Category: Delivering Development

The Echo Chamber is showing up everywhere!

Either drawing directly on Delivering Development, or working in parallel to it, people seem to be circling around the idea of development as an echo chamber from which we have great difficulty escaping to see the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
A View from The Cave approaches this issue through a discussion of skepticism in aid:

For some people, aid and development endeavors seem as simple as serving up a spoonful of sugar that is brimming with kindness, energy, compassion and good intentions. Simply add sugar to the prescribed medicine and we can save the world!
Unfortunately, we know that it is not so simple. Communicating this is even harder. Telling a women that her favorite clothing distribution organization could be preventing growth and contributing to the poverty cycle is not received well. Speaking with a gentleman about orphanages being filled with children who have been orphaned not due to the death of parents, but voluntarily after an orphanage has been established, will make you seem cold-hearted and uncaring.

This, of course, extends past outreach to the general public – the research and policy worlds are full of this sort of problem.  Marc Bellemare has a post up that addresses this through the idea of confirmation bias, which he eloquently defines as the phenomena in which “people tend to give much more importance than is warranted to whatever evidence confirms their beliefs, and they tend to discard whatever evidence contradicts their beliefs”.   He then extends this to the policy world:

Over the last decade, development economists have developed a number of methods aimed at establishing the validity of causal statements. But what good are those methods when policymakers have their own ideas about what works and what does not?

As an economist in a policy school, this is one of those things I don’t really like to think about. I nevertheless think social scientists in general — and economists in particular — should carefully think about how to engage with people who suffer from confirmation bias, as it is no longer sufficient to just put our findings out there for policy makers to use.

Too right! This is exactly my point from one of the panels I sat on at this year’s Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Seattle – our responsibility as researchers does not end with publication.  It starts with publication, as that evidence is treated as nothing more than another viewpoint in the policy world, and can/will be used and abused to all sorts of ends if left undefended.
Finally, H-5inc. has drawn directly on Delivering Development in a recent post, arguing that a passage in the book “rather nicely sums up what I think is really at the root of our struggles to make productive and appropriate use of data” (that is a very nice thing to say, honestly):

We expect the world to work in a certain manner. Therefore, we gather data to measure the expected workings of the world and analyze those data through frameworks founded on the very understandings of the world they are meant either to affirm or to challenge. In addition, by our choice of data, and our means of analysis, we end up affirming that the world does indeed work the way we thought it did.

Lots of voices circling around the same subject, lots of different ways to intervene and start to tear down the echo chamber that limits us so severely in our efforts to productively engage the world.  I choose to interpret this as evidence in support of my hopelessly realistic optimism about development and the world in general.

Posted on by Ed 0

Future challenges, future solutions

On Global Dashboard Alex Evans discusses a report he wrote for ActionAid on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020.  Given Alex got to distill a bunch of futures studies, scenarios and outlooks into this report, I have to say this: I want his job.
The list he produces is quite interesting.  In distilled form, they are:
1. What is the global balance of power in 2020?
2. Will job creation keep pace with demographic change to 2020?
3. Is there serious global monetary reform by 2020?
4. Who will benefit from the projected ‘avalanche of technology’ by 2020?
5. Will the world face up to the equity questions that come with a world of limits by 2020?
6. Is global trade in decline by 2020?
7. How has the nature of political influence changed by 2020?
8. What will the major global shocks be between now and 2020?
All are fair questions.  And, in general, I like his 10 recommendations for addressing these challenges:
1. Be ready (because shocks will be the key drivers of change)
2. Talk about resilience (because the poor are in the firing line)
3. Put your members in charge (because they can bypass you)
4. Talk about fair shares (because limits change everything)
5. Specialise in coalitions (and not just of civil society organisations)
6. Take on the emerging economies (including from within)
7. Brings news from elsewhere (because innovation will come from the edges)
8. Expect failure (and look for the silver lining)
9. Work for poor people, not poor countries (as most of the former are outside the latter)
10. Be a storyteller (because stories create worldviews)
I particularly like #10 here, as it was exactly this idea that motivated me to write Delivering Development.  And #7 is more or less the political challenge I lay out in the last 1/4 of the book.  #9 is a clear reference to Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion, which everyone should be looking at right now.  In short, Alex and I are on the same page here.
I have two bits of constructive criticism to offer that I think would strengthen this report – and would be easy edits.  First, I think Alex has made a bit of a mistake in limiting his concern for environmental shocks to climate shocks.  These sorts of shocks are, of course, critical (hell, welcome to my current job), but there are other shocks out there that are perhaps not best captured as climate shocks on such a short timescale.  For example, ecological collapse from overuse/misuse of ecosystem resources (see the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) may have nothing at all to do with climate change – overfishing is currently crushing most major global fisheries, and the connection between this behavior and climate change is somewhat distant, at best.  We’ve been driving several ecosystems off cliffs for some time now, and one wonders when resilience will fail and a state change will set in.  It is near-impossible to know what the new state of a stressed ecosystem will be after a state change, so this is really a radical uncertainty we need to be thinking about.
Second, I am concerned that Stevens’ claim about the collapse of globalization bringing about “savage” negative impacts on the developing world.  Such a claim strikes me as overgeneralized and therefore missing the complexity of the challenge such a collapse might bring – and it is a bit ironic, given his admonition to “talk about resilience” above.  I think that some people (urban dwellers in particular) would likely be very hard hit – indeed, the term savage might actually apply to those who are heavily integrated into global markets simply by the fact they are living in large cities whose economies are driven by global linkages.  And certainly those in marginal rural environments who are already subject to crop failure and other challenges will likely suffer greatly from the loss of market opportunities and perhaps humanitarian assistance (look at contemporary inland Somalia for an illustration of what I am talking about here).  However, others (the bulk of rural farmers with significant subsistence components to their agricultural activities, or the option to convert activities to subsistence) have the option to pull back from market engagement and still make a stable living.  Opportunity will certainly dry up for these people, at least for a while, as this is usually a strategy for managing temporary economic fluctuations.  This is certainly a negative impact, for if development does nothing else, it must provide opportunities for people.  However, this sort of negative impact doesn’t rise to “savage” – which to me implies famine, infant mortality, etc.  I think we make all-to-easy connections between the failure of globalization/development (I’m not sure they are all that different, really, a point I discuss in Delivering Development).  Indeed, a sustained loss of global connection might, in the long run, create a space for local innovations and market development that could lead to a more robust future.
So to “be ready” requires, I think, a bit of a broadening of our environmental concerns, and a major effort to engage the complexity of engagement with the global economy among the rural poor in the world.  Both are quite doable – and are really minor edits to a very nice report (which I still wish I wrote).

Posted on by Ed 1

Why is this still surprising?

Alertnet has a post on climate change and the poor that opened with one of my least favorite narrative techniques – surprise about local capacity and knowledge for adaptation.

I was struck by the local community’s scientific knowledge about climate change. I’d often heard that such communities know a tremendous amount about changing weather patterns – and can easily tell a good year from a bad one in terms of droughts or floods – but that they don’t know much about ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ or ‘climate change’.

Not so in Manikganj District. The community performed a drama for us and it was clear that they knew exactly what these relatively western scientific terms mean both in theory and in practice.

I was also struck by how the community – supported by the local nongovernmental organisation, GSK – has developed a range of strategies and activities to cope with longer floods, higher floodwater levels and the erosion that each year washes away more and more of their crop and homestead land into the nearby Padma River. There was no drama here. And I was deeply affected by the industrious positive way the people of Manikganj District meet these challenges and carry on with daily life.

I confess to a bit of fatigue at the continued voicing of surprise at finding out that those in the Global South who are dealing with the impacts of climate change actually have ideas, and often successful strategies, for managing those impacts.  Implicitly, every time we do this we back our readers up to a place of comfort (“those poor/dark people don’t know much”) and then get to act surprised when it turns out they do actually have knowledge and capabilities.  I’d like to think that the first half of my book flips this script, arguing consistently that the people I have been working with are staggeringly capable, and therefore it is the breakdown of livelihoods and adaptation that is interesting, not its existence.
To be fair, though, I blame myself and my colleagues working on adaptation and livelihoods for the persistence of this narrative technique.  Once we get past that all-to-common intro, the post gets into concrete discussions of how people are adapting – good, useful grounded description.  But what I long for, and what I am working on (articles in review and in prep, folks) is moving beyond the descriptive case toward a more systematic understanding of adaptation and livelihoods decision-making that enables some level of generalization and systematization. Indeed, by failing to approach livelihoods and adaptation decision-making in this manner, we enable the very frustrating lead-in technique I described above – every case becomes unique, and every effort to manage the impacts of climate change is therefore an isolated surprise.  If, in fact, it is not at all surprising that people have at least some knowledge and capacity for addressing climate change (and this is really not surprising at all, dammit), we need to get past simple description to capturing processes that might be leveraged into better early warning, better programming, and better understandings of what people are experiencing on the ground.

Posted on by Ed 3

I know that often big corporations and capitalism are the problem . . .

but damn, there are days I am glad I went with a commercial publisher – and one of the big ones, at that.  Yesterday, I came home to a small envelope from Palgrave Macmillan in my mailbox.  I had no idea what it was, since I was not expecting anything from them.  I opened it up, and inside was this:

 

 

(Incidentally, I have a promo code that instructors can use for a free inspection copy – if you are an instructor of a course that might adopt this text, send me an email and let me know the course you teach, and I can pass the code along.  They will force you to register and they tend to verify courses, though, so don’t bother bluffing . . .)

Obviously, this is the publicity flyer they are circulating to get my book some visibility in academia.  It’s pretty nice – I like it.  But what really struck me was the post-it attached – unsigned, with only one sentence: “1000 copies mailed out March 2011 to courses in Economic Development”.  Uh . . .
Holy crap.
If 1% of the instructors who receive this mailing adopt, I will sell more copies of my book in the first year than most academic titles ever sell.  There is no way I could have done this anywhere near as effectively by myself. And it is a nice reinforcement of the message I’ve been receiving from my publisher and agent that my editor is heavily invested in this book, and is planning a concerted push to get it out there.
Now, friends and colleagues in the blogosphere/twitterverse, I am awaiting your reviews.  No, really . . . I actually want the feedback.  Yes, I would love to see a bunch of glowing reviews show up telling everyone that my book is the be-all, end-all, but I know that it is not – I want to see what people think, where the book works and where it doesn’t.  That is the only way I can shape my message effectively, and shape the next book (yes, one is already lurking) to engage the development/aid community productively.

Posted on by Ed 0

Adaptation, Development and Occam's Razor

Adrian Fenton, writing on the website of IIED (whose work I generally like), seems to be pushing the idea that community-based adaptation (that is, adaptation that builds upon/strengthens strategies employed at the local scale) and microfinance go hand-in-hand. I am not so sure this is a good idea – I feel like IIED has missed a fundamental point here – for most of the developing world, livelihoods are about avoiding and managing risks and challenges – and then capitalizing on any surplus that might come about after managing those risks.  As many have noted, this largely risk-averse approach to making a living hugely constrains opportunity because you cannot employ all of your resources in an effort to engage in markets/work off the farm/what have you – you have to effectively waste a bunch of them guarding against events that often don’t happen. One way in which this happens, which I lay out in my book and have discussed on this blog, is when people set up their livelihoods in a manner that allows them to temporarily deglobalize when markets turn against them.  This effectively requires holding back resources from market sale in case you have to rely on them directly.  For example, farmers who keep the deglobalization option open in their livelihoods hold back a portion of their labor from market engagement as they dedicate time to planting and raising food crops that might be used for subsistence purposes if the markets turn.
Given this fundamental characteristic of so many livelihoods that we see in the Global South, it seems to me that coupling adaptation (current community- and household-level livelihoods are, in effect, adaptation efforts that go on continuously) with microfinance applies the wrong medicine to the problem – people don’t need more capital, they need a way to free up the various resources they already have from the necessary conservativism of their current livelihoods strategies.  Adding loans, even small loans, to the current livelihoods mix simply increases risk without necessarily providing benefits that offset that risk.
Instead, it seems to me we ought to be shifting our focus toward microinsurance and away from microfinance – microinsurance provides the safety net that enables risk-taking at the household and community level, and therefore empowers people to use their existing resources in the manner they best see fit.  In short, it allows us to meet some of the financial requirements for adaptation without having to create new financial vehicles, and new forms of risk in already-stressed livelihoods.  This is a much more direct means of addressing the challenges to local livelihoods posed by climate change impacts and raising the capital needed to address future risks, rather than offering seed capital, hoping the business/effort works out with enough profit to pay back the loan and provide a large surplus that might then be employed to address climate change.
This strikes me as the adaptation and development version of Occam’s razor – when evaluating plans for future adaptation efforts, select the one that requires the fewest new institutions and steps to raise the capital/resources necessary to meet future challenges.

Posted on by Ed 0

Thinking in parallel on unfettered globalization

I’ve not posted a lot on globalization, per se, on this blog of late . . . but I was really taken by Steven Pearlstein’s review of Dani Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox in last Sunday’s Washington Post.  I have not read Rodrik’s book, but if Pearlstein’s review is accurate, I think I find myself in his camp on the subject.  There were a few passages in this review that I really liked, if for no other reason than they sound a lot like what I wrote in my book.  But I particularly liked this bit of Pearlstein on Rodrik:

Globalization, by its very nature, is disruptive—it rearranges where and how work is done and where and how profits are made. Things that are disruptive, of course, are destabilizing and create large pools of winners and losers.

Now, from chapter 1 of Delivering Development:

The integration of local economies, politics, and society into global networks is not the unmitigated boon to human well- being presented by many authors. Those living along the shores of globalization deal with significant challenges in their lives, such as degrading environments, social inequality that limits opportunity for significant portions of society, and inadequate medical care. The integration of these places into a global economy does not necessarily solve these problems. In the best cases such integration provides new sources of income that might be used to address some of these challenges. In nearly all cases, however, such integration also brings new challenges and uncertainties that come at a cost to people’s incomes and well- being.

This is some interesting thinking in parallel – anyone got Rodrik’s email?  I need to get a copy of the book, and the hours needed to read it.

Posted on by Ed 0

Measuring poverty to address climate change

Otaviano Canuto, the World Bank’s Vice President for Poverty Reduction, had an interesting post on HuffPo yesterday in which he argues that we cannot understand the true cost of climate change until we can better measure poverty – “as long as we are unable to measure the poverty impact of climate change, we run the risk of either overestimating or underestimating the resources that will be needed to face it.”  I agree – we do not have a particularly good handle on the economic costs of climate change right now, just loose estimates that I fear are premised on misunderstandings of life in the Global South (I have an extended discussion of this problem in the second half of my book).
However, I find the phrasing of this concern a bit tortured – we need to better understand the impact of climate change on poverty so we can figure out how much it will cost us to solve the problem . . . but which problem?  Climate change or poverty?  Actually, I think this tortured syntax leads us to a more productive place than a focus on either problem – just as I am pretty sure we can’t address poverty for most living in the Global South unless we do something about climate change (which I think is what Canuto was after), I don’t think you can address climate change without addressing poverty.  As I argue in my book:

Along globalization’s shoreline the effects of climate change are felt much more immediately and more directly than in advanced economies. More and more, as both climate change and economic change impact their capacity to raise the food and money they need to get through each day, residents of this shoreline find themselves forced into trade-offs they would rather not make.

For example, most of the farmers in Dominase and Ponkrum agree that deforestation lowers the agricultural productivity of their farms, due to both the loss of local precipitation that accompanies deforestation and the loss of shade that enables the growth of sensitive crops, such as cocoa. At the same time, the sound of chainsaws can still be heard around these villages every once in a while, as a head of lineage allows someone from town to cut down one of the few remaining trees in the area for a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. These heads of family know that in allowing the cutting of trees they are mortgaging the future fertility of this land, but they see little other choice when crops do not come in as expected or jobs are hard to find.

From a global perspective, this example may not seem that dire. After all, when one tree falls, the impact on the global carbon cycle is minuscule. However, if similar stresses and decisions result in the cutting of thousands of trees each day, the impact can be significant. All along the shoreline, people are forced into this sort of trade-off every day, and in their decision- making the long-term conservation of needed natural resources usually falls by the wayside.

Simply put, we have no means of measuring or even estimating the aggregate effect of many, many small livelihoods choices and the land use impacts of those choices, yet in aggregate these will have impacts on regional and global biophysical processes.  When we fail to address poverty, and force the global poor into untenable decisions about resource use and conservation, we create conditions that will give us more climate change.  If we don’t do a better job of measuring poverty and the relationship of the livelihoods and land use decision-making of the poor (something I have addressed here), we are going to be caught by surprise by some of the biophysical changes that persistent poverty might trigger.
 

Posted on by Ed 0

When you've won the Peace Corps, you've won the war

Absolute best personal tweet I saw today, from @goldenmeancap:

@edwardrcarr Reading Delivering Dev. Memories flooding back of 1 team member’s @PeaceCorps service in Swedru, GH C/R. He can’t put it down!

No matter which Swedru he means (there are two in Ghana’s Central Region, Agona Swedru – pretty big – and Swedru – pretty small), I actually think I know the place he’s referring to.  Not well, of course, but I have passed through Agona Swedru one time, and passed by Swedru I don’t know how many times . . . pretty cool.
But a larger point – when you can get a Peace Corps volunteer to start having (largely positive) flashbacks to their fieldwork, you know you’ve done something right . . . at least in the first half of the book, which takes the reader down to the village and into the lives of the residents. This tweet review made my day.

Posted on by Ed 0

Necessary adjustments – but quant and qual still meet

The other day, I posted about the convergence between my own qualitative findings on the food security outcomes of food price instability and those of Marc Bellemare, Chris Barrett and David Just: that, at least in various parts of Africa, such instability was most likely to impact the middle and upper income cohorts more than the lower income cohorts of a given population.  However, I jumped too quickly in assuming that their dataset included rural and urban households – as Marc pointed out on his blog, they used a panel of rural household surveys.  So my initial argument about convergence does not hold up, as they did not consider the urban context in their work.
This is not to say that I am backing away from my assessment of the vulnerabilities of urban populations to this sort of challenge – I stand by it, having seen it, if only anecdotally, in towns and cities in Ghana over the past 13 years.  Urban populations are generally much more dependent on markets for their food supply than those living in rural areas (though this is not always true), and therefore price instability does create significant livelihoods uncertainty that is very difficult to manage, especially for the urban poor.  I therefore stand by my argument that we need to be keeping a close eye on the relative impact of price volatility on urban and rural populations, as the impacts of such volatility is likely to have very different impacts on these groups.
But recognizing that Bellemare et al’s work only addresses rural outcomes is not a problem for my argument about what I am loosely calling temporary deglobalization as a strategy for managing price instability (and price increases) – indeed, I think it strengthens the argument because it means that their dataset is now commensurate with mine, which was also rural.  As I argued in an extended comment on Marc’s blog:

The rural farmers most hit by price instability are those most integrated with global markets – the ones least able to deglobalize, as it were, when things get uncertain . . . Meanwhile, the bottom 60% is not as engaged with markets in which price volatility matters, and therefore can back away from them in terms of how they use their crops. In my work in Ghana, I found very few true cash crops (in the area I was working). Instead, some crops were treated like “cash crops” in years where price conditions and farm outputs of staple crops were favorable, and as staple crops when either prices were not favorable (including periods of volatility) or outputs of other staples used for subsistence were not adequate to meet household food needs. (Note: in many cases, the treatment of a crop as “cash” or “staple/subsistence” was highly gendered as well). The real difference between the rich and poor (relative terms in the Ghana sample) is the overall livelihoods strategy – one strategy (seen among the wealthier) is much, much more engaged in production for local markets, while the other (seen among the poorer) hedged market production with significant subsistence production (again, highly gendered). In years of volatility (or really in the face of most shocks), the market-oriented livelihoods were simply less resilient than the more diversified livelihoods strategies of the poorer households.

Or, as Marc himself noted in his response to my post on his blog:

[The wealthier] households tend to be hurt by price volatility because they are producers and therefore net sellers of most of (if not all) the seven commodities retained for analysis (i.e., coffee, maize, beans, wheat, teff, barley, sorghum).

So this means that the “temporary deglobalization” argument is not merely a rural-versus-urban argument, but one that can separate households in the same rural community.  This, I think, strengthens one of the arguments I was making in my original post:

  • Demanding that rural producers orient themselves toward greater and greater integration with global markets in the absence of robust fallback measures (such as established, transparent microinsurance and microsavings initiatives) will likely extend the impact of future price instability further into the poorest populations.
Posted on by Ed 1

Disciplinary history and theory are useful II: Understanding the MVP’s enduring popularity

In my guest post on Aid Watch yesterday, I argued that a basic familiarity with the history and philosophy of development, and some training in critical approaches to development, might have averted at least one of the problems currently associated with the Millennium Village Project (a conflict of interest for project workers when the stated goals and interventions of the project and the needs of MVP communities do not align) before it happened.
A failure of background knowledge also lies at the heart of the MVP’s enduring popularity, even in the face of mounting empirical evidence that it is not working.  It is one thing to ignore the predictions of a lone academic (or a few academics).  It is another to overlook evidence of problems trickling in from around the world. If the MVP is so flawed, why do so many continue to support it?
I argue that the MVP drew its popularity from two sources: its theoretical eclecticism, and from the ways in which it resonated with conventional understandings of development and development practice in the major agencies.  If one goes through the literature on the MVP, one will find echoes of many different bodies of development theory (I say “echoes” purposefully: the MVP has never overtly referenced any bodies of development theory in its publications, forcing critics to read between the lines).  For example, various authors (e.g. here and here) have found in the MVP the influence of “big push” theories with their foundations in the 1950s, while others hear the reverberations of Reagan-era privatization and deregulation.
While drawing upon many bodies of theory to build something new is not a problem in and of itself, doing so productively requires an understanding of each theory from which one is drawing.  The framing of the MVP shows no sign of such familiarity.  Instead, it appears to pluck “useful” bits and pieces of these theories that support the project’s larger political agenda and justifications for its technical interventions.  It adopts the language of “big push” theories when it argues for a concentrated injection of capital across sectors of a village economy to get them all moving simultaneously.  At the same time, it turns to the governance focus with echoes in modernization theory.  As I argued in my article on the MVP:

This focus, insofar as it does not consider the ways in which existing processes do function and places a priori weight on Western modes of administration and governance, echoes earlier, often ethnocentric, tenets of modernization theory, such as the need to convince societies to embrace new, Western forms of administration on their path to ‘development’. (338)

The problem is that these “useful bits” were parts of larger theories that, on the whole, often contradicted one another.

For example, as Cabral et al. (2006) have observed, ‘big push’ theories of development that see a coordinated injection of capital across all sectors of an economy as a productive means of driving economic ‘take off ’ and development (for example, Rostow 1959) run contrary to the claims of modernization theorists like Lewis (1954), who saw unbalanced growth in different sectors of the economy as a key to stimulating the overall economy. (338)

The result was a project that on one hand had something for every development perspective.  However, this came at the cost of internal coherence, and the ability to reflect upon or address the well-known historical problems encountered by those who employed the larger theories from which these bits were taken. A reasonable familiarity with the history and philosophy of development would have made these issues apparent long before there was a need to gather empirical evidence on the performance of the MVP.
But this sort of eclecticism only goes so far in explaining the popularity of a project – after all, most people do not worry much about the underlying assumptions of a given project or program.  What policymakers certainly do notice are the ways in which the MVP nicely aligns itself with conventional understandings of development policy and practice.  For example, there are broad similarities in approach and assumptions between the MVP and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) which suggest that the MVP is not only nothing new, it is nothing revolutionary (or, in fact, even that different from what is already being done by the mainstream development community):

Like the MVP, PRSPs tend to deal with development issues sectorally, without addressing either the tradeoffs or the synergies between different sectors – this is particularly true in the context of sustainable development planning. PRSPs also tend to conceive of solutions to sectoral problems without reference to local conditions. For example, lagging agricultural production is often addressed through the introduction of more inputs, which on its surface might seem like the ‘common sense’ application of ‘tested and true methods’. Such a set of solutions and rhetoric is nearly identical to that seen in the MVP. Finally, PRSPs, like the MVP, do not consider the social context and processes through which problems are identified and solutions shaped at the national or local level. Yet, national politics may influence the identification of a particular harvest as ‘insufficient’ or ‘sufficient’, a label that shapeshow people view that harvest and the needs of those who are dependent on it for their livelihoods. In short, the MVP and the PSRPs are mutually reinforcing – there is no challenge to the development status quo in the MVP, except perhaps in the form of a call for more money to fund the ‘big push’ (Cabral et al. 2006) needed to ‘kick-start’ development in these villages. (338-339)

Again, a familiarity with the conceptual literature in development studies would have allowed those who touted this project as something new to recognize its fundamentally conservative approach to development.
All of this goes to deepen an underlying point in the Aid Watch post: more practitioner training in the history and philosophy of development, and a wider exposure to critical approaches to development, are critical first steps toward the creation of (or simply the recognition of) truly revolutionary, coherent and ultimately successful projects.

Posted on by Ed 1