Retrospective stabilization of budgets and projects in a development program in Chiloé, Chile

Abstract

This case study addresses the fundamental role that budgets and projects, dynamic, discretionary and flexible technologies for the management, planning and distribution of resources, play in the daily concerns and practices of public officials in charge of implementing the Program of Indigenous Territorial Development (PDTI) in the central area of the Chiloé archipiélago. Based on data obtained after a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this article describes how these technologies, activated through contingent practices and stabilized retrospectively, are used for the movement of resources and as tools to overcome the obstacles posed by a public administration model that It operates through management mechanisms such as labor flexibility, performance evaluation, accountability and competition for resources. Thus, it seeks to reveal the local and contingent circumstances that participate in the stabilization of budgets freed from the conditions involved in their production, and the discretionary tools that officials use to capture and allocate resources.