The ever growing number of governance indicators has enabled the evaluation of numerous dimensions of personal and actual social relations in different societies around the world. Some of these indicators evaluate immediate social relationships in a contradictory manner, such as corruption indicators on the one hand and attempts to create indicators of social capital on the other hand. Corruption indicators seem to implicitly evaluate actual social relationships as having a negative impact on “development”: precisely, illicit connections between actual persons are seen to be at the root of corrupt social structures of societies. But this type of relationship is evaluated entirely different within the discourse on “social capital”: here it is precisely these types of solidarity “instantiated in actual social relationships” (Fukuyama) that facilitate “development”. That is, while immediate social relationships are seen as the cause of underdevelopment in the anti-corruption discourse, experts evaluate them positively in the discourse on social capital. These contradictory theoretical evaluations – and thus experts’ evaluations - of social relationships are made visible and governable via the respective indicators, which then open up space for extensive power structures in global north-south relations. The paper seeks to deconstruct this specific type of power-relations by looking at this contradictory discourse brought forward by several institutions, among them by the World Bank.
