A few conversations on the blogs over the past two weeks have me thinking about the divide between aid/relief work and development – one of those minor issues I am supposed to be addressing in my current job. I am nothing if not ambitious. However, as folks have tried to clarify the difference between aid and development, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable because I really think these two areas need more blending, not more distinction.
And so now I am wondering if, in fact, the gap between aid and development is part of the reason so many “development” projects don’t work out. I put development in quotes there for a reason – most of these projects never actually get to the development phase. Take my ongoing rants about the Millennium Village Project. Here is an ambitious program of interventions that is meant to be a development project. However, at this point it is really an aid project – at least by the definitions I am seeing circulate. The MVP is still completely dependent on external interventions and expertise for its outcomes. Where it seems to me the MVP falls down is in the transition from the aid phase to the development phase, when these changes in people’s lives become self-sustaining, and engender new changes that do not require any sort of external intervention. In short, the MVP seems to assume that with enough aid over enough time, change becomes self-sustaining and the processes necessary to bring about well-being spontaneously emerge. This is what I like to call the “then a miracle happens” moment. As in:
Dump money, aid and material into a place over a series of years –> then a miracle happens –> change is self-sustaining
The MVP is hardly the only project guilty of this – hell, this thinking is endemic to development. We can back up to Rostow’s Stages of Growth in the 1950s (at least) and find the exact same fallacy. Big push/modernization theories, the Washington Consensus, basically every program founded on the core idea that economic growth drives everything else, they all suffer from this fallacy. This, ladies and gentlemen, is your grand challenge for development – the “big question” that could really change how we do what we do. We need to articulate how our initial interventions, our “aid”, is/can be transformed/built upon/leveraged/instrumentalized/whatever to result in the self-sustaining changes we see as development.
We can’t. Our interventions cannot cause development. That requires indigenous leadership.
Well, I am not totally sure about that. I think that development is always collaborative, in that nobody lives in a vaccuum. Given the global character of the economy, and the global sources of environmental challenges that people deal with, I think that anything that we might call development will have to emerge through collaboration with a larger world. The real question is “on whose terms?” That, I think, is worth struggling over – and I spend more than a chapter of my book on this very issue.
A worthy challenge indeed. One of the challenges is that while you can give aid to help with development you can’t develop someone else, they have to do it for themselves. I just wrote about this dilemma today http://kmonadollaraday.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/outside-in-development/
Yes! This goes to my reply to the comment above – development is probably collaborative to some extent, but the battle is over the terms on which collaboration takes shape. Right now, I don’t see very serious engagement with this problem at the level of aid agencies . . .
“We need to articulate how our initial interventions, our “aid”, is/can be transformed/built upon/leveraged/instrumentalized/whatever to result in the self-sustaining changes we see as development.”
Why? If one doesn’t believe that official definitions of “development” are meaningful, and that there is no such thing as a “relief-development continuum”, then why waste time trying to do something that not merely can’t be done, but doesn’t even make sense to begin with?
Well, trained as a thoroughgoing poststructuralist, I can understand your concern over definitions of development. I’d be happy to go 10 deconstructive rounds with anyone. Hell, my book challenges a lot of received wisdom in this area. But I generally use the tools of poststructuralism to further admittedly modernist aims, such as improving the world. Spivak was right – if we plan to do something in the world, we have to abandon our theoretical purity, fix some meanings (or at least accept that the term development is here and not going away) and get to work. At least we can fix meanings after serious critical reflection, and recognize that our fixations are temporary and partial, and thus subject to future revision. But that does not necessitate running away from development . . .
Thanks for the reply, Ed, but I’m not sure that my concern over definitions of development isn’t post-structural. When I was studying the history of development, the thing that struck me was how that the term was fundamentally a mirror in which people viewed themselves. I look forward to reading your book and discovering what definition of development you favour, but I’m fairly certain that it won’t get over the conceptual hump I’m carrying around on my back….
Perhaps I can tease out my concern by asking another question: “development” as opposed to what?
Ed, I agree with you completely. The problem requires some clear, focused and unladen thinking to come to any logical conclusion in the miasma of the historical, cultural, profit-led, prideful connections that is aid & dev. This requires concentrated intellectual endeavour. You go, Ed! We need to let go of what is considered to be “appropriate” to develop a different way of thinking about these issues. If we say that we can’t interfere with development then logically we should give only aid for the most acute of human disasters. If we believe at all in development aid then we must accept that it is an imposition and an interference, and think about ways in which to be more integrative and more creative right from the inception of a project. We should think about project fatigue, where things begin well but peter out. We need clearly formulated philosophy, coherent planning and sustained dynamism. Absolutely we need indigenous leadership and our choice is either to give said leadership money and walk away or to impose our plan. Let it be a different plan which is carefully considered in human as well as logistic terms. Of course aid & dev. are impenetrably linked – think, think, think.