Drawing on a semi‐autoethnography of a development project in northern Ethiopia, this article engages the role and power of indicators in the development sector. It both demonstrates and questions the power usually ascribed indicators when seen as an authoritative bureaucratic tool, while also showing how actors – and I was one of them – at various levels of the aid chain merely perform compliance with the indicators as a way to manage new and externally imposed demands. As the indicators ‘travel’ from the top, through the aid chain’s multiple nodes, to the level of beneficiaries, they convey policy priorities top‐down, but are seemingly complied with bottom‐up, demonstrating both their formative power and the scope for brokerage and manipulation of externally imposed policies. Interestingly, this form of brokerage and reactivity from below are also enabled and orchestrated by the top, i.e. by the same actors who conveyed the indicators, to maintain and reproduce aid relations.

中文翻译：

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遵守发展指标：援助伙伴关系中的经纪和跨国治理

本文利用埃塞俄比亚北部一个开发项目的半人种志，介绍了指标在开发部门中的作用和力量。它既显示并质疑了通常被认为是权威性官僚工具的权力所赋予的指标，同时还显示了在援助链各个层面上的参与者（我也是其中之一）如何仅遵从指标来管理新的指标以及外部施加的要求。当指标从顶部通过援助链的多个节点“遍历”到受益人的水平时，它们从上至下传达了政策重点，但似乎遵循了自下而上的原则，既展示了其形成力，又展示了经纪范围和操纵外部施加的政策。有趣的是