Geoff Dabelko, Sean Peoples, Schuyler Null and the rest of the good folks at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars were kind enough to interview me about some of the themes in Delivering Development. They’ve posted the video on te ECSP’s blog, The New Security Beat (you really should be checking them out regularly). So, if you want to see/hear me (as opposed to read me), you can go over to their blog, or just click below.
Category: Development Institutions
And another thing . . .
Would folks who know precious little about development please stop telling everyone what the discipline of development looks like? Seriously. Francis Fukuyama has a piece in the American Interest in which he decries the lack of what he calls “large perspective” work in the social sciences. Admittedly, I have some sympathy for his position here – like all academic disciplines, the social sciences generally reward narrow specialization, or at least that is what most of us are trained to believe. I think there is another way to succeed in academia, a path I am taking – to write not only high quality, refereed research in one’s field(s), but also general-audiences works that gain a wider profile (that was the point of writing Delivering Development). When you reach audiences beyond academia, you develop other lines of influence, other sources of funding . . . and generally give yourself some space in your home institution, as nobody wants to fire/lose the visible public intellectual. Sadly, few of us choose the buck the system in this manner, and therefore become slaves to our journals and their relatively narrow audiences.
I also like Fukuyama’s clear argument about the goals of social science:
“The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level.”
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. When we refuse to admit this, we empower the people who are willing to take problematic data and jam it through dicey quantitative tools to produce semi-coherent, super-shallow analyses that appear to present simple framings of the world and solutions to our problems while in fact they obscure any real understanding of what is going on, and what might be done.
But in between these two points, made at the beginning and end of the article, respectively, Fukuyama populates his piece with a number of statements about development that range from the problematic to the factually incorrect. In the end, I am forced to conclude that he has little, if any, understanding of contemporary development in theory or practice. Sadly, this did not keep him from making a number of sweeping, highly erroneous statements. For example, at one point he makes the claim
Few scholars have sought to understand development as an inter-connected process with political, economic and social parts.
This claim exists to further his argument that development is plagued by siloed thinking that has led to intellectual incoherence and failed policy. While I might agree about development having problems with its intellectual coherence, he is totally wrong in this claim. It only holds up if one chooses to NOT use something as ubiquitous as Google Scholar (let alone Web of Science) to examine the literature of the past 20 years. Anthropologists, geographers and sociologists have been doing just this sort of work, mostly at the community level, all along. Often the lessons of this work are not aimed beyond the communities in which the work was undertaken, but there is a giant volume of work out there that has long taken this interconnection seriously.
Further, Fukuyama’s ignorance of the current state of the discipline and practice of development shows in his claim:
While paying lip service to the importance of institutions, most economists and field practitioners still see politics as at best an obstacle to the real work of development, which is improvement in incomes, health, education and the like, and not as an independent objective of development strategy. (Amartya Sen is an important exception to this generalization.) The democracy promotion agencies, for their part, spend relatively little time worrying about economic growth, social policy or public health, which in their view are goods often used by authoritarian regimes to buy off populations and prevent democratization.
While some economists still treat “the social” as maximizing behavior warped by a bunch of externalities, those that are any good concern themselves with politics (at scales from the state to the household). Practitioners, perhaps more than anyone else, know that politics are hugely important to the work of development. Sen has a wide purchase and following throughout development, including at my current employer. And how does one then address the Democracy and Governance Office in my Bureau – they are, without question, a democracy promotion office . . . but their whole lives revolve around linking this to various other development efforts like economic growth or public health. When he claims that those who work for USAID “do not seek an understanding of the political context within which aid is used and abused” he’s simply factually incorrect. Basically, Fukuyama is just throwing out huge claims that have little or no anchor in the reality of contemporary development agencies or practice.
Fukuyama’s article was not really about development – it was about understanding social change. However, in using development as his foil in this piece, Fukuyama has done a great disservice to the contemporary discipline – both in its good and bad aspects. Like those who would give us useless universalizing generalizations and predictions from their social inquiries, Fukuyama’s (mis)reading of development makes it harder to see where the real problems are, and how we might address them.
Qualitative research was (already) here . . .
You know, qualitative social scientists of various stripes have long complained of their marginalization in development. Examples abound of anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists complaining about the influence of the quantitatively-driven economists (and to a lesser extent, some political scientists) over development theory and policy. While I am not much for whining, these complaints are often on the mark – quantitative data (of the sort employed by economists, and currently all the rage in political science) tends to carry the day over qualitative data, and the nuanced lessons of ethnographic research are dismissed as unimplementable, ideosyncratic/place-specific, without general value, etc. This is not to say that I have an issue with quantitative data – I believe we should employ the right tool for the job at hand. Sadly, most people only have either qualitative or quantitative skills, making the selection of appropriate tools pretty difficult . . .
But what is interesting, of late, is what appears to be a turn toward the lessons of the qualitative social sciences in development . . . only without actually referencing or reading those qualitative literatures. Indeed, the former quantitative masters of the development universe are now starting to figure out and explore . . . the very things that the qualitative community has known for decades. What is really frustrating and galling is that these “new” studies are being lauded as groundbreaking and getting great play in the development world, despite the fact they are reinventing the qualitative wheel, and without much of the nuance of the current qualitative literature and its several decades of nuance.
What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy. I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc. On the other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is nothing new in this article. Indeed, the implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this. But what of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists). Hell, what of the Peace Corps?
Whether intentional or not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum. This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method. While I am sure that there is more to their research than presented in the article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security. They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making. I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present. But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena. The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and my analyses.
The result of all that work was a deep humility in the face of the challenges that those living in places like Coastal Ghana or Southern Malawi manage on a day-to-day basis . . . and deep humility when addressing the idea of explanation. This is an experience I share with countless colleagues who have spent a lot of time on the ground in communities, ministries and aid organizations, a coming to grips with the fact that massively generalizable solutions simply don’t exist in the way we want them to, and that singular interventions will never address the challenges facing those living in the Global South.
So, I find it frustrating when Banerjee and Duflo present this observation as in any way unique:
What we’ve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn’t necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.
For anyone working in food security – that is, anyone who has been reading the literature coming out of anthropology, geography, sociology, and even some areas of ag econ, this is not a revelation – this is standard knowledge. A few years ago I spent a lot of time and ink on an article in Food Policy that tried to loosely frame a schematic of local decision-making that leads to food security outcomes – an effort to systematize an approach to the highly complex sets of processes and decisions that produce hunger in particular places because there is really no way to get a single, generalized statistic or finding that will explain hunger outcomes everywhere.
In other words: We know. So what do you have to tell us?
The answer, unfortunately, is not very much . . . because in the end they don’t really dive into the social processes that lead to the sorts of decisions that they see as interesting or counterintuitive. This is where the heat is in development research – there are a few of us working down at this level, trying to come up with new framings of social process that move us past a reliance solely on the blunt tool of economistic rationality (which can help explain some behaviors and decisions) toward a more nuanced framing of how those rationalities are constructed by, and mobilize, much larger social processes like gender identification. The theories in which we are dealing are very complex, but they do work (at least I think my work with governmentality is working – but the reviewers at Development and Change might not agree).
And maybe, just maybe, there is an opening to get this sort of work out into the mainstream, to get it applied – we’re going to try to do this at work, pulling together resources and interests across two Bureaus and three offices to see if a reframing of livelihoods around Foucault’s idea of governmentality can, in fact, get us better resolution on livelihoods and food security outcomes than current livelihoods models (which mostly assume that decisionmaking is driven by an effort to maximize material returns on investment and effort). Perhaps I rest too much faith on the idea of evidence, but if we can implement this idea and demonstrate that it works better, perhaps we will have a lever with which to push oversimplified economistic assumptions out of the way, while still doing justice to the complexity of social process and explanation in development.
Optimism in numbers
Tom over at A View from the Cave has a really interesting observation at the end of his post on the Mortensen scandal the other day:
I have been conducting interviews with the Knowledge Management team with UNICEF and the one today go to discussing the access of information. I was struck when the gentleman I was interviewing said, “There are hundreds of offices and thousands of people in UNICEF. Any idea that I come with has likely been already done by 50 people and better than what I had imagined.” We need to access this information and share it with each other so that a story like this will not go the same route.
I know that this is not a new observation – hell, it is practically the mantra of the ICT for development crowd – but I want to point out something that gets lost in its common repetition: optimism. The interviewee above was not disparaging the idea of access to information, but instead showing tremendous humility in the face of a vast, talented organization. Tom’s point was to move from this humble observation to (quite rightly) point out that while great ideas may exist within the organization, until they are accessed or shared they are just potential energy.
This is the same thing I tried to leave readers with as one of the takeaways from Delivering Development. As I argue:
We probably overlook significant problems every day, as our measurements fail to capture them, and we are likely mismeasuring many of those we can see. However, this is not failure; this is hope. If we acknowledge that these are, indeed, significant problems that must be addressed if we wish to build a sustainable future, then we can abandon the baggage of decades of failure. We can open ourselves up to innovation that might be unimaginable from within the echo chamber of contemporary globalization and development . . .
This uncertainty, for me, is hope. There are more than 6.5 billion people on this planet. Surely at least several of them have innovative and exciting ideas about how to address the challenges facing their lives, ideas that might be applicable in other places or be philosophically innovative. We will not know unless we ask, unless we actively go looking for these ideas and empower those who have them to express them to the world.
In short, Tom’s interviewee sees 50,000 people as a hopeful resource. I see the nearly 7 billion people on this planet in the same way. I am optimistic about the “potential energy” for addressing global challenges that exists out there in the world. That said, it will be nothing but potential until we empower people to convert it into kinetic actions. Delivering Development provides only the loosest schematic of one way of thinking about doing this (there is a much, much more detailed project/workplan behind that loose schematic) that was presented to raise a political challenge the the status quo focus on experts and “developed country” institutions in development – if we know that people living in the Global South have good ideas, and we can empower these people to share their ideas and solutions, why don’t we?
Sometimes optimism requires a lead blocker. I’m happy to play that role . . . hopefully someone is following me through the line.
Revisionist history
REVISED 6 April 2011, 11:35am
Esther Duflo responded in a comment below – you should read it. She is completely reasonable, and lays out a clearer understanding of the discipline and her place in it than did the article I am critiquing here. I have edited the post below to reflect what I think is a more fair reading of what went wrong in the article
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Esther Duflo is a fairly impressive person. So why does she, and the Guardian, feel the need to inflate her resume?
Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.
“It was not considered a fancy area of study,” she says. “There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have some advisers and mentors.”
Er, no. Development economics as a formal field had been around since the early 1980s (Note: Marc Bellemare and Duflo have both pointed out that the real roots of this discipline go back to the 1940s), and economists had been working on development issues since . . . colonialism, actually. I imagine there are a lot of senior Ph.D. economists at the IMF, World Bank and various other organizations who will be amused to hear that they were beaten to their degrees by Duflo. She was not at all one of the first doctoral students to work on this, and there are/were plenty of faculties that look at development economics.
I suspect that this might have something to do with what Mark Blaug was talking about in his article “No History of Ideas, Please, We’re Economists.” In short, one of Blaug’s arguments is that disciplinary history has largely disappeared from doctoral programs in economics, with the predictable effect of dooming the discipline to repeat its errors. I would extend Blaug’s point to many who work in the larger field of development – we have a lot of technical specialists out there with excellent training and experience, but relatively few of them understand development as a discipline with a history and a philosophy. As a result, we see “new” projects proposed and programmed despite their odd resemblance to previous efforts that failed.
There is a hint of this in the article – after all, Duflo is correct in noting that she emerged as an academic at a time when other social science fields were on the ascendancy, but she the Guardian fails to ask why this was the trend at the time – especially after economics’ dominance of the field for so long. A little disciplinary history here would have helped – these other fields rose to prominence in the aftermath of the collapse of development economics as a formal field in the late 1980s…
So, Guardian, anyone over there actually schooled in development? Or interested in fact-checking?
Why do we insist on working at the national level again?
The BBC has posted an interesting map of Nigeria that captures the spatiality of politics, ethnicity, wealth, health, literacy and oil. There are significant problems with this map. The underlying data has fairly large error bars that are not acknowledged, and the presentation of the data is somewhat problematic; for example, the ethnic “areas” in the country are represented only by the majority group, hiding the heterogeneity of these areas, and other data is aggregated at the state level, blurring heterogenous voting patterns, incomes, literacy rates and health situations. I really wish that those who create this sort of thing would do a better job addressing some of these issues, and pointing out the issues they cannot address to help the reader better evaluate the data.
But even with all of these caveats, this map is a striking illustration of the problems with using national-level statistics to guide development policy and programs. Look at the distributions of wealth, health and literacy in the country – error bars or no, this data clearly demonstrates that national measures of wealth cannot guide useful economic policy, national measures of literacy might obscure regional or ethnic patterns of educational neglect, and national vaccination statistics tell us nothing about the regional variations in disease ecology and healthcare delivery that shape health outcomes in this country.
This is not to say that states don’t matter – they matter a lot. However, when we use national-scale data for just about anything, we are making very bad assumptions about the heterogeneity of the situation in that country . . . and we are probably missing key opportunities and challenges we should be addressing in our work.
Better because we are there?
It’s been a difficult weekend – I spent it at the memorial for the wife of one of my best friends. I was at their wedding almost 12 years ago, and the reality of the situation has not set in for me at all.
Every once in a while, though, life hands us a particular event through which we can suddenly see much larger issues more clearly. This weekend certainly gave me that. When I finally saw my friend on Friday, the first thing out of my mouth was the largely useless phrase “how are you?” – no matter how sincere I was, I know enough about loss to know that there is no good answer to that question. Yet somehow he came up with one: “Better, now that you’re here.” I’ve known him long enough to know that this was a sincere response, and I found it deeply moving.
Ever since, this exchange has been eating at me – it is one of those lenses through which I can see a much larger issue in my life. How many times do those of us who work in aid and development really ask “how are you?” to those we work with/work for when we get out in the field – how often do we really let people participate in our programs and projects by telling us how they are and what they need, versus giving them the right to agree (too much “participatory” work falls under the latter heading)? And how often could they honestly say, “Better, now that you are here” to us if we were to ask?
Maybe, just maybe, this is an informal metric we might use to evaluate our efforts in the world . . . are things better, now that we are there? If not, what can we/should we do differently to make sure that people do feel that way?
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).
Perspective
I sat through an outstanding FEWS-NET briefing today at work – some of the material falls under the heading of sensitive but unclassified (SBU), which basically means I can’t give details on it here. However, the publicly-available information from the briefing (link here – click on the near-term and medium-term tabs) makes it clear that there are really bad things taking place in parts of the Horn of Africa right now that are likely to result in large areas being extremely food insecure, which FEWS-NET defines as:
Households face substantial or prolonged shortfalls in their ability to meet basic food requirements. Reduced food intake is widespread, resulting in significantly increased rates of acute malnutrition and increasing mortality. Significant erosion of assets is occurring, and households are gradually moving towards destitution.
To summarize, people are dying due to food insecurity in the Horn of Africa right now, and it is going to get a whole lot worse for the next 6 or so months.
The briefing was very well run and presented, and the question session afterward was generally quite informative. FEWS-NET is a remarkable tool – I think it is probably the best food insecurity assessment tool in the world right now – and I am engaged with thinking about how to make their assessments and projections even more accurate. So I had a sort of technical disconnect from the meaning of the data during the briefing – to me, the numbers were data points that could be parsed differently to better understand what was actually taking place.
I returned to my desk, head buzzing with ways to reframe some of the analysis, but before I could get to writing anything down, an email came in telling me that the wife of one of my closest friends had passed away from ovarian cancer. She was 41, and leaves behind my friend and their very young son. For some reason, in that moment all of my data points became people, tens of thousands of mothers, fathers and children whose loss was beyond tragic.
That was it for me. I logged out, walked out of the office, and went to get my oldest daughter out of preschool an hour early. Somebody needs to parse the data, to reframe and retheorize what we see happening in places like the Horn of Africa so we can respond better and reduce the occurrence and impact of future events. But not me, not today.
Tomorrow, maybe.
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.