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The rise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international development in historical perspective

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Abstract

This article brings a historical perspective to explain the recent dissemination of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the new “gold standard” method to assess international development projects. Although the buzz around RCT evaluations dates from the 2000s, we show that what we are witnessing now is a second wave of RCTs, while a first wave began in the 1960s and ended by the early 1980s. Drawing on content analysis of 123 RCTs, participant observation, and secondary sources, we compare the two waves in terms of the participants in the network of expertise required to carry out field experiments and the characteristics of the projects evaluated. The comparison demonstrates that researchers in the second wave were better positioned to navigate the political difficulties caused by randomization. We explain the differences in the expertise network and in the type of projects as the result of concurrent transformations in the fields of development aid and the economics profession. We draw on Andrew Abbott’s concept of “hinges,” as well as on Bourdieu’s concept of “homology” between fields, to argue that the similar positions and parallel struggles conducted by two groups of actors in the two fields served as the basis for a cross-field alliance, in which RCTs could function as a “hinge” linking together the two fields.

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Notes

  1. Since Abbott (1988, p. 343) himself suggested that his concept of “task area” is similar to Bourdieu’s “field,” and since the distinction between “ecologies” and “task areas” is immaterial for our purposes, we use “ecology” and “field” here interchangeably. We follow Mudge and Vauchez (2012) in incorporating Abbott’s concepts into field analysis and treating the two approaches as compatible and complementary.

  2. The term “philanthro-capitalists” has been coined by Bishop and Green (2009) to describe new, large foundations, established by successful individuals from the worlds of finance and technology, who “apply business techniques and ways of thinking about their philanthropy” (ibid., p. 6). The often-cited example is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (created in 2000), though the term captures a broader movement in the philanthropy sector (Reckhow 2013).

  3. We also conducted interviews and exchanged emails with key academic figures from the first wave, as well as with Trials Search Coordinators from the Campbell Collaboration and the Cochrane Library to look for possibly missing repositories and reviews from the period.

  4. Experimental designs that did not clearly explain how the control group was assigned, or that used average data from the population as control, were considered quasi-experimental.

  5. A list with all the studies in our two samples is available upon request.

  6. There is a large number of missing values (unknown disciplinary affiliation) in our first wave data (28% of authors), but we do not think this casts doubt on the finding. Given the decades that have passed, it is not surprising that it is more difficult to identify the disciplinary affiliation of first wave authors. The unidentified, however, are unlikely to be US-based economists because this is the category easiest to identify. We suspect that most were local researchers.

  7. Of 32 development papers in the top 5 economics journals in 2015, 10 were RCTs, up from zero in 2000 (Duflo 2016). No first wave studies, in contrast, appeared in high-visibility disciplinary journals. The main venue was Studies in Family Planning, an interdisciplinary journal published by The Population Council.

  8. Another necessary component are the policy beneficiaries themselves, but we do not possess data that would allow us to compare them.

  9. These replicas of a unit from one ecology (a profession, a discipline, a political party,) within another are what Abbott (2005, pp. 265–269) calls “avatars.” For example, applied economics is an avatar of academic economics in the “policy and advice arena.” While an avatar is “an institutionalized hinge,” over time it can become independent and even compete with its original creators.

  10. The existing estimates are not yet reliable enough to determine the relative share of development aid coming from private foundations. The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) estimates that, since 2002, aid to developing countries from Private Voluntary Organizations had been three times as large as ODA. This number, however, includes not just direct development investments, but also private bank lending and remittances, so it is an over-estimate. More accurate estimates are likely in the future since in 2010, the Gates Foundation became the first private aid donor to report to the DAC, encouraging other foundations to do the same (OECD 2011, p. 4).

  11. The problems faced by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), which works primarily with governments, underscore this point, demonstrating how hard it is for governments to randomize benefits. Despite explicitly requiring all loans to undergo impact evaluations, IADB was able to conduct RCTs only in 26% of its loans and had to resort to a quasi-experimental design in the reminder. IADB (2017) representatives reported that RCTs were seen as “imposed on country governments, which are reluctant to appropriate RCTs by themselves.”

  12. Pritchett makes the same point, though perhaps more bluntly: “The only people for which the RCT movement is in fact a tool for the job are philanthropists…. From the charity perspective, there’s a nice confluence between the methodological demand for statistical power and of being able to tweak at the individual level. I can give this person food, but not that person. (…) I’m not trying to affect the government; I’m not trying to affect national development processes.” (in Ogden 2016, p. 142)

  13. For example, total donations to the four charities shortlisted by GiveWell increased from $3,000,000 in 2010 to $110,000,000 in 2015. Conversely, when RCT evidence is inconclusive, projects lose their recommended status and funding, as happened to Development Media International (Givewell 2017).

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Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank XingJian Li for her meticulous work in this project, as well as Margarita Rayzberg, Diana Graizbord, Moran Levy, Joan Robinson, Josh Whitford, and Diane Vaughn for their feedback. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2014 Society for Social Studies of Science Meeting, the 2015 Social Science History Association Meeting, the 2016 and 2018 American Sociological Association Conference, Columbia University’s SKAT workshop, Sciences Po, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. We also thank the participants at these presentations for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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    Luciana de Souza Leão & Gil Eyal

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de Souza Leão, L., Eyal, G. The rise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international development in historical perspective. Theor Soc 48, 383–418 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09352-6

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