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 trans
parency that translation institutionalizes trough accounts, we raise an irreducible part of igno
rance and incertitude that necessarily comes with every attempt to build knowledge for govern
ance.