In the last 20 years, the drive for evidence‐based policymaking has been coupled with a concurrent push for the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as the “gold‐standard” for generating rigorous evidence on whether or not development interventions work. Drawing on content analysis of 63 development RCTs and 4 years of participant observation, I provide a rich description of the diverse set of actors and the transnational organizational effort required to implement development RCTs and maintain their “scientific status.” Particularly, I investigate the boundary work that proponents of RCTs—also known as randomistas—do to differentiate the purposes and merits of testing development projects from doing them, as a way to bypass the political and ethical problems presented by adopting the experimental method with foreign aid beneficiaries in poor countries. Although randomistas have been mostly successful in differentiating RCTs from the projects evaluated, I also examine cases where they were not able to do so, as a means to highlight the controversies associated with implementing RCTs in international development.

中文翻译：

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正在审判什么？在国际发展中进行野外实验。

在过去的20年中，基于证据的政策制定工作与同时使用随机对照试验（RCT）作为“金标准”的努力相结合，以产生关于发展干预措施是否有效的严格证据。借助对63个发展RCT的内容分析和4年的参与者观察，我对参与者的多样性以及实施发展RCT和维持其“科学地位”所需的跨国组织工作进行了详尽的描述。特别是，我研究了RCT的支持者（也称为随机信使）的边界工作。-区分测试开发项目的目的和优劣，以绕过贫困国家采用援助对象的试验方法所提出的政治和道德问题。尽管随机主义者在将RCT与所评估的项目区分开来方面最成功，但我还研究了他们未能做到的案例，以此突显与在国际发展中实施RCT相关的争议。