4 min readMar 12, 2026 06:19 AM IST
First published on: Mar 12, 2026 at 06:19 AM IST
The 21st century saw the emergence of a new philosophy for voluntary organisations. Good intentions were no longer enough, scale and outcome monitoring became the new gold standard. The California consensus, driven by the philanthropic impulses of tech billionaires, impatiently sought rapid societal change rooted in science and technology. This was a departure from the philosophy of institution-building favoured by foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. The traditional idea of selfless service was no longer sufficient; new philanthropists demanded measurable results. Ostensibly, it made sense that recipients of public funding should be held accountable. But what if this search for scale and accountability is ultimately counterproductive?
Microfinance programmes have been praised for high repayment rates in group lending to women by Grameen Bank and BRAC. However, Anne Marie Goetz and Rina Sen Gupta find that pressure on fieldworkers and group members to achieve high repayment rates has led them to selectively choose recipients based on their ability to repay, often excluding the poorest, least educated, and least connected. When outcome measures become the main criteria for judging programmes and institutions, it is not surprising that they lose sight of their original goals and become focused on maximising performance on outcome metrics.
Randomised evaluations, the foundation of rigorous programme assessment, are complex and often methodologically fraught. What happens in one place can influence another. Analysis of the effect of savings groups on income in Uganda and Malawi by Christopher Heitzig and Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan finds that rising incomes in villages that implemented savings groups also impacted nearby villages. As a result, about 23-28 per cent of the programme’s benefits were not captured. Without careful attention to spillover effects, we might wrongly conclude that a programme has failed even when it has succeeded.
A focus on scale introduces other challenges. Transformative social programmes are often bottom-up, emphasising processes that need participation and buy-in from local communities. They may not be easily scaled, and the idea that a programme is only valuable if it can reach hundreds of millions of people might be counterproductive. In their book, John List and colleagues enumerate examples of projects that fail to scale globally. Closer to home, consider Lok Jumbish, a primary education programme in Rajasthan. Lok Jumbish was a highly participatory programme in which the community was mobilised to create a village education plan. It was so successful that the World Bank and the Indian government collaborated to scale up some of these ideas into a larger District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) that eventually covered 272 districts and 18 states as a centrally sponsored scheme.
A comparison of Lok Jumbish and DPEP by Tomako Kobayashi highlights their differences and notes the shallow local participation in Village Education Committees of DPEP compared to the deep, passionate engagement in Lok Jumbish. Evaluation of DPEP by the World Bank shows that while the programme was successful in increasing initial enrolment, it did not achieve its goal of reducing dropout rates or improving learning achievement.
Arguably, the most significant critique of the California consensus — which has now entered the vocabulary of Indian philanthropy and policymaking — is that it has shifted the landscape of civil society activism from passion and commitment to technocracy. In a climate where outcome monitoring, scaling up, and sustainability are the main buzzwords, grassroots organisations that speak from the heart are likely to be deprived of resources and public attention.
India is home to some of the greatest transformative movements — Satyagraha and non-violence, land reform, dairy cooperatives, the Chipko Movement — all rooted in grassroots civic action. Each was a leap of faith, each generated energy that gave rise to a nation of a thousand movements. Let us not allow the space for civic action to shrink in the pursuit of the holy grail of outcome monitoring.
The writer is professor, NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre and University of Maryland. Views are personal
