Abstract

This paper examines the process of implementation of a global intervention to reduce time to diagnosis of tuberculosis in the city of Patna in eastern India. We argue that implementation of a project constitutes more than taking policies formed in global institutions and applying them to local contexts: rather, we show a process of learning by which a global intervention came to absorb dispersed forms of knowledge and variations in the milieus that, in turn, affected the design of the intervention itself. The heterogeneity of everyday life effectively dismantled the boundaries between major and minor actors and shifted the target of intervention from its initial emphasis on individual providers and their clinical protocols, to all significant nodes in a network of people and things implicated in the relays of decision-making to make the intervention work