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Conjuring a Blockchain Pilot: Ignorance and Innovation in Humanitarian Aid

2024; Taylor & Francis; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14650045.2024.2389284

1557-3028

Margie Cheesman,

Global Security and Public Health

When aid professionals adopt high tech pilot projects, ignorance, blind faith, misplaced trust, and authentic expertise all come into play. Based on ethnographic research in Jordan, I examine how a refugee aid organisation produces and applies a blockchain pilot. Innovative pilots help international aid organisations attract and maintain their funding sources and reputations. I argue that The Blockchain Pilot is 'conjured' as a product to be promoted to a marketplace of aid donors. 'Conjurings' are the spectacles and magical appearances that draw an audience of investors. Ethnographic research suggests that conjurings drive capitalist markets. Rather than just requiring knowledge and expertise, I argue that conjurings entail key forms of ignorance: (i) confusion, (ii) illusion, (iii) disappearance, and (iv) misdirection. This ignorance is both strategic and inadvertent. Ignorance, just like knowledge, is shaped by hierarchical power relations. The organisation's experimental adoption of a blockchain database system benefits some stakeholders (innovators, private partners) more than others (local aid workers and refugees). The conjuring of the pilot is what justifies the adoption of blockchain, even though a simple database would have sufficed.