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.
Category: Development Institutions
On Aid and Development
An interesting post at Blood and Milk yesterday led a commenter to note that we shouldn’t use the terms “international development” and “aid” interchangeably – that the “real big story about development is exactly that it is NOT all about aid, but about domestic elites establishing pro-growth rules.”
For me, this raises two issues – the first is about the relationship between aid and development, and the second about the character of development itself. Alanna Shaikh, who writes the Blood and Milk blog, added a new post today that addressed the first. In this post, Shaikh argues “You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.” Well, sort of. I currently work in one of the world’s largest development/aid organizations. I am the climate change coordinator for the Bureau most directly responsible for our aid activities (as opposed to our development activities). This puts me in something of an odd position – I am a development/environment person tasked with thinking and program-building for the long-term in an aid organization that is often reactive in its programming and its mandate. Why, then, did I take this position? Because of the need to better connect aid to development (and vice versa). Right now, aid and development exist in very different worlds – even in the same building, there is little communication or coordination between these two missions. This galls people on both sides of the divide, from leadership down the line. The vision of an agency like mine is that aid should transition to development, ideally seamlessly (though at this point we would take any sort of transition). Adaptation to climate change is one area where such transitions can be created out of existing programs – our aid teams work on hydrometeorological disaster risk reduction (DRR), and our development side works on adaptation to climate change. These are very similar areas of work, differentiated largely by timeframe. One of my jobs over the next few years will be to better connect our hydromet DRR and adaptation programming to build one connection between aid and development – a thread that we might use to close other aid/development gulfs (such as in food aid and agricultural development).
Aid may not be the same thing as development, but it should not be seen completely separately from development – my Bureau sees its constituency as that component of the population that is largely left behind by economic growth programming. Nobody debates that a significant percentage of the population slips through the cracks of economic development programming – our job is to ensure that those who slip through the cracks do not remain there, but have an opportunity to recover and participate in society, politics and the economy. So, when I hear someone argue that there can be development without aid, I strongly disagree – at least at the national scale (communities are a different issue). At the national scale, you cannot have socially or environmentally sustainable development that abandons a significant portion of society to its fate. Aid is critical to development – or it should be, if only we could better coordinate aid and development efforts.
Second, I am deeply concerned by the continued connection of development to economic growth. The linkages between human well-being and economic growth are shaky at best (most correlations can be readily challenged and dismantled) – largely because development, globalization and growth do not really work the way people seem to think they do (my book is an exploration of this point). Further, economic growth cannot be eternal. 3% growth per year for everyone forever is simply beyond the physical capacity of the planet. I’m pretty sure that development is going to have to detach itself from economic growth (ironically, this would mostly entail simply acknowledging the reality of what’s been happening around the world for the last 60 years) if it is ever to accomplish its end goal – the improvement of the human condition in this world.
Finally, a thought on the two metastories of development that Shaikh raises at the end of her post. I agree that development is neither all success or all failure – it plays out differently in different places, and we have better understandings of why in some areas (health, for example) than in others (transportation development, for example). I would argue that this is a symptom of a larger problem – we really don’t understand what is happening in the Global South most of the time, and as a result we are often measuring and analyzing the wrong things when we do project scoping or evaluation work. Our assumptions about how the world works shape the way we frame our questions about the world, and the data we gather to answer those questions. The problem, simply put, is that we are often asking the wrong question. Sure, every once in a while our assumptions align with events on the ground, and a project works. But the rest of the time, our assumptions do not align with reality, and we run into difficulty understanding what is happening in particular places, and why particular projects fail. The end result? A seeming random set of project outcomes, where things work in one place but not another for reasons that seem hard to discern. There are more fundamental metanarratives of development out there than success or failure – they are narratives about how globalization works and how development works that shape our very ability to assess success or failure. And those narratives actually misinform many of our best efforts.
Where accountability goes to die
The subtle airbrushing of market manipulation out of the public consciousness continues apace. Despite clear evidence from IFPRI that market manipulation is creating the conditions of uncertainty that are driving up global food prices, nobody seems to want to address this in a forceful manner – and heaven forbid you raise this in any food security discussions in a development agency. People will blindly argue that there is no evidence (except, of course, there is), and then when confronted with the IFPRI study will make absurd arguments like the uncertainty is creating the appearance of manipulation because, you know, IFPRI wouldn’t bother to make sure they had the causality going in the right direction before they published.* So, we will just keep plugging away at the issues of supply to address global food issues, because why address the only factor that IFPRI could identify as having a causal effect on the rising food prices in 2008?
And now we see the same blindness spreading into our discussions of the financial markets. In the January issue of Wired Felix Salmon and Jon Stokes return to the Flash Crash, the sudden near-600 point drop in the Dow that occurred back in May. The regulatory agencies assigned to policing market manipulation more or less abdicated their responsibilities and absolved everyone of blame in their report. This was absurd, and doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of logic. Now Wired is on board, running a “blame the algorithms” story that uses the flash crash as exhibit A. They argue that Waddell and Reed (the managers of the mutual fund that made the trade)
used an algorithm to hedge its stock market position. The trade was executed in just 20 minutes – an extremely aggressive time frame, which triggered a market plunge as other algorithms reacted, first to the sale and then to one another’s behavior
Sure – this is exactly how it played out. But the issue here is not that the algorithms themselves were to blame. Someone had the PROGRAM THE ALGORITHM FOR THE FIRST TRADE. The algorithm did not decide to dump all of those futures contracts in 20 minutes. The person who designed the algorithm (or, more likely, his/her employer) made that decision. Once set in motion, I have no doubt that this trade cascaded through other, more conventionally designed algorithms, triggering all sorts of “irrational” behavior as they tried to adjust to the rapidly-changing market conditions. I also have no doubt that whoever set up the original algorithm had some idea that this is exactly the sort of chaos that would ensure from their insane trade. Everyone is now focused on events after the initial trade, and how trading algorithms might need more controls or oversight. I think that is a reasonable position, but it does nothing to address the behavior of individuals willing to initiate market chaos by setting up insane trades.
Incidentally, nobody in their right mind would set up an insane trade for no reason. I wonder if the SEC spent any time looking into who was short on the Dow that day and made out big (including people who made out huge before a bunch of trades later in the crash were invalidated), and then examined the connections those folks might have had to Waddell and Reed. Then again, it seems few folks in major development agencies want to seriously examine market manipulation and its impact on food security.
At what point does willful obliviousness turn into criminal negligence?
*these were actual arguments raised when a colleague of mine attempted to address the issue of market manipulation at a meeting in one of our major development agencies. Really. How the hell, exactly, does uncertainty create the appearance of manipulation?
Measurement matters . . .
Todd Moss at the Center for Global Development has a post about Ghana and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Overall, he makes some good points about the purpose of MCC compacts, and whether or not it makes sense to re-up with Ghana in 2012 for a second compact. While Moss makes a number of good points in his post (including the fact that Ghana has a lot of capital incoming from oil, and a ready market for its debt, both of which seem to negate the need for continued grants), I was brought up short by one stunning statement:
Ghana is (suddenly) just barely “low income”. A recent rebasing of its GDP found the country was 63% richer than everyone thought. Ghana might still technically qualify for the MCC but the rationale for another huge compact drops pretty significantly.
Now, to be fair to Moss, he has an excellent post here on the implications of such rebasing. Importantly, the second lesson he takes away from this sudden revaluation of Ghana’s economy is:
Boy, we really don’t know anything. Over the past thirty years Ghana has been one of the most scrutinized, measured, studied, picked-over economies in Africa. (yes, I too did my PhD on Ghana…) Yet, we were all taking as gospel a number that was off by a tremendous margin. If we are nearly two-thirds wrong on Ghana’s GDP, what hope can we possibly have in stats for Chad? Everyone knows that data is dubious, but this seems to add a whole new level of doubt.
His fourth point is closely related:
I’m still confused… but it probably doesn’t matter. The Reuters article quotes the government statistician as estimating GDP per capita at $1318 instead of $753. This doesn’t add up to the total GDP figures also given since this implies a 75% increase. If the $1318 is correct, then that either implies that the government thinks there are only 19.4 million people instead of the normal estimates of about 24 million. Or, if the total GDP number of $25.6 billion is right, then per capita GDP is really $1067 per capita. (I think I’m already violating my lesson from #2.)
I have a chapter in my book dedicated to understanding why our measurements of the economy and environment in the Global South are mostly crap, and even when the data is firm it often does not capture the dynamics we think it does. I then spend a few chapters suggesting what to do about it (including respatializing data/data collection so that it can be organized into spatial units that have social, economic, and ecological meaning, and using basic crowdsourcing techniques to both collect data and ground truth of existing statistics). Even better, this is rooted in a discussion of Ghana’s economy. I give Moss credit for being willing to point out the confusing numbers, and acknowledge that they confuse him. They should.
But Moss gets it totally wrong here:
Ghana has long aspired to be a middle-income country by 2020, and this now seems like it will happen many years early. Accra certainly feels like a middle-income city.
This statement explains how he can label Ghana “barely low-income”, even after he has called the very statistics that make such a claim possible into question: he’s focused on Accra. Accra has very little to do with how the bulk of the Ghanaian population lives – and most of that population is very, very poor. Ghana is not barely low income – it is still quite low income, with some pockets of extreme wealth starting to distort the national statistics. It doesn’t matter how Accra feels – that city is home to at best 10% of the population. Kumasi is home to between 5-8% more. Generously including Tamale and Takoradi in the middle-income city categories (this is very generous) nets you probably 25% of the population – nobody else is living in a middle income country. Like Moss, I did my dissertation work in Ghana. I still work there. The difference is that I did my work in rural villages, and still do. $1 a day beyond subsistence is a common income in the rural areas of the Central Region, even now – and the Central Region has a lot more infrastructure than most of the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions. This population remains poorly educated – failed by poor rural schools. They cannot support a transformation of the Ghanaian economy. Most of Ghana is still a very low income country, not ready for any sort of sustained economic growth. The country has seen enormous success in recent years – I am stunned by what I have seen in the past 13 years – but the fruits of that success are not distributed evenly. While the cities have boomed, the villages are nearly unchanged. This is Ghana’s new challenge – to spread this new wealth out and foster a diverse, resilient economy.
This is not to say that an MCC compact is the right tool to foster this, or that Ghana is the best place to be putting MCC money. However, declaring “success” too soon creates its own set of risks – let’s use some nuance when considering how a country is doing, so we can identify the real challenges to overcome and successes to build on moving forward.
Militarizing aid
The role of the military in development is a terribly fraught issue – and it has been with us for a very, very long time. In my book, I argue that globalization and development turned into each other long ago – insofar as development has largely been reduced to a means by which we connect different parts of the world into a global market and political economy. This is not because development is some sort of militaristic economic movement (though, of course, sometimes it has been used as such), but because one of the dominant assumptions in development is that free markets and a globalized political economy are the best ways to bring about improvements in human well-being (my book is an extended, empirically-based critique of this assumption). If you accept this definition of development, colonialism was really the first phase of “development” as we understand it today. Military force was an important part of colonial efforts to open new territories to these markets (often couched in terms of peoples “own good”), thus creating a remarkably negative association with the military in development circles.
Today, the military has largely taken on a very different role – it is a critical means by which relief supplies are delivered to disaster-stricken areas. And, in conflict zones like Iraq, the military has been forced to take on development work, despite the fact that its personnel are not trained for that mission (something most folks in the military are well aware of, and would like to see changed). Underdevelopment has been viewed as a national security issue (such as the very poorly substantiated assumption that poverty breeds terrorism), especially in the context of climate changes which are presumed to negatively impact the poorest and most vulnerable such that they will threaten state stability in many parts of the world. Engagement with the military is something that is nearly impossible to avoid if one works for a major agency.
I’ll be frank, here – I’ve never been comfortable with the military’s engagement with development. As I mentioned above, they are at best highly disciplined amateurs who have little experience and no real knowledge base when conducting “aid work”, which as we all know can make anyone more dangerous than helpful. I also think it is unfair to ask people trained for one mission to go out and conduct another for which they are not prepared – it’s never good to set someone up for failure. But the New York Times ran a story today that really gets to the heart of my issues with the militarization of development – it makes it impossible for anyone to do good development work. When development work is conducted alongside military operations, especially as conscious parts of a hearts-and-minds campaign, development becomes a tool of war. This makes the practitioners combatants, at least in the eyes of the opponent. I am in no way justifying the kidnapping or killing of those who work in development in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but I think we have to be honest about why otherwise unarmed civilians working on projects that are intended to have a community benefit might end up becoming targets. It is not because “the enemy” is utterly depraved and indifferent – indeed many on the other side might see the use of development as a tool of war as itself depraved, a sort of holding people’s well-being hostage to larger geopolitical ends.
This post is not, in the end, a critique of the military – I certainly wish we lived in a world where they were not needed. I imagine many of those serving in the military feel the same way. But that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where the military is doing development because someone has told them they have to. This is not their fault. However, I would ask that the military step back and think carefully about using development as part of larger combat campaigns – the association with conflict and combat gives our entire endeavor a bad name.
“Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,”
Well, there’s nothing like continued empirical evidence for the arguments I have been making about Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and thanks to a Tweet from Michael Clemens, I’ve now got more. Clemens is one of the authors of a report that is very critical of the MVP, and that report was good enough to find and cite my work on this topic – but how he dug up this story from a Liberian newspaper, I will never know:
“The project is a new approach to fighting poverty in post-conflict Liberia, but residents in the District have complained that they had seen no evidence of the project getting off the ground. In a brief statement to the President, Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah indicated that the project, which seeks to improve the socio-economic and infrastructural development of the District lacked the residents’ involvement and that there was not tangible impact being felt by the villagers. He added that the people of that District were discontent about the way the project is being implemented in their village.”
But the brutal sentence is the one by Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah that titles this post: “‘Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,’ he said.”
Clemens’ report is here. My article is here.
Easterly says what most of us are thinking . . .
Bill Easterly is one of the better public intellectuals in the area of development – I enjoy his writing, and I think that his work since leaving the World Bank has become more and more valuable as it takes on an ever-more critical edge. I take him to task for some of his earlier work in my book, and I think that he does not quite question the workings of globalization and development to the extent necessary to really start to get at what is happening in the world, but by and large I think he is a tremendously valuable asset for the development community.
My belief in his value just went up tenfold, however, with his op-ed comparing the celebrity activism of Lennon to that of Bono. While I take his points about Lennon’s activism, I suspect that Easterly overstates the case for Lennon’s importance as an activist a bit – it is hard to change the system from completely outside, as there is often no way to engage with people constructively – all you get is parallel conversations. But Easterly’s criticism of Bono is dead on:
While Bono calls global poverty a moral wrong, he does not identify the wrongdoers. Instead, he buys into technocratic illusions about the issue without paying attention to who has power and who lacks it, who oppresses and who is oppressed. He runs with the crowd that believes ending poverty is a matter of technical expertise – doing things such as expanding food yields with nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants or solar-powered drip irrigation.
Bono becomes a problem not through any fault of his own, really, but because he becomes a mouthpiece for people like Jeff Sachs (I have plenty to say about him, but look here, here and in the peer-reviewed literature here) who really seem unable to think about power relations, history and political economy when considering development. Asserting that poverty is the result of a lack of development asserts a problem and a solution all at once, without ever really addressing a cause. Further, as I tell my students, there is no such thing as a purely technical, apolitical development intervention – even putting in a well will have variable impacts across a community, creating winners and losers. The technical is not the hard part in development – if it was, we’d have accomplished a hell of a lot more than we have up to this point.
I also must admit that I really appreciated Easterly turning his guns on the other celebrity activists:
Bono is not the only well-intentioned celebrity wonk of our age – the impulse is ubiquitous. Angelina Jolie, for instance, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (seriously) in addition to serving as a U.N. goodwill ambassador. Ben Affleck has become an expert on the war in Congo. George Clooney has Sudan covered, while Leonardo DiCaprio hobnobs with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders at a summit to protect tigers; both actors have written opinion essays on those subjects in these pages, further solidifying their expert bona fides.
But why should we pay attention to Bono’s or Jolie’s expertise on Africa, any more than we would ask them for guidance on the proper monetary policy for the Federal Reserve?
Why indeed? I sure as hell don’t plan to lecture Clooney or DiCaprio on acting. Affleck, well . . .
But I must take issue with Easterly a tiny bit here – yes, Bono is the frontman, but shouldn’t our frustration be directed at those who fill his and others’ heads with the belief that we can fix it all, with just a little more money (I’m looking at you, Dr. Sachs)? I have no doubt that Bono, Clooney and all the rest have the best of intentions, and work hard to inform themselves rather than run around blind, but in the end they are manipulated by people with greater experience and what appears to be greater expertise to further agendas that these celebrities do not understand – Bono is backing Sachs’ push for more aid (which is in conflict with Easterly’s and others’ view that we need to focus on institutions, political systems and corruption). Clooney is supporting a group that has one idea of how to address issues in Sudan, but may not have the best or the only ideas because they tend to deal in moral absolutes (like supporting an ICC warrant for Kony, which derailed peace talks in Northern Uganda/Southern Sudan/Congo/CAR). We need to make sure we dig past the celebs to those who feed them these ideas, and address the problem at it source . . .
This is great!
Blog Wronging Rights has an absolutely fantastic post on “poverty porn”, and how one reality show (The Amazing Race) actually may have gotten it mostly right in its depiction of Ghana. Anybody reading this who works in development: click that link and read. Please. And anyone who is reading this who has ever witnessed one of those awful commercials for an aid agency or organization that features forlorn, dirty children: click that link and read.
Man, when we have to go to reality TV to get something resembling an accurate depiction of life in the Global South, you know things are off the rails . . .
Too right . . .
Kentaro Toyama has a great piece in the Boston Review on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in development – really, though, it is a larger commentary on how we think about using technology in development generally. Simply put, Toyama warns against treating ICT as itself a solution for poverty – instead, he argues, it is but one tool, a means to an end:
If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Alex Dehgan the other day – talking about how efforts to address particular development challenges, whether via technology or other approaches, should be focused on a systematic approach to the problem that will yield different, but locally-appropriate, outcomes in different places, instead of the search for a singular solution that could be applied anywhere and everywhere (history is littered with the wreckage of these efforts – most recently, see the Millennium Village Project). This is what I have been after in my work on livelihoods and adaptation for the past 7 years or so – a way of approaching these issues in a rigorous manner that allows for the serious consideration of local context. How we translate that into programming and policy remains to be seen . . .
For everyone who doesn't understand social research . . .
OK, two posts for today, because I can’t help myself. Yeah, I am a social scientist. Which means that people either think I run control experiments on various populations (an idea that freaks me out)*, or they think that I have no method to my research at all – I just sort of run around, talk to a few people until I get bored or run out of money, and then come back and write it up.
Of course, both views are crap. Good social science is founded on rigorous fieldwork and data whose validity can be verified. How one collects that data, and verifies that validity, varies – it depends on what you are studying. For whatever reason, though, people have a hard time understanding this. Quick story: a former chair of my department, during a debate about field methods, actually once asked me if it was really possible to teach someone to do interviews and participant observation. My response: “I didn’t pop out of the womb able to do this, you know.” End of discussion, thankfully.
But now I have found someone who has written this up nicely – Wronging Rights (absolutely hilarious, and totally awful, all at the same time – just go read for a bit and then feel bad about yourself for laughing. Everyone does) has a great post on the subject that links to a series of even better posts at Texas in Africa that covers it (see the Wronging Rights post link to connect to the relevant Texas in Africa posts).
Social scientists, get to reading. Journalists, read this and understand why you are not social scientists. Especially you, Thomas Friedman. And the rest of you . . . never, ever ask me if you can teach someone to do social science . . .
*controlled experiment: what, am I supposed to pick two identical villages (no such thing), and then start to work with one village while studiously ignoring the other village no matter what happens to that community (i.e. drought, food insecurity, disease, what have you) because I need to preserve the integrity of my control group? There are other ways to establish the validity of one’s results . . .