2024/09/02 by Fiona Gedeon Achi · 1 voice · 1 citation
Nursing · Social Sciences · #Child Nutrition and Water Access #Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact #Water Governance and Infrastructure
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/sea2.12329
openalex publication_date 2024/09/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Abstract This article analyzes the politics of scale in global development by focusing on a sanitation program in western Kenya. It follows the daily work of a nongovernmental organization that seeks to provide access to chlorine dispensers to millions of people for the purpose of disinfecting water. By engaging with literatures on development and infrastructure, this article proposes reach as an analytic that jointly attends to the aspirations, labors, and uncertain outcomes embedded in scale work. An ethnography of reach emphasizes the temporality of off‐grid infrastructures to capture the ambivalent relationships between aspirations and results and between standardization and adaptation, as well as the unstable nature of care. This proves useful to theorizing expansion as potentially generative of, rather than only inimical to, the good life—thereby troubling the vision of scale making as replication often used to understand development projects and their consequences.