In this study, we examine the key management and scientific traditions that inform the logical framework, a project planning and evaluation tool that is central to how many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) manage their projects and provide accounts to funders. Through an analysis of USAID reports from the 1960s and 1970s, interviews with the logical framework’s developers, and a close reading of seminal texts, we identify how systems theory, management by objectives, and scientific theory informed how USAID problematized its project planning and evaluation practices and how they came to be inscribed into the logical framework as a way to address such perceived problems. We argue that these traditions are important for understanding a particular strand of managerialization that informs international development NGOs, and, more generally, for understanding how funding agencies “see” through the logical framework.

We propose an abstract notion of a type theory to unify the semantics of various type theories including Martin–Löf type theory, two-level type theory, and cubical type theory. We establish basic results in the semantics of type theory: every type theory has a bi-initial model; every model of a type theory has its internal language; the category of theories over a type theory is bi-equivalent to a full sub-2-category of the 2-category of models of the type theory.