Technomoral Inclusion

Development is inherently a moral project towards ‘visions of a better world’ (Yarrow 2011: x), whether conceptualised as an ‘interpretive grid’ of dominant ideologies (Ferguson 1990: xiii) or as an ‘aidland’ with a ‘world of aid professionals’ (Apthorpe cited in Mosse 2011: vii). A ‘moral fervour’ underscores development discourses (Bornstein and Redfield 2011; see also Fassin 2012). This moral fervour of implementing projects assumed to be ‘good’ in the Global South and funded by organisations in the Global North holds echoes of colonial legacies and logics of saviourism, bringing attention to the entanglements (Mbembe 2019) of current top-down development policies in postcolonial contexts. In this section, I examine how Leave No One Behind is a prominent moral priority of development that creates top-down expectations for inclusion efforts that reach select marginalised groups in ways that align with predetermined indicators of the SDGs.

Within the framework of the SDGs, the ‘rallying cry’ (Samman 2017) of Leave No One Behind exemplifies this moral tone of development. Leave No One Behind is ‘taking explicit action to end extreme poverty, curb inequalities, confront discrimination and fast-track progress for the furthest behind’ (UNDP 2018). In 2015, with 194 UN member states, Ghana adopted the SDGs and the value of Leave No One Behind. Building on its model status of achievement under the previous MDGs, Ghana aligned the SDGs with its national development plans. Talk about the SDGs was ubiquitous across government speeches, civil society events and development projects, to the extent that the SDG logo was papered on the walls outside Accra's airport. Alongside this SDG adoption was support for the Leave No One Behind value. In my observations of NGO and government events, Leave No One Behind permeated everyday language. It was so prevalent as to become an often-used cliché. For instance, in arranging a group photo following an NGO network meeting, someone worried about being included and called, ‘we shouldn't leave anybody behind’.

Its widespread adoption suggests that Leave No One Behind remained unburdened by the political and systemic reasons why some people were ‘left behind’. UN documents on the definition of Leave No One Behind are general, leaving it up to each country to conduct ‘Leave No One Behind assessments’ to ‘examine’ who is left behind, ‘empower’ those groups and ‘enact’ policies to address inequalities (UNDP 2018). In my observations of SDG implementation among NGOs in Ghana, Leave No One Behind tended to coalesce around certain groups of people, namely people with disabilities, women, youth and the rural poor. This focus was not based on assessments, from what I observed, but on interpretations that aligned with existing development priorities and moral framings of marginalisation. I rarely, if ever, heard Leave No One Behind used in reference to religious inclusion, class inequality, inclusion of marginalised ethnic groups or with regard to sexual diversity, which are sensitive issues in Ghana. Tania Murray Li (2007) refers to such topics that are outside the frame of consideration as ‘constitutive exclusions’. Inclusivity was limited to framings that had widespread currency, were not overly thorny and could translate to technical terms.

Within the NGO network, Leave No One Behind became especially synonymous with including people with disabilities. Under the MDGs, ‘disability was nowhere to be seen’ (Grech and Soldatic 2016: 5). As a result of lobbying by disability advocates, SDG targets specifically included indicators that track the inclusion of people with disabilities (Grech and Soldatic 2016; Shakespeare 2012). Anthropologists critique how children have been a ‘moral referent’ of development and humanitarianism, framed as the good ‘victim’ requiring intervention (Moeller 2002; see also Malkki 2015). The focus of Leave No One Behind in Ghana constituted people with disabilities as a moral referent. Where Leave No One Behind encourages NGOs to reach the ‘most’ marginalised, people with disabilities were, to use Miriam Ticktin's (2011) phrase, a ‘morally legitimate suffering body’, produced as exceptional cases requiring a moral imperative of intervention. While NGOs continued to track the inclusion of women, youth and people in rural areas in their programmes, for example, there was particular moral fervour around reaching people with disabilities. I suggest it is the notable moral valence that made the inclusion of people with disabilities fused to ideas of Leave No One Behind in Ghana.

Audit structures of development, in which NGOs in Ghana are embedded, shaped NGO efforts of moral inclusion. Audit logics permeate how institutions across sectors operate, governing through rationales of metrics, targets and evaluations (Rose 1999; Shore and Wright 2015; Strathern 2003). NGOs in Ghana were governed through such managerial rationales, as technical audits made them legible to their donors (Vannier 2010). The donors had headquarters in the Global North (North America and Europe) and included bilateral development agencies as well as prominent international NGOs. If NGOs could show in their reports that they had targeted and tracked the participation of specific groups, the NGOs received successful evaluations, a good reputation and an ongoing stream of projects on which they relied for their sustainability (Bawa 2013; Frimpong 2017). As Mosse (2005) argues, development evaluations are judgements not necessarily about what happened, but about how a project was interpreted in relation to a set of pre-designed indicators. Under Leave No One Behind, the inclusion of specific groups of people deemed to be marginalised became predesigned indicators of evaluation. As a moral group framed as needing inclusion, people with disabilities became targets of development programmes in Ghana in such a way that could be measured technically, enabling NGOs that reached these groups to prove to donors their alignment with hegemonic global development policies. In other words, the NGO network used data disaggregated participation tracking that was articulated in ways that could translate contexts from NGO events in Ghana to donors based in Europe and the United States. Moreover, such indicators were comparable between NGOs, positioning some NGOs as doing better at inclusion than others. Those indicators were not detached tracking of value-neutral numbers, but rather a technical approach that privileged highly active efforts to do ‘good’ participation.

Decades of participatory development approaches targeted at increasing the involvement of the poor have used such technocratic approaches, which scholars critique for their depoliticising effects that reproduce existing power structures (Cooke and Kothari 2001; Li 2007; Mosse 2013). Yet, such approaches retained their prominence and, in my observations, became further entrenched as a moral good. NGOs in particular are framed as those that are ‘supposed to be good at doing good’, and centring Leave No One Behind in their work affirmed this position (Sampson 2017: 9; see also Fisher 1997). Leave No One Behind ‘is the beautiful thing about the SDGs’, proclaimed a leader of the NGO network. Their technical uptake of this value through audit mechanisms of tracking against indicators positioned the network as righteous.

The concept of ‘technomoral politics’ from Bornstein and Sharma (2016) is useful for examining the intersection of morally underpinned inclusion with techniques of audits. In their study of NGOs in India, Bornstein and Sharma demonstrate how non-state actors use judicial means, human rights language and other technocratic procedures to position themselves as moral actors vis-à-vis the state. Bornstein and Sharma (2016) show how values-based approaches render techniques of development into moral goods and NGOs operationalise such moral positions through techno-legal tactics. I use this technomoral analytic to study the coalescing moral values with technical audit mechanisms in the governance of NGO practices of inclusion.

‘Scoring Marks’

In July 2019, the Minister of Planning for Ghana reported to the UN in New York on the first four years of SDG implementation. After speaking to the gathered global representatives, the Minister guided a civil society representative to the podium. The civil society representative, a visually impaired person wearing dark glasses, stood a head taller than the Minister and wore traditional attire with a strip of kente cloth reading ‘Ghana’ draped around his shoulders. He spoke about civil society's support for the SDGs. At the end of the presentation, the livestreamed video followed as the Minister led the civil society representative to the table behind the podium. The presentation garnered a high degree of interest in Ghana, especially the participation of a civil society representative and a person with a disability. In real time, NGO staff in New York shared video clips, pictures and quotes from the presentation over WhatsApp with their colleagues in Ghana. The ‘beauty’ of the presentation, a government press release noted, was the inclusion of a civil society presentation, describing how it was delivered by ‘a visually impaired person who was guided from the lectern to his seat by the Minister’. The press releases did not mention the decades of expertise the civil society representative had on disability inclusion in Ghana or their work with one of the major national disability advocacy organisations. In this section, I examine the ways that representation was an important indication of alignment with Leave No One Behind for NGOs and how donors and NGOs often celebrated representation as successful inclusion.

With greater attention on representation of people with disabilities at events, Leave No One Behind brought recognition to civil society advocates with experience in inclusivity and provided a platform aligned with hegemonic global discourses of the SDGs for organisations and individuals with decades of advocacy expertise on issues of accessibility. Back in Ghana, the civil society representative who spoke in New York expressed to me his pride in having been selected and that it showed ‘an absolute overwhelming vote of confidence in PWDs [persons with disabilities] in this country’. Ghana has ‘a relatively robust disability movement’ (Guerts and Komabu-Pomeyie 2016: 86). With disability-focused organisations dating back to the 1960s, Ghana has many regional and national organisations. The civil society speaker was part of these long-time efforts on inclusion in Ghana and had the opportunity to speak to this experience during a national report to a multilateral development agency at the UN.

Following Ghana's presentation in New York, a representative from Germany noted that Ghana is a ‘stable democracy’ (another key descriptor of its ‘model’ status) and commended the participation of civil society in reporting on the SDGs. A Danish representative similarly remarked: ‘we commend the government for its efforts to involve a wide range of stakeholders in its [report]’. Both Germany and Denmark are major bilateral donors in Ghana. These comments from donors highlighted that the success of Ghana's report was produced (Mosse 2005) both by the content of the report and by the representation of civil society and a diversity of stakeholders in presenting the report's findings.

Ghanaian NGOs leaders I spoke with perceived that these commendations from donor countries resulted, in part, from the alignment with principles of inclusion. ‘We did it deliberately’, one NGO leader explained to me in reference to nominating a person with a disability to speak at the UN. He added, ‘if I had done it, I wouldn't have scored those marks’. Not all disabilities are apparent, but in this case, the representative's disability was apparent and could be marked in videos and photos. Ticktin has shown that such choices of who is selected to represent a group or issue is often based on their affective power to ‘trigger sympathy, raise awareness, and gain resources’ (2017: 585). While the purpose of the presentation was to assess progress towards the SDGs and the civil society representative was an expert in this area, the representation of who gave the presentation also enacted Ghana's successful alignment with Leave No One Behind.

NGOs that operate in donor-dependent contexts are ‘deliberate’, to use the term of the NGO leader, about meeting donor expectations and shifting their discourses to reflect global development priorities. In audit-dominated contexts, evaluation measurements become targets, as improvement is built into the ethos of audits (Strathern 1996). I observed that the staff of the NGO network, who were professionals with university education and decades of expertise in development reporting, were adept at meeting expectations of the evaluation indicators by which donors assessed their projects. NGO staff translated the value of Leave No One Behind into trackable metrics to report on the participation of groups that could fall under the category of ‘left behind’. For example, the NGO network used attendance forms that all participants signed, in which they were asked to self-identify as belonging to pre-identified categories, including identifying as a person with disabilities (because of self-identification, these forms would track both apparent and not apparent disabilities). Such forms rely on self-identification, but research shows that statistics attempting to ‘count disability’ are challenging and inadequate (Eide and Loeb 2016; Fujiura and Ritkowski-Kmitta 2001) and self-identification processes hold risks of stigma (Lockhart 2018). Network staff then submitted these forms and their disaggregated data of participant representation in reports to donors, which donors used to assess whether the network met expectations of inclusion.

The stakes of such donor assessments were significant, as individual technomoral judgements coalesced into decisions about future funding for the network. At a larger scale, these assessments accumulated to the ‘development darling’ status that the entire country of Ghana held and its levels of foreign assistance. Importantly, this is not to suggest that NGOs in Ghana were more ‘behind’ in efforts at inclusion or only ‘mimicking’ what they thought donors wanted. In fact, research shows that NGOs in the Global North are similarly focused on ‘upward accountability’ techniques of reporting that are legible to their funders (Crawford et al 2018; Ebrahim 2005). Moreover, disability advocacy organisations in Ghana have worked on inclusion efforts for decades before Leave No One Behind and before donors required data-disaggregated participation forms. With the shift Leave No One Behind, donors expected a wider group of NGOs, beyond those with expertise in disability inclusion, to show efforts to reach the most marginalised in their audit reports.

Failures to meet donor requirements resulted in worry for NGO staff over the potential effects on their funding or reputation. For example, a manager of an NGO explained to me that at a recent training for agro-chemical dealers, most participants were men, despite their efforts to invite diverse participants. This unbalanced participation was going to be a problem in their donor report, the manager explained to me. The manager lamented that the donor report would miss how the small number of women who attended were active participants and had a strong voice in the training, obscured by the technical failure of low representation. Even though representation is important, it can be limited if not paired with efforts to address the systemic reasons for the existing underrepresentation (Cameron et al 2019). While representations, including of persons with disabilities, are always socially produced (Mitchell and Snyder 2001), the everyday enactment of Leave No One Behind was focused on ‘scoring marks’ in technical reports, which framed inclusion as an issue of who was in the room, rather than the experiences in that room, to which I turn next.

‘We Will Not Leave You Behind’

In 2019, I attended a training on the SDGs for journalists that was organised by the government and the NGO network with the aim of strengthening media coverage of the goals. The NGO network made a special effort to invite journalists affiliated with a disability advocacy organisation in Ghana. Because of the network's collaboration with the disability advocacy organisation, many participants who signed the attendance form, which requested disaggregated self-identification, identified as people with disabilities. A European donor funded the training and required the network to submit a report with a section on how the event was inclusive. The donor required information on ‘the extent to which your activities have contributed to and enabled disadvantaged groups – women, children, PWDs [people with disabilities], children, youth and other vulnerable people’. As part of my participant observation, network staff sometimes asked me to support the preparation of these reports, such as gathering the necessary ‘modes of verification’ as evidence for the report, including participant lists. For this training, the network submitted the participant list with disaggregated indicators for the participation of women and people with disabilities and included a narrative showcasing the collaboration with the disability advocacy organisation. While audits are allegedly meant to be value-neutral processes (Bear and Mathur 2015; Shore and Wright 2015), technical reports to donors explicitly require alignment with values of inclusivity. In this case, the report showed the participation of people with disabilities and fulfilled that section of the donor's criteria. Yet, research shows that a focus on disability statistics can obscure lived realities and the complexity of inequalities in Ghana (Cutajar and Adjoe 2016). In this case, the successful technical indicators in the report failed to capture the contradictory outcomes of inaccessibility that took place in practice at the training.

The NGO network leaders were proud of their partnership with the disability advocacy organisation, were enthusiastic about learning how to include people with disabilities in their events and made efforts to foster relationships with experts. For example, the network gave presentations on the SDGs at the office of the disability advocacy organisation they worked with for this training, had staff offer support in drafting a report on disability and the SDGs, and invited representatives from their organisation to most events. NGO network staff were eager, as I will show in the next section, to build their expertise on inclusion, as reaching the most marginalised was one of the ways that the network positioned its contribution to achieving the SDGs compared to other contributing groups, including government and private sector. Most of the members of the network had worked on inclusion for decades under the mantra of participatory development but were shifting to a greater focus on reaching people with disabilities under the umbrella of Leave No One Behind. As I show in this section, although upwards accountability to donors was not the sole impetus for network staff's practices of inclusion, a focus on inclusion practices that would be legible to donors shaped how network staff approached inclusion as representation, which was not always informed by how to make events accessible.

The workshop for journalists began like most development events in Accra, with the Chairperson introducing the agenda. As was often my role during participant observation, I joined the event as a note-taker for the network. The few dozen participants sat around a large boardroom table, each with a printed copy of the agenda. One of the journalists who had left the agenda on the table interrupted the Chairperson: ‘we are talking about leaving no one behind, and yet I do not have a copy of the documents in braille’. A government official responded, ‘yes, this is a problem and one of the areas that has been slow is translating the SDGs and documents into local languages and braille’. She suggested that the government hold a special meeting with representatives of the disability advocacy organisation to discuss a communications strategy for reaching people with disabilities. ‘The SDGs says that we should Leave No One Behind, and we will not leave you behind’, she concluded proudly.

Even with this expressed commitment to Leave No One Behind, steps had not been taken to ask attendees and address what barriers might exist for their engagement. ‘A social model of disability has not yet taken hold throughout Ghana’, note Kathryn Guerts and Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie (2016: 86). The social model of disability is one ‘whereby limitations/hindrances arise in a person's interactions with environmental barriers rather than as a consequence of an individualised impairment or inherent limitation’ (Grischow and Mfoafo-M'Carthy 2022: 9). In an interview with Ebenezer,² a disability advocate in Ghana whose expertise features prominently in the next section, he explained to me that NGO organisers did not always provide the accommodations he needed. Accommodations remove barriers to enable the full participation of all. For example, he sometimes had to pay for the costs of his aide to travel with him when he was invited to share his expertise, even if his own transportation was covered. ‘When you want to include PWDs’, Ebenezer explained, ‘you need to resource the reasonable accommodation for their participation and not just once or twice, but every single time’. Ebenezer commended the NGO network for inviting persons with disabilities to events but described the efforts as ‘not full inclusion’. While the network had been ‘representational’, which ‘makes a statement’, he reflected, ‘they need to continue to go beyond that’. Ebenezer distinguished between representation that ticked the box on a technical report and a social model that removed barriers that created exclusions in the first place, such as accessible venues, documents provided in accessible formats and extra budget earmarked for accommodations. Again, such challenges are not unique to Ghana or NGOs, as the social model of disability is one that advocates continue to promote in the Global North as well (Barnes 2012).

The influence of technomoral approaches in development shaped how NGOs approached the value of Leave No One Behind. It took labour on the part of NGO staff to produce a successful training by targeting specific groups of people to invite, creating lists of participants that would make legible the presence of targeted groups and discursively committing to global values of inclusion. Such technomoral framings can contract the meaning of inclusivity in practice, however, especially when success is limited to representation without accountability for broader exclusions in those spaces. In other words, successful inclusion within the context of development audit judgements may still be inaccessible in practice. Even in moments where the success was called out as a failure, such as the participant bringing attention to not having the agenda in an accessible format, the government staff fell back on the discursive commitment to inclusion and affirmed their alignment with Leave No One Behind, even without changes taking place at that event. While appearing benevolent and moral, such technomoral approaches to inclusivity entrench the power of existing ‘upwards accountability’ (Ebrahim 2005) structures of reporting instead of an approach informed by social needs and relations in practice. As I show in the next section, these moral efforts took on a more relationship-based than technical tenor when the network learned about inclusion from expert peers in disability advocacy NGOs.

‘I Need You in Every Meeting’

Efforts to meet the criteria of technomoral donor-facing accountability only offer part of the story of the moral fervour network staff exhibited in their inclusion work. While NGO staff were experts at manoeuvring development discourses and their reporting accountability tended to be donor-facing (Mohan 2002), the uptake to fulfil the idea of Leave No One Behind cannot be solely understood as NGOs consumed by development audits. The increasingly moralised framing of participation under Leave No One Behind included affective registers of pride and virtuosity for NGO staff. Organisers were proud of the participation of people with disabilities in their events and the relationships they developed with disability advocates, even if there were limitations in practice. The moral valence of Leave No One Behind aligned with the ways NGO staff constituted their moral position of doing ‘good’ and disability inclusion became a new type of expertise that NGO workers could develop.

Two dozen members of the NGO network gathered around tables in an ornately decorated conference room in Kumasi, Ghana's second biggest city, where they participated in a training workshop on the SDGs. Ebenezer delivered the first presentation of the workshop, facilitating a two-hour session on the intersections of disability within the SDGs. With a position at an academic institution, Ebenezer also worked as a senior staff member in a disability-rights advocacy organisation and the NGO network invited him to the workshop to share his expertise. As a visually impaired person himself, Ebenezer was active among Ghana's disability organisations and had considerable experience working on issues of accessibility. As a professional and NGO worker, Ebenezer was a peer to the other NGO staff gathered in Kumasi. In contrast to the more representation-focused techniques of inclusion that would be legible to donors, the network developed a horizontal form of accountability with its members who were people with disabilities. These relationships fostered more inclusive practices in the network and greater expertise in inclusion, which led network staff and members to shift to using inclusive language, ensure their meetings were held in accessible venues and advocate for the SDG indicators that benefited people with disabilities.

Beginning his presentation at the Kumasi workshop with language, Ebenezer requested of the group, ‘please use the term “Persons with Disabilities” to refer to those living with impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions’. Turning to the SDGs, Ebenezer enumerated thirteen targets that required disaggregated data to track the experiences of people with disabilities. Encouraging participants to go beyond these targets, Ebenezer underlined, ‘all seventeen goals affect PWDs under the principle of universality’. Ebenezer discussed each goal in turn, describing how accessibility was relevant to its indicators. For instance, under the fourth goal of universal education, he enumerated barriers to education for people with disabilities in Ghana. ‘It is estimated that 90 percent of children with disabilities do not attend school in developing countries and are much more likely to drop out of school after elementary education because of barriers to further progression’, he explained. He provided similar facts about social exclusions under the other sixteen goals as well. ‘The needs of PWD have to be considered and included in the implementation of SDGs’, he concluded. His presentation prompted the group to see the systemic inequalities for people with disabilities embedded in social life, going beyond a representational approach. Interestingly, Ebenezer argued that inclusion was the morally right thing to do and that the SDGs’ technical indicators required intervention in this area. His approach exemplified a technomoral framing that was nonetheless consistent with a social model of disability.

Ebenezer's participation was one of the markers of the workshop's technical success in meeting the inclusivity indicators required by the donors who funded the training, paying for the hotel, accommodations and meals. The network included Ebenezer's participation in the reports to the donors. The network sent the donors a list of participants disaggregated by gender and ability, a workshop agenda that highlighted Ebenezer's presentation, and a narrative explanation of how the training specifically made efforts towards inclusivity.

Technical reports to donors, however, did not capture the affective tenor of the relationship nor the depth of the ongoing relationship that the NGO network built with Ebenezer. The NGO leaders around the conference room were rapt during Ebenezer's presentation, and I watched, again participating as the network's note-taker, as network members took careful notes. Over the course of the next two days of the workshop, Ebenezer continued to bring attention to inclusivity. For instance, when the group discussed the ability of children to talk to NGOs, Ebenezer clarified, ‘by children who can talk you mean children that can communicate’. Everyone in the conference room responded with a positive ‘eiiiee’, acknowledging the correction. ‘I need you in every meeting’, the workshop facilitator smiled and thanked Ebenezer. The feedback forms following the workshop, which I helped the network to collate, evidenced the pride among participants in accessing this training and gaining skills in accessibility. Later, network leaders praised Ebenezer's contributions as a highlight of recent activities and decided to organise a follow-up training for other members. Ebenezer's participation in the network continued, as he shared his expertise during events over the course of the following months. The network also built a closer relationship with the disability-rights organisation he worked with and allocated support to the organisation in drafting a report on addressing inequalities based on ability in the implementation of the SDGs in Ghana.

I read the affective register of the other NGO staff who adopted each of Ebenezer's recommendations as pride, which I understood as linked to their strengthened capacity and expertise in working towards a morally ‘good’ approach to development. In an interview with Ebenezer after the Kumasi workshop, he told me that he participated in the network as he hopes to engender inclusiveness across all those working on the SDGs, so that it is owned by all and not just organisations like his. Ebenezer told me that he thought Leave No One Behind was a ‘crucial principle’ of the SDGs, because, he explained, it made ‘disability everybody's issue’. In her research on institutional diversity work, Sara Ahmed (2016) illustrates that diversity work requires labour and an affective ‘willfulness’ to push against what she refers to as a ‘brick wall’. I observed that Ebenezer's pushing required a significant amount of labour, with presentations and trainings, recurring reminders and corrections on language, and constant prompts on the ways the work could be more accessible. In this case, however, the NGO network staff and members were receptive to Ebenezer's corrections, prompts and suggestions, and responded with attention, action and pride.

For instance, the network asked Ebenezer to comment on their national SDG report. Ebenezer noted to me that he was impressed with the receptiveness to his ideas, as the network staff adopted most of his suggestions. The network staff disaggregated the report's data and dedicated a section to the needs of people with disabilities. The network made other changes with the support of Ebenezer and his NGO: preparing a list of accessible venues to use for events, sharing documents in advance in Word and PDF formats to all participants, and correcting each other's language to be inclusive. The network also gave Ebenezer a leadership position on their governance committee, where his participation extended beyond his expertise on inclusivity to contribute to all matters of the network. These changes moved towards giving greater decision-making power to Ebenezer and disability-focused NGOs within the network, which aligned with calls by disability advocates to move beyond ‘tokenistic and box-ticking’ towards greater decision-making involvement (Grech and Soldatic 2016: 8).

In this case, technomoral governance structures continued to influence the NGO network's ‘upwards accountability’, but a longer-term, horizontal and relational accountability also developed with Ebenezer. Ebenezer's engagement with the network evidences the kind of relational accountability that can develop among NGOs and peers in the Global South and what inclusion, beyond ‘scoring marks’, might look like. Ebenezer's suggestions held purchase with the network, at least in part, because of their alignment with the global value of Leave No One Behind and with technomoral indicators of successful inclusion. Yet, forms of judgement that are possible in technocratic audits cannot account for the long-term relationship that the network developed with Ebenezer and his organisation. While NGOs are subsumed in technomoral forms of governance, expectations to Leave No One Behind opened the door for relational forms of accountability.

Conclusion

Where the NGO network's leadership saw the government as holding overarching responsibility for Ghana's progress on the SDGs, they articulated their role, at least in part, as ensuring that no one was left behind in the implementation of the global goals. Technomoral governance is a helpful analytic to illuminate the ways that ideas of participation were couched in increasingly moral terms as the right thing to do, positioning NGOs that assumed such techniques as more virtuous than others against which they competed for funding. The prevalence of Leave No One Behind in Ghana aligned those NGOs with global development discourses and ‘good’ development, but it also reaffirmed the SDGs and the Leave No One Behind agenda, further entrenching this morally underpinned approach to development and the power of global policy agendas in everyday practice. As Mosse notes, ‘development proceeds not only (or primarily) from policy to practice, but also from practice to policy’ (2005: 182). The moral tenor of these indicators as the ‘good’ way to approach development constituted inclusion ideas as beyond reproach and folded the upwards accountability structures in which inclusion was practised as similarly moral and, therefore, unquestionable. The coalescing of technical indicators with moral frames under Leave No One Behind was powerful because of the ways it reproduced existing accountability structures and inclusion priorities. Technomoral approaches can have depoliticising effects (Ferguson 1990) when inclusion is embedded in structures of upwards accountability. Such technical approaches can privilege predetermined indicators of representation rather than systemically addressing root causes of social exclusions, centring grassroots experts, or including forms of social exclusion that may fall outside widely accepted target groups or issues. Critical questions about what is left out of efforts to Leave No One Behind are particularly relevant in this moment as the Government of Ghana considers passing a national law on legal restrictions on sexuality.

Looking behind cases assessed as technically successful, however, illustrates that moral judgements say little about, and can even obscure, the everyday reality of Leave No One Behind. The relations of power in development in which donor agencies set indicators and develop evaluation criteria that NGOs must meet to sustain their funding scope how NGOs implemented Leave No One Behind. Because the moral project of inclusion was translated into a predetermined scope of technical mechanisms legible in donor reports, the systems that prevented the active engagement of marginalised groups did not need to be addressed for donors to assess events as successful. I found that data-driven participation did not solve Leave No One Behind, as the government official quoted in the introduction suggested, but it did affect NGOs’ efforts at inclusion and created space for relational accountability to develop within and beyond technomoral logics.

Ebenezer's role with the NGO network offered a different approach to inclusion, one that fostered a relationship in which he held his peers accountable for considering the language they used, the social exclusions in the events they planned and the social inequalities experienced by people with disabilities in Ghana. ‘Treat statistics as a means rather than as an end’, Glenn Fujiura and Violet Ritkowski-Kmitta (2001: 93) recommend, when considering tracking disability indicators. Similarly, technomoral practices of inclusion should be treated as a starting point from which more meaningful relations of accountability can build. This relational accountability was still, for the moment, closely tied to donor audits and hegemonic technical requirements set by multilateral organisations, and whether these efforts will shift to centre systemic social exclusions remains to be seen. The relational accountability that created space for people like Ebenezer to voice and claim their needs shows the potential of shifting to a social model of inclusion. The SDGs are an ambitious array of social, environmental and economic global objectives, and we need to better understand inclusivity beyond its technomoral bounds if the goals are to avoid having success in technical reports while reproducing existing structures of inequality.