Accounting, Transparency and “Translation”: The Case of HUMANITARIAN Cross Cultural Governance

Abstract

We have conducted a field research on philanthropic “tsunami” projects in South-eastern India that are embedded in a quiet complex governance scheme (French Firm funding, execution by local NGOs, consolidated management by a French federation of NGOs), in which the classical notions of fraud and transparency prove to very ambiguous, so that accounting cannot be the main source of control. We show that the opacity of events at microscopic operational level is a mandatory condition for institutionalization of accounted “facts”. Therefore, we establish the
importance of “translation” effects in the sense of Actor Network Theory (ANT). Beyond transparency that translation institutionalizes trough accounts, we raise an irreducible part of ignorance and incertitude that
necessarily comes with every attempt to build knowledge for governance.