I started Open the Echo Chamber in July of 2010, just before I headed off to USAID on an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. For a few years, this was a very active site where I offered commentary on all things development, environment, and academia. But, as Bill Easterly once said, blogs are hungry mouths, and around 2013-14 I just couldn’t keep it up anymore. There have been some posts since then, but they are few and far between.

Then, while updating my homepage in October 2020, I apparently deleted the site. I have no idea how, but it was gone. I had a backup from 2011, and an index file that I was able to reinstall. Using the Internet Wayback Machine, I then grabbed all the posts that were not in the backup and had any sort of intellectual content (some posts were very time-specific and without enduring value) and copy/pasted them here. Some of the links in them are likely broken or head to the Wayback Machine. I might clean them up. I probably won’t. 

This is now a somewhat messy archive of Open The Echo Chamber. I doubt I will post new material here again. Some folks find the old posts interesting and worthwhile, given people keep visiting the site, so I suppose an archive is worthwhile. There are around 300 posts here – it was a lot of work, even if it didn’t feel like that much work. I suppose I want to preserve that as well. I’m not done with the work, nor am I done writing – I just do it in other places and in other ways. Some of it is even as much fun as this was.

 

[In a first for this blog, this post is co-authored with my colleague Rob Johnston, Director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute and Professor of Economics at Clark University. I’m grateful for his willingness to work with me on this]

A recent blog post by NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway has been making the rounds recently, not only via his twitter feed and extensive mailing list, but also as a column in Business Weekly and the source material for articles in media outlets like MassLive (we’re not providing links because, as will become clear, we don’t want to reward this work with clicks). Ostensibly a post on the risk Covid-19 presents for higher education, this work is best characterized as pseudo-science designed to generate splashy media headlines. Nothing generates clicks quite like existential doom, and in this sense, both Galloway and media outlets win with content like this. If you are into marketing, and you subscribe to the maxim “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” this is an interesting case study. Look closer, however, and it becomes obvious that this is much ado about nothing—Galloway’s study is simply unverified and unvalidated speculations that appear driven by his particular view of fragility in higher ed. 

It’s unfortunate that media attention which might have gone to meaningful research on the pandemic was instead devoted to a blog post such as this one. We would rather not validate the “eyeballs at all costs” approach behind Galloway’s post and therefore give him more of the attention he so clearly desires. However, the media stories that have emerged from his analysis have cast the well-being of our institution, and several others, into question. We, and we suspect others across higher ed, are hearing expressions of concern from students, parents, and alumni. It is therefore important to demonstrate that the analysis in question is appallingly bad (analogous analysis would not receive a passing grade in either of our classes), why this is the case, and why nobody should take it seriously.

While there are many ways to challenge Galloway’s “analysis” (scare quotes are the only way to dignify this work with that term), we focus on three categories of problem. First, there are flaws with the data used and its connection to the conclusions he attempts to draw. Second, for an analysis that is supposedly centered on Covid-19 risk, there is nothing in it that reflects the different epidemiological situations of institutions around the United States. Third and most importantly, this “analysis” is not anchored in any empirical testing or validation, though it easily could be. As a result, it is entirely self-referential and open to manipulation to provide any result desired by the author (or anyone else), including clickbait narratives of doom.

First, the data. The data Galloway employed was what he could find easily, as opposed to the data he needed to create a valid and reliable analysis. While all analyses are constrained by the data at hand, this appears to be a particularly lazy case of the streetlight effect. As a result, the data chosen for this analysis are entirely ad hoc and lacking in clear links to actual institutional outcomes (e.g., whether institutions have failed in the past or are failing now). Their predictive value is unknown. Some examples of the data issues that pervade this analysis:

• Galloway’s analysis attempts to tie the value of an institutional credential to the institution’s average monthly online search volume. Whether this is valid in any context is debatable, but even if we accept this premise there are many things that distort that volume. Power Five conference schools have substantially higher search volumes than smaller universities and liberal arts colleges because they have nationally-ranked football teams and are often home to more than ten times the undergrads, not necessarily because people think those degrees are higher value. There is no evidence that Galloway attempted any sort of normalization for these effects before simply linking search volume to brand value (which seems ironic for a marketing professor).
• It appears that this analysis treats higher instructional wages per full-time student as a good thing without explaining why. Salaries are shaped by a range of factors, including regional markets and the composition of the institution (institutions with law schools, medical schools, and engineering schools will have much higher instructional wages than those without). Again, without an effort to address these differences, the crude application of salary to institutional quality is rendered somewhere between problematic and meaningless.

Looking across the data he employs, Galloway doesn’t seem to understand what he is comparing when he looks across institutions, or the underlying financial situations of those institutions. For example:

• The analysis makes no distinction between all-undergrad institutions and institutions with graduate and professional programs, despite the fact that these institutions have very different sources of reputation and revenue. These distinctions produce very different opportunities and challenges across these institutions. Indeed, enrollments in graduate professional programs are in some ways countercyclical to undergraduate admissions, offering financial hedges to institutions that house them. This seems to be one of many critical oversights in this analysis.
• Incredibly, the analysis makes no distinction between state institutions and private institutions, which for reasons of revenue and politics will have very different fragilities and pathways to success.

Second, we note that for a piece purported to be an analysis of the risks Covid-19 poses to the health of institutions of higher ed, this work displays a shocking lack of data that measure Covid-19 risks or impacts. The actual rates of infection, stress on local and regional health systems, and the likely future trends in both are critical indicators for such an analysis. So too are the different guidelines that are in place for institutions in different states, or the different procedures that institutions might (or might not) be taking to attenuate risks. This sort of data speaks to the likelihood of different institutions having to close all face-to-face instruction, or even to close completely for a term or more. None of this information is in Galloway’s analysis, despite its wide availability on a range of platforms. Instead, Galloway assumes an oddly even risk across the United States at a time when extraordinarily clear regional discrepancies are emerging.

Third, this ad hoc “analysis” is self-referential: there is no attempt to validate it empirically. Galloway might have taken his proposed index and applied it to schools that have closed in the past year, or perhaps applied it to those that have closed over the past decade (as Covid-19 is largely cast as a stressor exacerbating existing issues for institutions) to check its explanatory power. This is standard practice in modeling exercises, used both to tune models and to assess their validity.

Instead, a range of critical questions go unanswered. Are appropriate variables included in the index? Are these variables weighted in the right way?  Without careful validation against real data (e.g., whether institutions have thrived, perished, etc., or are doing so now), one cannot determine whether the proposed index has any predictive validity whatsoever.

Without testing, the implicit model behind this analysis is self-referential and easily engineered to produce any desired outcome. Do the results support the position you want to advocate? If not, just remove a variable or two, substitute new variables, or change the weighting (importance) given to different variables. Eventually you can get an analysis that tells a story that you like – even if that story is detached from reality. Because Galloway’s analysis has not been validated or ground-truthed in any way, there is no way to determine whether it tells us anything useful. 

This is not research. This is embarrassing and irresponsible. Perhaps even more disappointing, shoddy “analysis” of this type threatens to erode the long-term confidence that the public and policy-makers have in all research—including careful research that applies valid, reliable and peer-reviewed methods. In his original blog post, Galloway used an aside that his analysis has not been peer reviewed and a weak admonition that he sees this work as starting a conversation (at which, of course, he is the center) as a fig leaf to excuse this shoddy, irresponsible work. We view this as an astonishing abdication of responsibility by a person with a large audience who had to know his half-baked “analysis” would create significant concern at a number of institutions. As academics, we see his stipulation as an acknowledgement that this analysis is so poor that there is no chance that it would survive peer review, or indeed be recoverable with revisions in a manner that would make it so. Bluntly, this analysis is so problematic and badly flawed that institutions it has slated to “thrive” or “survive” should perhaps consider their own situations carefully before feeling good about how they were characterized here.

This is not to say that Covid-19 poses no challenge to higher education, or even to suggest that higher education might not benefit from some reflection about its goals and practices at this time. We welcome careful research to address these important issues. However, we feel that identifying and addressing such challenges requires serious research and analysis, not the headline-grabbing dumpster fire that lurks beneath Galloway’s post and the resultant media attention.

If something useful can come of this absurd offering, it is to demonstrate the value of higher education when well-executed. We feel quite confident that any good undergraduate at Clark, and certainly all of our graduate students, would have received the training in critical thinking, research, and analysis necessary not only to identify many, if not all, of the problems we point to here, but to conduct such an analysis in a more effective, productive manner. 

Niall Ferguson is talking about climate change, which means somebody needs to explain why you shouldn’t be listening to him. This is pretty easy, because if you subject his argument to even the most gentle scrutiny, it becomes clear that Ferguson has no idea what he is talking about, or even that he knows how to productively think about climate change and its potential impacts. The giveaway is Ferguson’s enthusiasm for Bjorn Lomborg, whose economic arguments about climate change are persistently and willfully misleading. To quote Ferguson:

Subsidies to renewable energy have a cost. Cutting CO2 emissions has a cost. Those costs in terms of forgone growth could exceed the costs of climate damage if we over-reach in the way that, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would. The key point, as Lomborg says, is that vastly more people die as a consequence of poverty each year than die as a consequence of global warming. A CO2 emissions target is not the optimal target if meeting it would trap millions in poverty, not to mention ignorance and ill health.

The argument here is attractive at first glance because it seems simple and logical enough – the costs of reducing CO2 might reduce economic growth, trapping people in poverty, which kills more people than climate change, so we’d actually be making things worse by reducing emissions. But whenever someone gives you simple logic for a complicated problem engaging multiple complex systems (the global climate, the global economy, etc.), beware.

First, there is Ferguson’s willful efforts to mislead the reader. Of course subsidies have costs. Ferguson’s framing, however, willfully ignores the spectacular costs of the subsidies to fossil fuels that long reduced their direct consumer costs and thus made them more attractive than renewables. Further, this shabby line of argument elides the fact that even in the face of subsidies to fossil fuels, many forms of renewable energy are becoming economically efficient choices. And of course cutting emissions will have costs. What Ferguson ignores in this statement is that emissions also have costs. The amount of these costs, while debated, never come in cheap – its just a question of how expensive these costs are (for example, here, here, and here). So Ferguson’s implicit suggestion that we have a choice to make between incurring costs and not incurring costs is false. Our choice is between which costs we want to pay – those to mitigate and adapt to climate change and its impacts, or those to respond to those escalating impacts into the future. Whether talking about the cost of subsidies to clean energy, or the cost of cutting emissions in general, Ferguson offers a terribly disingenuous argument, and one I cannot believe he does not fully understand.

Second, it appears the Ferguson understands little about poverty, climate change impacts, or most crltically the relationship between the two. Ferguson’s argument about poverty and mortality (borrowed from Lomborg) is a bit odd, if you think about it a little. Poverty is a descriptive term for a human condition of lack – whether of needed assets, resources, or opportunities. Those lacks result in conditions in which people can and do die – for example, those who lack adequate housing are at risk for death from exposure, while those who lack access to adequate nutritious food are at risk for death from malnutrition. As these examples illustrate, poverty is not the agent of death. Poverty is the condition under which agents, such as weather conditions, can lead to death.

This is more than a pedantic point about poverty – it has everything to do with why Ferguson’s/Lomborg’s zero-sum argument about poverty versus climate change mitigation is garbage. This argument assumes that poverty and climate change are unrelated causes of death that can be measured against one another. However, it is extraordinarily well-established that the outcomes of climate change, from acute stresses produced by climate extremes to chronic impacts produced by long-term changes in temperature and precipitation, tend to exacerbate existing inequalities in whatever society they are found. Thus, climate change impacts will exacerbate poverty, the conditions under which people encounter higher rates of mortality. Put another way, it is not a choice between investment in anti-poverty efforts and investment in climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts. Investments in anti-poverty work that pay no attention to climate change are likely to be less effective than those that do not. These are NOT INDEPENDENT VARIABLES.

Lomborg knows this, and has had this screamed at him, for something like a decade. The fact he continues to argue otherwise is just bad faith. Ferguson, on the other hand, likely has no idea what he is talking about and is just grabbing on to a narrative he likes. It’s pathetic when Harvard and Stanford give positions to someone willing to make misleading arguments about concepts he does not really understand to put forth an opinion that is not only demonstrably wrong, but just a rehashed, boring version of previous demonstrably wrong framings of climate change, its impacts, and the need for action. And it is tragic that the Boston Globe, a paper I otherwise respect, gave him the column inches to offer that opinion.

Sheila Navalia Onzere

June 19, 1977 – August 31, 2019

It is with a sense of incredible loss that I report the death of Sheila Onzere, HURDL’s research scientist. Sheila died yesterday in Nairobi, Kenya, after a sudden illness. She had been home, taking care of her mother and working some short-term contracts while HURDL waited for longer-term work to come through. The shock is overwhelming. I was messaging with her last week. Multiple members of the HURDL family were messaging with her yesterday morning. We were all talking about projects and plans in a future that now will not happen. None of us know how to process that.

Sheila came to HURDL in September of 2014. The lab had only existed for a little over 18 months when she joined. To that point, I had been the only non-student member of the team, but the amount of work we were doing had ramped up and it was clear we needed another professional to keep things moving. I put out an ad for a research associate, and narrowed the pool to a few candidates. I still remember the Skype interview with her – all the members of HURDL at the time, Kwame Owusu-Daaku, Tshibangu Kalala, and Daniel Abrahams, piled into my office and subjected this poor Kenyan woman, operating on a weak internet connection, to the full HURDL experience – questions followed by digressions followed by jokes followed by nobody listening to me at all. In retrospect, it was an ideal interview, as it presented the most honest picture of HURDL possible – and Sheila took the job. The lab and all its members were much better for it.

Sheila made us a better organization. She brought a Ph.D. in Sociology (Iowa State) to the lab (though this lab full of geographers will always claim her BA in Human Geography from Moi University was the one that counted), and with it substantial experience working with farmers both in the US and in Africa. But as much as her technical and academic skill, Sheila brought a sense of responsibility and enthusiasm to the work of the lab. Her willingness to always step in and cover something not only kept HURDL glued together, it helped establish the ethic that made the lab such a fun and interesting place to work. She was kind, generous, and very funny. Her laugh was infectious, a reward for anyone who could make it emerge. Even her sigh of exasperation (which I elicited plenty of times) was surprisingly kind and gentle. She was unique, perfect for HURDL and all the people that had the fortune to work in it while she was a part of the team.

A while back, commenting on the structure and organization of HURDL, someone told me that it ran more like a family than a formal organization. This was not meant as a complement, but a statement identifying an institutional weakness. I disagreed then, and I disagree now. That observation helped me understand what I loved about the lab and the people in it. We were, and are, a family. When the lab came to my house to eat and hang out, it felt like a family dinner. That feeling is what makes the day-to-day of the lab worth it. We’ve lost a family member, and we are mourning like a family. It hurts intensely, but that is because Sheila meant so much to all of us. I would not have it any other way.

 

Resilience is a term that permeates development and adaptation conversations alike. However, it is often used without clear definition, and the definitions assumed or elaborated generally misrepresent the dynamics of human-dominated systems.

TL;DR: We’re doing resilience wrong, and it is screwing up the lives of people who are supposed to benefit from resilience programming.

To address this problem, I recently wrote an article seeking to address these conceptual issues and make resilience a useful, constructive concept for development and adaption. The key points:

• Socio-ecological resilience is an outcome of projects steering diverse actors and ecological processes toward human safety and stability in a manner that preserves the privileges of those in positions of authority.
• At even moderate levels, disturbance in socio-ecologies is not a source of transformation, but instead produces rigidity that limits innovation and transformation in the name of safety and stability. When a resilient system provides safety in the context of a disturbance, the system and its attendant social orders and privileges are legitimized. This is why many development projects fail: they gently disturb a project, which rejects the intervention in the name of safety and certainty, and returns people and activities to their initial state.
• Disrupting resilient socio-ecological projects, whether through extreme disturbance or interventions associated with development and adaptation, opens space for transformation, but creates risk by removing existing sources of safety and certainty. This is another source of project failure, one where the intervention blows up the existing project, but what comes together in its wake leaves some or all of the people involved more vulnerable to existing stresses, or vulnerable to new stresses that leave them worse off than they were before the intervention.
• Reinforcing existing socio-ecological projects, such as through interventions aimed at stabilizing existing activities, reduces opportunities for transformation by legitimizing their practices and social orders.
• Interventions seeking to build resilience while achieving transformative goals can catalyze change by easing stress on livelihoods. In the context of reduced stress, the side of these projects aimed at maintaining existing structures of authority relaxes, allowing space for innovations by actors who are otherwise marginal to decision-making.

There is a lot going on in this article, and I intended it as much as a provocation as a path forward. If any of this is interesting or challenges the way you saw resilience in the world, feel free to read more deeply – the article is here.

As many of you know, I tend to post when provoked to rage by something in the press/literature/world. These days, I am massively overtasked, which means I need special levels of rage to post. So hooray to Tom Friedman, who in his utterly frustrating column yesterday actually managed to get me there.

I’m going to set aside my issues with the Friedman-standard reductionist crap in the column. Ken Opalo killed it anyway, so just read his post. Instead, I want to spend a few words excoriating Friedman for his lazy, stereotypical portrayal of my friend and colleague Ousmane Ndiaye in that column. First, as has been noted a few times, Ousmane is a climatologist with a Ph.D. This is NOT THE SAME THING AS A WEATHERMAN. Just Google the two, for heaven’s sake. What Ousmane is trained in is high-end physical science, and he is good at it. Really good at it.

But what is really remarkable about Ousmane, and totally elided in Friedman’s lazy, lazy writing, is that he is no office-bound monotonic weatherman. First, Ousmane is really, really funny. I’ve never seen him not funny, ever – even in serious meetings. Which makes me wonder how hard Friedman, who writes “”His voice is a monotone,” is working to fit Ousmane into the box of “scientist” as Friedman understands it.

Second, Ousmane does remarkable work engaging farmers across Senegal. I have seen him in farmer meetings, talking about seasonal forecasts. He cares deeply about these farmers, and how well he is able to communicate forecasts to them. I’ve also seen him at Columbia University, in scientific meetings, moving between professors and development donors, talking about new ideas and new challenges that need to be addressed. He moves between these worlds easily, a skill far too lacking in the climate change community.

What I am saying here is simple: Friedman missed the fact that he had the star right in front of him, clicking away at the computer. He needed a counterpoint for his rapper, and a sad caricature of Ousmane became that counterpoint. And because of the need to present Ousmane as the boring scientist, Friedman totally missed how unbelievably apocalyptic the figures he was hearing really are, especially for rain-fed agriculturalists in Senegal. A 2C rise in temperature over the last 60 or so years means that, almost certainly, some varieties of important cereals are no longer germinating, or having trouble germinating. The fact Senegal is currently 5C over normal temperature is unholy – and were this to hold up, would totally crush this year’s harvest (planting starts in about a month, so keep an eye on this) because very little would germinate properly at that level.

Ousmane was describing the apocalypse, and Friedman was fixated on a clicking mouse. Friedman owes Ousmane an apology for this pathetic caricature, and he owes the rest of us an apology for the ways in which his lazy plot and the characters he needed to occupy it resulted in a complete burial of the lede: climate change is already reaching crisis levels in some parts of the world.

 

P.S., if you want to see some of the work that has started to emerge from working alongside Ousmane, check out this and this.

Back in September, HURDL released its final report on our work assessing Mali’s Agrometeorological Advisory program – an effort, conceived and run by the Government of Mali, to deliver weather and climate information to farmers to improve agricultural outcomes in the country. You’d think this would be a straightforwardly good idea – you know, more information (or indeed any information) being better than none. So our findings were a bit stunning:

• As we found in our preliminary report, less than 20% of those with access to the advisories are actually using them
• Nearly everyone using the advisories is a man
• Nearly everyone using the advisories is already relatively well-off
• The advisories were most used in the parts of the country where precipitation is most secure (see map below).

This was, to say the least, a set of surprising findings. And, on their surface, they suggest that the program is another example of development failure: a project that only reaches those who least need the help it is providing.

But that conclusion only holds if this program was oriented toward development and adaptation in the first place…and it was not. The program was established in 1981 as an effort to address conditions of acute food insecurity closely linked to severe drought. The goal was simple: use short-term and seasonal advisories to help farmers make better decisions under stress and boost food availability in Mali. This program, in other words, was an effort to address a particular, acute problem (food insecurity linked to extreme drought) through a very specific means (boosting food availability). This was not a development project, it was a humanitarian response to a crisis. And as such, it was brilliant – and each of the findings above demonstrate why.

• The goal was to rapidly boost yields of grains (and cotton), for which men have most decision-making authority.
• The goal was to rapidly boost overall yields of grains to improve availability within Mali, and therefore targeting the wealthy farmers who had the access to equipment and animal traction necessary to use the advisories made sense.
• The goal was to rapidly boost grain production…and much more grain is grown in the wetter parts of Mali than in the dryer areas in the north.

In short, the project was never intended to address development goals – it was supposed to address a particular aspect of a humanitarian crisis through particular means, and its design targeted exactly the right decision-makers/actors to achieve that goal. Indeed, one could argue that the rather narrow use of advisories speaks to how well designed this humanitarian intervention was. In short, the gendered/wealth-dependent character of advisory use, and the fact they are most used in areas that are already very agriculturally productive, are not bugs in this project: they are features!

The problem, then, is not with the design of the project, but the fact it continued for more than 30 years, and some 25 years after the end of the droughts. As a narrowly-focused effort to address a particular, short-term humanitarian crisis, the gendered/wealth-based outcomes of the project were acceptable trade-offs to achieve higher grain yields. But over 30 years, and without the justification of an acute crisis, it is likely this project has served to unnecessarily exacerbate agricultural inequality in rural southern Mali.

HURDL is now engaged in a project to redesign this program, to shift it from a (now unnecessary) humanitarian assistance effort to a development/adaptation project. With this shift in priorities comes a shift in how we view the outcomes of the program – the very things that made it an effective humanitarian assistance program (gendered and income-based inequality) are now aspects of the project that we must change to ensure that the widest number of farmers possible have access to information they can use in their livelihoods decisions as we move into conditions of greater economic and environmental uncertainty. In short, we now have to bridge the DRR and Humanitarian Response/Development and Adaptation divide that has so plagued those of us concerned with the situation of those in the Global South. This will be tremendously challenging, but through this process we hope to not only work with Malian colleagues to design and deliver a development and adaptation version of this program to Malian farmers, but also to learn more about how to bridge the particular time/scope emphases of these two assistance arenas.

Look, I know there have been lots of Star Wars and development posts/tweets (here, here, here), so I won’t belabor things. But forgive me a quick observation after seeing the most recent Star Wars: isn’t the continual construction of bigger and more powerful flying orbs of death by the bad guys (the Empire, then the First Order) a perfect metaphor for the sort of thinking that gave us the Millennium Villages?

Goal: Galactic Domination

Project 1: Star Wars: A New Hope

Logframe: Build giant Death Star space station, blow up a representative planet, watch galaxy cower in fear => Galactic Domination

Evaluation: Failure to address single design flaw results in giant space station destroyed

Outcome: Lack of Domination

 

Project 2: Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Logframe: Build bigger, better Death Star space station, everyone will remember the last one blew up a planet, and because this one is even bigger the galaxy will cower in fear => Galactic Domination

Evaluation: Fixed previous design flaw, overconfidence in tactics and shields failed to account for another fatal flaw, giant space station destroyed

Outcome: Catastrophe, Complete collapse of the Empire

 

Project 3: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Logframe: F*ck it, we’re making an actual moon/planet into an absolutely massive, sun-powered Starkiller base (rebranded to avoid stigma of previous Death Stars), blow up the entire Federation home system, watch galaxy cower in fear=> Galactic Domination

Evaluation: Pretty much the same flaw as with the second Death Star, with pretty much the same result: Starkiller base destroyed

Outcome: Still no domination

So, to summarize: we have a problem, we can’t seem to solve it, so we will keep plowing ahead with the same approach, but bigger and more expensive, because clearly it isn’t the concept that’s flawed, we just haven’t gone big enough!

 

Yep, sounds like a lot of development.

Last week, I published a short editorial in Scientific American’s SA Forum online that decried the near-total lack of organization or prioritization in the Sustainable Development Goals/Global Goals/whatever they are called this week. My argument was simple: by not ordering or prioritizing goals, the SDGs

risk becoming an empty exercise that empowers business as usual in the field of global development.

At the conclusion of that piece, I suggested that the only way to avoid this outcome was to find actors who were able to demand organization and prioritization among these goals – principally the big bilateral donors like USAID and DfID, or perhaps the Gates foundation (which, on expenditures, comes in around the world’s sixth-largest donor organization).

I’ve been taken to task a few times by colleagues for this suggestion. These rather polite and professional interventions (I know, not at all like the internet I’ve come to expect) pointed out that I’d empowered the big donors, with their problematic, often Eurocentric framings of development and how to achieve it, to act as the saviors of development via the SDGs. Given my rather clear critical stance with regard to these framings of development (most clearly articulated in Delivering Development, but generally present in most of the stuff I write), I think some folks were mystified by my logic. So allow me to clarify:

When we refuse to define terms, organize concepts or efforts, or engage in the politics necessary to set priorities, we are not apolitical: we are empowering other political agendas. The basic argument of my op-ed was simple: by not making hard decisions, we have empowered a particular political agenda, one that leaves development in a business-as-usual situation. Therefore, I see nearly any effort at locking down priorities and organizing efforts as superior to no prioritization at all, because any effort to set priorities will accomplish two things:

First, it will bring politics to the fore, and we will all be forced to wrestle with what we want to prioritize and why.

Second, it will lock down the meanings of the different terms we use (i.e. sustainable, well-being, secure) in such a way that they can become sites where politics can happen.

What do I mean by this? If, as we have done to this point, we refuse to define what we mean by sustainable (for example), we create a conceptual container that can be filled by nearly any definition, policy, program, project, or activity. It allows completely contradictory efforts to coexist and cancel each other out, without providing a base from which to contest any or all of these efforts. When there are no definitions, everything using a given term can be seen as equally valid. Similarly, if we refuse to prioritize our efforts, organizations can fill their efforts to meet the SDGs with almost any hodgepodge of policies, programs, projects, or activities…and will likely do so in a manner that mirrors their current emphases, funding, and staffing structures. Thus, organizations could set up completely contradictory agendas, with associated material efforts, and be seen as making equally valid efforts to address the SDGs in the eyes of the donors and the public. There is no way to contest the way one organization or another does its business if there are no definitions or priorities from which to work.

This does not mean that I think any particular donor organization will save the SDGs by setting the agenda we need to move forward. All are mired in their own internal and/or national politics, and therefore will push for agendas that most clearly reflect their own strengths and priorities. Further, most donor organizations do, in fact, operate from rather problematic, Eurocentric framings of the world, for example in their continuing inability to recognize the genius of small farmers who already negotiate uncertain environments and economies. As I have written about at length, in the eyes of most donor organizations these farmers are poor and helpless in the face of these large forces, and in need of help/saving/education. As a result, the donors cannot identify the things that these farmers really need (which are often a lot more narrow than a total reworking of their agricultural systems) and, even worse, they cannot learn from the things these farmers already know about how to best manage their agricultural, economic, and social environments.

So no, I don’t think the donors will save us…directly. But if one or more are willing to step up and impose politics on this process, they will create a process by which terms gain definition, and efforts are prioritized. When these meanings become fixed, it becomes possible to engage them and contest them, to actually have a conversation about what development is, and what it should be. Right now, we can just hold hands, say words like sustainability, and watch a nice concert together, all the while operating under the illusion that we have the same goals, and that we are working toward those goals in the same ways. That gets us nowhere. I want a development world where we are forced to recognize that different organizations and individuals prioritize different things, have different visions of the future, and different means of moving us toward those visions. Further, I want a development world where we have to struggle with the fact that what organizations want may have little to do with what the global poor want. That is what the SDGs could have given us.

It is too late to make the SDGs’ 17 goals and 169 targets a site of real development politics. But all is not lost: over one thousand initiatives have been set up to meet these targets and achieve these goals, and many more are coming. This is where the goals will become impacts on the ground. If we can create a real politics of development around these initiatives by organizing and prioritizing them, perhaps we can recover the SDGs as a site from which we can build a truly transformative agenda for development.