Indicators as a Form of Resistance Colombian Community Mothers: An Example of the Global South's Use of Indicators as a Counter-Hegemonic Global Dominance Technique

Resumo

Whereas mainstream critical literature affirms that indicators are a new global form of North-South domination, people in the global south do not experience these indicators as such. In some ways, some social movements have used the discourse surrounding indicators to obtain monetary and symbolic capital. This article analyzes these indicators as a form of resistance, destabilizing traditional criticism of the discourse. The Community Mothers case study, developed between June 2012 and February 2013, shows how street-level bureaucrats use the indicators as an empowerment mechanism. The Community Mothers display an undocumented agency that develops a feminist agenda of helping fellow women, contrary to the government agenda that promotes childcare and the early childhood program policies. In this sense, the fieldwork undertaken portrays mothers and children as conflicting actors. Despite this, the social policy indicators hide this conflict reproducing the normative image that ideologically links mothers with their children. The results of this research project reveal, therefore, that the global south plays an unexpected role in the power dynamics inherent to the indicator. It presents a very different version of the history of global governance to the one that portrays unidirectional and structural domination offered by neocolonialism, in which the south always loses.