Conjuring innovation: Tech pilots as products

A recent Forbes article claimed ‘Blockchain makes cash-based humanitarian aid secure, fast and transparent’.

But how do aid professionals actually experience it?
Are these claims truly being fulfilled?
What impact does blockchain innovation have for organisations in practice?

My latest research article (Conjuring a Blockchain Pilot: Ignorance and Innovation in Humanitarian Aid) lifts the bonnet on humanitarian innovation. Based on ethnographic research in Jordan, I explore what is at stake when an aid organisation experimentally applies a blockchain pilot project in refugee camps.

This innovation, I suggest, comes with a mix of genuine promise, authentic expertise, but also blind faith and strategic ignorance.

Tech pilots aren’t just designed to help people: regardless of what they achieve, they are valuable products for aid industry actors to promote.

The Blockchain Pilot

The Blockchain Pilot was introduced to replace the traditional cash-in-hand system with a blockchain-based digital wallet, integrated with biometric iris recognition. This system aimed to improve the security, speed, and transparency of aid payments while significantly reducing costs by bypassing conventional financial intermediaries. It also promised to empower Syrian refugee women by providing them with independently held digital wallets. However, a key appeal of the pilot was its potential to attract funding and boost the organisation’s reputation among donors.

How conjuring works: Ignorance in innovation

In the paper I argue that The Blockchain Pilot was ‘conjured’ as a product to be promoted to a competitive marketplace of aid donors. In social studies of capitalist markets, ‘conjurings’ are the spectacles and magical appearances that draw an audience of investors. I suggest that conjurings are not just about appearance and show. They involve key forms of ignorance: (i) confusion, (ii) illusion, (iii) disappearance, and (iv) misdirection.

i. Confusion
Aid professionals involved in the pilot expressed confusion about blockchain. Despite being expected to represent and defend the pilot, most staff had little understanding of how blockchain operated. This confusion was not unique to this organisation. The universal mystification surrounding blockchain made promotional claims about it difficult to evaluate or refute.

ii. Illusion
Blockchain was often treated as a magic technological object capable of achieving a range of desirable effects without clear explanation. Aid professionals conflated blockchain with other features of automation or digitalisation which did not actually require blockchain. ‘Digital wallet’ was a misnomer: refugees could not access the balance and transactions record on a personal device; they could not credit money, only withdraw it; they did not have custody of the wallet, the aid organisation did.

iii. Disappearance
The hierarchical design of the system meant that aid workers did not have access to the blockchain ledger. This design reinforced existing power asymmetries within the organisation and disconnected them from valuable information. Aid workers disappeared from the aid delivery process, replaced by the private companies and biometric cameras.

iv. Misdirection
Promoting The Blockchain Pilot often involved diverting attention away from its negative impacts on people. Aid organisations focused on quantitative metrics like cost-effectiveness and transaction speed, while downplaying the social and practical challenges faced by the refugees and aid workers.

Ignorance is not an insulting term denoting simply the absence of knowledge. It is actively produced, it can be both strategic and inadvertent, and it is shaped by hierarchical power relations and neoliberal business models in aid. The politics of ignorance is therefore something we need to take seriously when we analyse organisations and technological change.

This study is not just a cautionary tale for practitioners in aid. Beyond refugee camps and beyond blockchain, the conjuring of innovation products can take precedence over delivering meaningful value to the people they enrol.