Environment and Planning A 2012, volume 44, pages 1641-1656 doi:10.1068/a44640 Saving, spending, and future-making: time, discipline, and money in development Maia Green Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, England; Visiting Fellow, Research on Poverty Alleviation, PO Box 33223, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; e-mail: maia.green@manchester.ac.uk Uma Kothari Institute for Development Policy and Management, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, PO Box 88, Manchester M60 lQD, England; e-mail: uma.kothari@manchester.ac.uk Claire Mercer^ Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, England; e-mail: c.c.mercer@lse.ac.uk Diana Mitlin Institute for Development Policy and Management, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester, PQ Box 88, Manchester M60 lQD, England; Intemational Institute for Environment and Development, 80-86 Grays Inn Road, London WCIX 8NH, England; e-mail: diana.mitlin@manchester.ac.uk Received 21 November 2011 ; in revised form 19 April 2012 Abstract. Money is a distributed technology for the government of futures. Using ethnographically informed accounts of social practices around saving and collective remittances in poor countries this paper examines how the malleability of money enables it to have the potential for formalisation which allows it to be brought into formal relations of future-making and foreclosure, at the same time as its potential for investments and reallocation enables it to be the basis of flexible and adaptive strategies of future-making. We show how individuals engaged in development aspirations strive to achieve futures through the collection, care, and use of money, and how strategies of formalisation, discipline, and framing accord money developmental capacities. The liquidity of money renders it a flexible vehicle for personal and collective aspirations while representing risk of leakage to other persons and ventures. The paper examines the strategies used by low- income savers and hometown associations in their concerns with establishing rules and discipline around theflexibilityof money. Keywords: money, saving, future-making, development policy, remittances Introduction The idea of the future is achieving belated recognition across the social sciences, along with the significance of hope (Anderson and Fenton, 2008; Miyazaki, 2004). Recent contributions have asserted the centrality of notions of futurity to understanding human agency, together with a range of anticipatory actions that seek to 'make the future present' which are particularly salient in contemporary political and economic orderings (Anderson, 2010; Bom, 2007; Pickering, 1995). While this focus prompts consideration of the scope of human action in directing change, it highlights the extent to which such strategies for enacting futures, as modalities of control, may mirror the imposed closure entailed by the retrospective analytics of the social 1[ Corresponding author.