The Biometric Imaginary: Bureaucratic Technopolitics in Post-Apartheid Welfare
By Kevin P. Donovan. 2015
Starting in March 2012, the South African government engaged in a massive effort of citizen registration that continued for more than a year. Nearly 19 million social welfare beneficiaries enrolled in a novel biometric identification scheme that uses fingerprints and voice recognition to authenticate social grant recipients. This article seeks to understand the meaning of biometric technology in post-apartheid South African welfare through a study of the bureaucratic and policy elite's motivation. It argues that biometric technology was conceived of and implemented as the most recent in a series of institutional, infrastructural and policy reforms that seek to deliver welfare in a standardised and objective manner. This has, at times, been driven by a false faith in technical efficacy and has involved a playing down of the differential political implications of biometric welfare identification.
Subfields: Social Sciences & Humanities
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Citations in the corpus
- Re-imagining Algorithmic Fairness in India and Beyond (2021, background): “6National IDs are contested in the non-West, where they are used to deliver welfare in an ‘objective’ manner, but lead to populations falling through the cracks (see research on IDs in Aadhaar [161, 194], post-apartheid South Africa [65] and Sri Lankan Tamils and Côte d’Ivoirians [24]).”
- The Society of Algorithms (2021, background): “In typical Weberian fashion, the government claims that the system’s universalism and standardization guarantee equal treatment (Donovan 2015).”