Implementing Inequality

Rebecca Warne Peters ’00 argues in Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development (Rutgers University Press, 2020) that if international development is to meet its larger purpose, it must first address its internal inequalities of work and professional class. Through an ethnographic study in postwar Angola, she introduces the innovative concept of the “development implementariat”: those in-country workers, largely but not exclusively local staff members, charged with carrying out development’s policy prescriptions. The implementariat is central to the development endeavor but remains overlooked and under-supported.