practitioners’ framework in the development idiom itself: it scored capacity from zero to one and prescribed interventions by the score. This revision turns that framework around. The gradient is no longer what the theory measures; it is what the research studies — the scores, thresholds and rankings through which institutions sort one another, and the negotiations those gradients summarise and hide.

What has been withdrawn: numerical scores presented as measurements, and claims that past outcomes “confirmed” the framework. A framework written after the fact cannot be confirmed by the facts it was written around.

Gradients in the world

How a negotiation becomes a number.

Capacity gradients are not the invention of a theory; they already organise the aid world. The World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, for example, rates eligible countries on sixteen criteria, each on a scale from one to six, and the ratings enter the formula by which concessional lending is allocated. The Bank describes the ratings as reflecting indicators, observations and staff judgements based on country knowledge (World Bank, CPIA).

That last phrase is where an anthropologist starts. Behind each rating sit meetings, missions, documents, relationships and disagreements — encounters in which officials of a borrowing government and staff of a lender work out what counts as evidence of capacity. The number that emerges travels further than any of those encounters, and outlives them.

A substantial anthropology of quantification helps here. Indicators are a technology of governance: they convert judgement into simplified, comparable numbers, and in doing so they shift power toward those who design and publish them (Davis, Kingsbury & Merry 2012; Merry 2016). Audit reshapes the institutions it inspects, which learn to perform for it (Strathern 2000). Numbers carry authority precisely where trust in personal judgement is weak (Porter 1995). And governments under scrutiny can learn to look like capable states while the ability to implement lags behind (Pritchett, Woolcock & Andrews 2013).

The programme’s question, at every point on a scale: what negotiation lies behind this number, who took part in it, and what does the number now allow or forbid?

Three parties

Who negotiates the terms of rule.

The stateofficials, offices The governedcitizens, subjects Outsiderswho come to help Legitimacy Technique Knowledge terms of rule

The research follows three relationships at once, because what looks like a state’s capacity is worked out among all three.

Between the state and outsiders, technique is negotiated: who designs budget and procurement systems, who runs them, who audits them, and when control is said to pass.

Between the state and the governed, legitimacy is negotiated: what people accept, refuse, claim or endure, and on what terms.

Between the governed and outsiders, knowledge is negotiated: whose account of a place counts, and what is lost when local practice is translated into a donor’s categories.

Outsiders are not only Northern lenders and NGOs. Increasingly they are other African states offering their own models — Rwanda among them. And the researcher, arriving from abroad to study the triangle, is also inside it.

Lenses

Eight ways of seeing what a score cannot.

Each lens comes from a body of ethnographic and historical work. The first paragraph says what that work shows; the second says what this programme asks because of it.

1 · The state as an effect

The state is not a thing standing apart from society but an effect of everyday practices — documents, uniforms, offices, maps, audits — that make a line between “state” and “society” appear real (Mitchell 1991; Abrams 1988). People meet it in low-level encounters where its boundaries blur (Gupta 1995), and it is often most visible at its margins (Das & Poole 2004).

The programme asks: which practices produce the appearance of capacity, and can that appearance be built without the substance?

2 · Verticality and encompassment

States present themselves as standing above society and enclosing it. Aid agencies and NGOs unsettle that picture: they are transnational, yet they work at the local level and often do what states are imagined to do (Ferguson & Gupta 2002). Where official institutions are thin, authority is shared and bargained over among many actors, foreign ones included (Hagmann & Péclard 2010; Lund 2006).

The programme asks: where do outsiders sit in the everyday work of rule, and how do people place them?

3 · The development gift

A gift creates obligation, and an unreturnable gift creates hierarchy (Mauss 1925). Aid that can never be reciprocated leaves recipients in lasting debt and makes the giver’s standing depend on the recipient’s need (Stirrat & Henkel 1997). Where people claim what they are owed rather than what they are given, the terms of the gift are themselves contested (Lombard 2016).

The programme asks: what changes when a former recipient of advice becomes a giver of it?

4 · Brokers and translators

Development travels through intermediaries — project brokers, translators, consultants — who turn policy into practice and practice back into policy language, and who often make projects appear to have worked (Lewis & Mosse 2006; Bierschenk, Chauveau & Olivier de Sardan 2000; Mosse 2005).

The programme asks: who translates between officials, citizens and outsiders, and what is lost or added in translation?

5 · Travelling models

Governance techniques travel as “models” that are detached from where they were made and re-embedded elsewhere, changing as they go (Behrends, Park & Rottenburg 2014; Rottenburg 2009). Global connections work through friction: the awkward, creative grip of encounters across difference (Tsing 2005).

The programme asks: when a model of governance travels, what is presented as its core, and what does the receiving side take, bend or refuse?

6 · Paper and the archive

Bureaucracy is made of paper, and files do political work: they create relations, assign responsibility and outlast their authors (Hull 2012). Archives are products of power, shaped by what their makers feared and wanted to know (Stoler 2009); silences enter history when records are made, kept and retrieved (Trouillot 1995).

The programme asks: who keeps the record of a negotiation, and how does custody decide what capacity is later said to have existed?

7 · Visibility, risk and blame

What a society counts as risk tracks whom it is ready to blame (Douglas 1992). Disasters are social before they are natural (Hewitt 1983; Wisner et al. 2004), and infrastructure is a promise as well as a structure — states build what can be seen (Larkin 2013).

The programme asks: when blame for a disaster can fall on nature or on government, how does that ambiguity shape what is built beforehand?

8 · Sovereignty from below

Sovereignty is not only a legal status held by states; it is claimed, denounced and desired, often inconsistently, by people living where the state is thin (Lombard 2018), and felt in the emotions and transactions of relations with foreign partners (Lombard 2022). The “failed state” label names only what is missing (Lombard 2016).

The programme asks: how do people who are told their state lacks capacity describe the rule they actually live under?

Practical norms. Across all eight lenses runs one finding from the ethnography of African public services: between official rules and actual conduct lies a layer of unwritten but widely shared norms that officials follow — sometimes to cope, sometimes to serve the public better than the rules allow (De Herdt & Olivier de Sardan 2015). Much of what is called capacity is located there, and reforms that ignore it tend to be absorbed by it.

Projects

Five ethnographic questions.

Each project follows the triangle through a different kind of material. Rwanda appears often because two rich archives and one live policy experiment are there; the questions are comparative.

Rwanda as a model abroadDoctoral project · fieldwork in Kigali from 2027

Rwanda now shares its own approaches to governance with other governments, including through the Rwanda Cooperation Initiative. A country long described as a recipient of capacity-building has become, in part, a provider of it. The project is an ethnography of a travelling model: what Rwandan officials present as the core of their practice, how it is packaged for others, and what visiting officials take up, adapt or leave aside. It asks what the reversal of the gift does to relations among all three corners of the triangle.

Lenses: travelling models; the development gift; sovereignty from below.

Who keeps the record of negotiation?MADE Graduate Fellowship, Genocide Studies Program, Yale

After Rwanda’s community-based gacaca courts closed in 2012, their records became the subject of decisions about custody, digitisation and access, including a dispute with the UN mechanism that inherited the international tribunal’s archive. The project is an ethnography of archiving: who has held these records, who could consult them, and how custody has been explained to the people whose testimony they contain. It asks whether custody was settled by consolidation at the centre or worked out through negotiation among national, international and community actors.

Lenses: paper and the archive; the state as an effect.

Attributive AmbiguityWith Luoxianer Peng · AAG Annual Meeting 2027

When a glacial-lake flood or a dam failure can be blamed either on a changing climate or on those who governed the risk, the possibility of deniability shapes what states build in advance: visible response, rather than quieter prevention. Cases from the Indian Himalaya — Chamoli (2021) and South Lhonak in Sikkim (2023) — with Derna, Libya (2023) as a probe of the argument’s limits.

Lenses: visibility, risk and blame.

The LagGuqing Yu (first author) and Zhijun He · AAG 2027

Between the moment a flood risk is formally identified and the moment anything is done about it, people go on living, building and waiting in the zone. In the Msimbazi basin of Dar es Salaam, satellite records of built-up change measure that interval. The anthropology of waiting treats such delays not as empty time but as a way power is experienced (Auyero 2012).

Lenses: the state as an effect; visibility, risk and blame.

Who Fails the Filter?SSRN working paper, 2026

Rules meant to guarantee capacity decide who is let in. Brazil’s EIRELI business form required a minimum capital that, the paper argues, was never checked. Using 69.1 million business registrations, it asks who was screened out. Read anthropologically, a registry is an archive of millions of small encounters with a rule, and of the ways people went around it — legibility, with its costs (Scott 1998).

Lenses: the state as an effect; practical norms.

Related work in economics: “Policy Substitutes or Complements? Industrial Policy and Institutional Quality in Rwanda” (with Z. Yan; Midwest Economics Association 2025; SSRN working paper).

Working concepts

Four ideas the programme is testing.

Negotiation-based capacity

The claim that capacity grows not only when a centre consolidates control, but when officials, citizens and outsiders arrive at terms they can each live with. It is set against its rival — consolidation from the centre — and the archive project is designed so that either could turn out to be right.

Constitutive ambiguity

Uncertainty about who is responsible for what is usually treated as a defect of institutions. Ethnographically it is often part of how arrangements hold together: it lets parties with different interests act together without settling every question. Ambiguity is not noise.

Attributive ambiguity

A specific form of the above: when an outcome can be attributed to more than one cause, anticipated deniability becomes a force in how resources are allocated before anything happens.

Prerequisites as filters

The “prerequisites of capacity” that development theory lists are, in practice, gates. Studying who passes them, who is stopped, and who goes around them shows capacity from the side of those it is supposed to serve.

Method

Studying capacity ethnographically.

Study up, and across. The terms of rule are negotiated in ministries, donor offices and neighbourhood committees at the same time. The research follows them to all three, studying the powerful as closely as the governed (Nader 1972) and following people, documents and models across sites (Marcus 1995).

Follow the model, follow the document. A secondment agreement, a custody memorandum, a registration form: each passes through many hands, and each hand changes it.

Read archives along their grain, for what they say and for what their keepers worried about, left out or could not see.

Treat numbers as field sites. Scores, registries and satellite records are studied as artefacts of the encounters that produced them, and also used as evidence of pattern at scale. Interviews and observation explain what the patterns mean; the patterns show how far the interviews reach.

Stay long enough. A single visit records a level; returning to the same offices and people is what shows a direction of change.

Work in the language. Negotiations happen in the languages people govern in. Kinyarwanda study is under way for Rwanda, alongside Kiswahili for work in East Africa.

Write reflexively. A researcher from China, trained in the United States, working in Africa, is himself an outsider who arrives — and part of what is being studied.

Researching with care

The ethics of studying negotiation.

Consent that holds over time

People are told what the research is, in a language they use, and may withdraw. Consent is revisited when the use of their words changes — for instance, before publication.

Protecting interlocutors

Negotiations over rule involve people whose position depends on discretion. No interlocutor is identified without explicit permission, and descriptions are altered where identification could cause harm.

Archives of harm

Records of mass violence contain testimony from survivors, witnesses and accused people. Research on custody concerns how records are kept and governed; it does not republish their contents.

Position and return

Findings are shared back with the institutions and people who took part, in a form they can use. The researcher’s own place in the triangle is part of the analysis, not a footnote to it.

Contribution

What the programme hopes to add.

To the anthropology of the state, it brings outsiders inside the ethnography rather than treating them as its backdrop, extending work that already refuses to describe African states only by what they lack.

To the anthropology of development, it follows a South–South case — a model travelling from one African government to others — where much of the literature has followed Northern donors.

To the anthropology of quantification, it studies capacity scores as artefacts of negotiation while also using numbers as evidence, taking seriously both what numbers hide and what they can show.

To development practice, it offers a plainer vocabulary for what capacity-building involves: not the transfer of a substance, but a renegotiation of who does what, on whose terms.

The question, tested

Is this a good anthropological question?

A research question that will carry a decade of fieldwork and writing should meet some demanding standards. Here is the programme held against nine of them.

1 · It travels

If a field site closed tomorrow, could the question still be asked elsewhere? The negotiation of the terms of rule among states, the governed and outsiders is not tied to one country. It is already being asked of archives in Rwanda, glacial lakes in the Himalaya, a flood basin in Dar es Salaam and a business registry in Brazil. Sites are places to ask it, not the question itself.

2 · It is held for reasons that last

The question began close to home, in a place long described by what it was said to lack, and it has followed a life spent in each corner of the triangle — as one of the governed, as an outsider arriving to help, and as a student of the institutions that do the helping. Caring about the question is also what obliges respect for the people inside it.

3 · It aims at a concept

A new site is one kind of originality; a concept others can carry away is another — as “waithood” travelled far beyond the African youth it first described (Honwana 2012). The programme’s working concepts are candidates, and the doctoral project is meant to settle on one that can be used by people who never read the case.

4 · It matters now

As Northern aid budgets contract, more of the advising, lending and model-sharing on the continent is done by other governments of the Global South, African ones among them. How the terms of rule are negotiated when the helper is a neighbour is a question for the people governed, not only for specialists.

5 · It is feasible for the person asking it

Funding, permits, visas, language, access and travel are the usual list. The less usual item is whether the researcher can stay long enough, return afterwards, and do so without harm to himself. The design favours offices, archives and meetings — spaces that studying up opens — over settings the researcher cannot responsibly enter.

6 · It is designed for its own duration

A doctorate, then a book, then the next project: each piece should extend the same question rather than replace it. The sequence runs from who keeps the record of a negotiation, to how a model of rule travels, to how its receivers take it up — and, alongside, how blame and visibility shape what states build.

7 · Its critique aims at structures

A structural argument can be misread as blaming the people who bear the harm. Before any finding is written, the programme asks whether it could make the most vulnerable appear responsible for what was done to them. If it could, the argument is rewritten.

8 · Its critique is found from within

Where something looks wrong, the first move is to ask how officials, archivists and residents themselves understand it — and whether critics already exist among them. Where they do, their voices carry the argument; the researcher does not stand outside as the only critic.

9 · It knows what does not belong to it

Sacred knowledge, things said in friendship, testimony given in a court of reconciliation, and communities too small to anonymise are not problems of writing but limits of the question. If the question could only be answered by crossing them, it is the question that must change.

For practitioners

The operational version.

The first version of ICGT was written for people designing capacity-building. Its practical parts remain here, revised in light of the research above.

Questions to answer before intervening
  • Minimum coherence. Is there enough of a political settlement for any agreement to hold?
  • Who is at the table? Which officials, which citizens, which outsiders — and who is missing?
  • Elite incentives. Do those in power need public goods to survive, or do they survive by keeping institutions weak (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003)?
  • Whose knowledge counts? Where do local practice and imported models disagree, and who decides?
  • What does ambiguity protect? Which unsettled questions are holding the arrangement together?
  • Form or function? Would success show up as new laws and units, or as things actually getting done?
  • What is the exit? When and how does outside support step back, and who decides?
Working alongside, and adjusting as terms change

Institutional twinning pairs a functioning institution with a developing one for extended joint work: secondments in which partner staff implement alongside domestic staff rather than advising from above; joint projects with shared responsibility; and reverse placements, in which domestic staff work inside the partner institution. Because terms of rule shift, adjustments should be agreed in advance and reviewed regularly (Andrews, Pritchett & Woolcock 2017).

Development finance: proposals, held with caution

Lenders measure risk by capacity levels, so the countries that most need finance to build institutions are least likely to receive it; they also treat non-engagement as neutral, though it carries risks of its own. Three design ideas follow the direction of change rather than its level: disbursements tied to milestones negotiated with those who will be judged by them; shared-risk partnerships in which a lender holds a temporary stake in an institution’s governance; and graduated terms that price the move from external support to domestic control. The research above counsels caution: outside stakes in domestic institutions can reproduce the hierarchies they mean to dissolve, and sovereignty is claimed and felt, not only priced.

Knowing when not to intervene: Afghanistan, read backwards

The United States spent twenty years and some $145 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan; its own inspector general concluded that the effort struggled to develop a coherent strategy, to make projects sustainable and to tailor them to the Afghan context (SIGAR 2021). Read through this programme, the early years show the warning signs it looks for. This is a retrospective reading, not a test; its value is as a reminder that the most important decision can be whether to begin.

Limits

What the programme does not claim.

Not a theory of why states succeed

Histories, resources and political settlements explain much of that. The programme studies how capacity is negotiated and represented, not why some states end up stronger than others.

Not a verdict on any government

Its projects describe how arrangements are made and understood by those inside them. They do not score or rank the states they study.

Not yet tested

The concepts above are working hypotheses. The projects are designed so that they could turn out wrong.

Not a replacement for practice

Practitioners’ judgement contains knowledge no framework captures. The aim is to make parts of that judgement discussable.

How it could be wrong. If custody of the archive, or the travel of the Rwandan model, turns out to have been settled from the centre with little real negotiation; if ambiguity turns out to be noise that people inside institutions experience only as dysfunction; or if capacity scores prove to track what happens on the ground so closely that nothing important lies behind them — the programme’s central claims should be revised.

Reading with

Work this programme draws on.

Louisa Lombard’s ethnography of the Central African Republic has been especially important: her account of the state as relationships among many actors, local and foreign (2016); of rebellion as a way of claiming entitled personhood (2016); of raiding as a political repertoire that flourishes where status is unclear and institutional guidance absent (2020); and of sovereignty as something people claim, denounce and desire (2018; 2022). The programme takes three lessons from it: describe what rule is rather than what it lacks; treat outsiders as parties to the negotiation, not neutral technicians; and expect the terms of rule to be contested from below.

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