Experiments in the Wild: a Historical Perspective on the Rise of Randomized Controlled Trials in International Development.

This paper brings a historical perspective to understand the recent dissemination of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the new "gold standard" method to assess the success (and failure) of poverty alleviation efforts. Although the buzz around RCT evaluations dates from the 2000s, we show that the experimental approach has a much longer pedigree in the field of development economics. Indeed, what we are witnessing now is a second wave of RCTs in international development, while a first wave took place in the 1970s and has ended by the early 1980s. In this paper, we contrast the first and second waves as cases of "reiterated problemsolving" (Haydu 1998) to analyze the practical, legal and methodological obstacles that made RCTs ultimately unviable in the 1970s, and thus highlight the transformations and strategies that made possible their resurgence in the 2000s. Our argument is that the contemporary expansion of RCTs can only be understood in a context of the privatization of foreign aid and the multiple new dynamics associated with it, which allowed randomistas to effectively change what it means to evaluate development policy. We rely on a rich set of archival data, policy documents and academic papers to show how differences in the network of actors, modes of presentation, scale of interventions and funding opportunities between the first and second waves explain the relative impracticality and consequent discontinuation of RCTs in the 1970s, in contrast to their rapid expansion now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]