What’s on trial? The making of field experiments in international development

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...