Science and technology have been integral issues of development cooperation for more than sixty years. Contrary to early efforts’ transfer of established technologies from the West to developing countries, contemporary technology aspirations increasingly articulate and practice the Global South as a live laboratory for technological experimentation. This approach is especially furthered by a group of private foundations and philanthrocapitalists whose endeavors in developing countries are, like their companies, shaped by logics of the individual, the market, and of societal progress through technological innovation and experimentation. This article draws upon critical intellectual thought about the political and social ramifications of technology to reflect on the renascent role of technology in development cooperation. It traces the discourses and practices of philanthrocapitalist organizations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand how their experimentalist technology aspirations influence human life and relations in the Global South. This article argues that this newfound focus on technology in development cooperation may challenge the essence of democracy, reduce participation, and have undesirable consequences for populations in the Global South.

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This article explores how ideas and practices manifested in a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project on women’s access to land are continuously remade and transformed as they move through the many layers towards implementation. The article builds a theoretical framework that lets us understand development projects as systems of continuous meaning negotiation and translation. It then discusses the particular project’s three dominant reconfigurations of gender and women—from instrumentalizing, to legal-institutional, to transformative and deeply political understandings of the project—as it is continuously remade on its way from headquarter and towards implementation in the Indian state of Odisha.

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