Category: development

Oh, so you CAN say it out loud

The AP is running a story on food prices – and it is heavily focused on the problem of commodities speculation.  Actually, it is heavily focused on French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s comments on the causes of the food price increases.  While Sarkozy acknowledged the importance of issues like climate change, he quickly moved past these causes:

Sarkozy said the difficulties go far beyond the whims of nature. He said financial market specialists — instead of agricultural trading houses — had taken over the global farm market and called for change.

“Take the Chicago market,” said Sarkozy, listing how the derivatives exchange totals 46 times the annual U.S. wheat production and 24 times that of corn. He said 85 percent of the contracts on commodities futures markets are held by purely financial players “with no link to the commodity itself.”

“The example shows to what extent our world has lost a sense of value, a sense of reality, a sense of capitalism to serve the development and happiness of people,” Sarkozy said.

It is worth noting that Sarkozy is no leftist . . . though he will likely be painted as one for that last sentence.  Then again, anyone who notes that markets might have negative as well as positive effects will be painted as  anti-capitalist/naive/out-of-place ideologue (see the comments on Dot Earth’s mention of my concerns over climate change communication).
Let me note that Sarkozy is not demonizing all speculation – nor do I.  As I discussed in an earlier post, speculation plays an important economic role that can distribute the stresses that lead to future price spikes over time, thus ameliorating future crisis.  However, this is not to say that speculation should just run unregulated – basic regulation that keeps speculation within productive parameters would likely enhance its value in the food security arena.  (See this IFPRI forum for more on the role of speculation in world food markets)
However, more information for these markets would probably help as well.  While the USDA and other organizations offer estimates of global and sometimes national-level agricultural production, it would be good to have concrete, sub-national datasets on ag production updated in real time – this would remove some of the uncertainty in commodities markets that can then be leveraged into arbitragable price instability . . . and that alone might start to clean out the more problematic players in agricultural commodities markets.

Posted on by Ed 0

The British lead . . . and who will follow?

David Cameron gave a speech yesterday at the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation conference.  It deserves to be read in full – I don’t agree with every word (and how I disagree with many of Cameron’s stances), but it is one of the clearest statements on why we must continue to deliver aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.
On the down side, Cameron starts out a bit too market triumphalist for my tastes:

At home we don’t tackle poverty by state hand-outs; we help people get into work, to stand on their own two feet and to take control of their own destiny.  The same should be true of development.  No country has ever pulled itself out of poverty through aid alone, so this government will take a new approach.  The same conditions create prosperity the world over.  They include access to markets, property rights, private-sector investment and they make up what I see as the golden thread of successful development.  Ultimately it’s the private sector that will be the engine for growth and that’s why this government’s efforts will increasingly focus on helping developing countries achieve that growth with the jobs and opportunities it will bring.

Well, this is a bit muddled.  First, last I checked England (and Great Britain more generally) was home to a robust welfare state (well, until various Tory governments from Thatcher to Cameron took a hatchet to it) that provided the safety net that enhanced the quality of life of its citizens.  On the other hand (and second), I agree that no country has ever been lifted out of poverty through aid alone – but then, that’s not what aid does.  At best, aid catalyzes much larger processes of change – and sometimes those changes play out constructively (I discuss this at length in Delivering Development).  Third, the only countries to have really changed their status in the last half century have done so by rejecting things like the open market and behaving in very politically repressive ways to get through a serious of difficult transitions that eventually made them competitive in global markets and able to productively take in foreign investment – so this claim about what works isn’t fully supported by the evidence.  Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion suggests that this might be changing as a new pile of countries “graduate” from low-income to middle-income status, but this is still unclear as many of the new “graduates” from low to middle income status have just crept above that line, often with no transformation of their economic fundamentals (leaving them vulnerable to slip-back) and still containing huge numbers of very poor people (creating the same problem, and calling into question the very concept of “graduation” to middle income status).
This is not to say that I don’t think markets have any value – I just fear those who place absolute faith in them, especially given that the environment is the site of perhaps the most serious market failure we’ve ever seen.  However, as the speech progressed, I became somewhat more comfortable as, at least in the context of development, Cameron takes a somewhat more moderate tack:

We want people in Africa to climb the ladder of prosperity but of course when the bottom rungs of that ladder are broken by disease and preventable death on a massive scale, when countries can’t even get on the bottom rung of the growth ladder because one in seven of their children die before they reach their fifth birthday, we have to take urgent action.  We have to save lives and then we can help people to live.  So that’s where today’s announcement fits in.  Because there cannot really be any effective development – economic or political – while there are still millions of people dying unnecessarily.

Absolutely correct – the “bottom of the pyramid”, as it were, often finds itself left behind when economic growth programs rev up . . . this is well-understood in both academia and the development institutions.  Indeed, it is not controversial for my Bureau (DCHA – the folks who deal with disasters and conflict) to argue that its work is fundamental to creating a firm foundation for future development efforts because we address the needs of vulnerable populations who might otherwise be overlooked by Agency programming.
But what I most like is the kicking Cameron hands out to those who argue we don’t have the money for aid in these hard economic times.  The kicking comes in two parts – first a moral argument:

When you make a promise to the poorest people in the world you should keep it.  I remember where I was during the Gleneagles Summit and the Live 8 concert of 2005 and I remember thinking at the time how right it was that those world leaders should make such pledges so publicly.  For me it’s a question of values; this is about saving lives.  It was the right thing to promise; it was the right thing for Britain to do and it is the right thing for this government to honour that commitment.

So to those who point to other countries that are breaking their promises and say that makes it okay for us to do the same, I say no, it’s not okay.  Our job is to hold those other countries to account, not to use them as an excuse to turn our back on people who are trusting us to help them.  And to those who say fine but we should put off seeing through those promises to another day because right now we can’t afford to help, I say we can’t afford to wait.  How many minutes do we wait?  Three children die every minute from pneumonia alone; waiting is not the right thing to do and I don’t think that 0.7% of our gross national income is too high a price to pay for saving lives.

…

I actually think that most people in our country want Britain to stand for something in the world, to be something in the world.  And when I think about what makes me proud of our country, yes, I think of our incredibly brave service men and women that I have the honour to meet and see so often; and yes, I think of our capabilities as an economic and diplomatic power; but I also think of our sense of duty to help others.  That says something about this country and I think it’s something we can be proud of.

Where . . . the . . . hell . . . is . . . the . . . American . . . political . . . leadership . . . on . . . this?  Dammit, the British just took the “City on a Hill” mantle from us.  Most Americans want America to stand for something in the world, last I checked.
Oh, and Cameron addresses the unaddressable (for America, it seems) in his speech: that development, in reducing the need for future wars and humanitarian interventions, actually is cost-effective:

If we really care about Britain’s national interest, about jobs, about growth, about security, we shouldn’t break off our links with the countries that can hold some of the keys to that future.  If we invest in Africa, if we open trade corridors, if we remove obstacles to growth, it’s not just Africa that will grow but us too.  And if we invest in countries before they get broken we might not end up spending so much on dealing with the problems, whether that’s immigration or threats to our national security.

Take Afghanistan.  If we’d put a fraction of our current military spending on Afghanistan into helping Afghanistan 15 or 20 years ago just think what we might have been able to avoid over the last decade.  Or take Pakistan.  Let another generation of Pakistanis enter adult life without any real opportunities and what are the risks in terms of mass migration, radicalisation, even terrorism?  That’s why UK support over the next four years will get four million more children in Pakistan into school.  This could be life changing for those children and it can be part of the antidote to the extremism that threatens us all.   So it’s not just morally right to invest in aid, it’s actually in our own interests too.

God help us, Ron Paul seems to be the only candidate for anything willing to say that the wars we are in are costing a hell of a lot of money, and might not have been necessary.  Of course, Ron Paul doesn’t like aid, either . . . actually, he doesn’t seem to like much of anything.  Nobody is really taking his hobgoblin act all that seriously, which means he isn’t going to shift the debate here.  Cameron, though, really glues his fiscal conservativism to a rational argument for aid – maybe we just should have worked on the aid side of things, at a fraction of the cost, and averted the whole mess in the first place.  Lord help me, the Tories are sounding reasonable . . .
Now, Cameron’s ideas for transforming aid are vague, mostly about focusing on results and enhancing accountability.  This is all well and good, but amazingly thorny.  There’s been quite a bit of discussion about evaluation in the development community (great summary list here)  and this blog (here, here and here) of late, and if nothing else, the reader might come to grips with the huge challenges that we must address before we can get to a realization of Cameron’s otherwise nonoffensive ideas.
I suppose it was asking too much to hope a leader talking about transforming development might mention that the global poor might actually have ideas of their own that we should start learning about before we go barging in . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

3.36 Billion Africans in 2100?

Schuyler Null has a post up on The New Security Beat on the 2010 revision of the United Nations (UNDESA) World Population Prospects, noting that this new revision suggests that by 2100 roughly 1 in every 3 people in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa – a total of 3.36 billion people.  It is far too early to pick apart these projections, especially as the underlying assumptions used to guide their construction are not yet available to the public. Null is quite right to note:

the UN’s numbers are based on projections that can and do change. The range of uncertainty for the sub-Saharan African region, in particular, is quite large. The medium-variant projection for the region’s total population in 2100 is 3.36 billion people, but the high variant projection is 4.85 billion and the low variant is 2.25 billion.

A few preliminary thoughts, though.  I pulled up the data for a country I know reasonably well – Ghana.  Under this new revised projection, Ghana’s population is expected to reach more than 67 million by 2100.  Peak population growth is supposed to take place between 2035 and 2040, with steady declines in population growth after that.  With life expectancies projected to rise to 79 years by 2100, certainly a lot more Ghanaians will be around for a lot longer than they are today (current life expectancy is just shy of 60 years).  That said, these numbers trouble me.  First, I don’t quite see how Ghana will be able to sustain a population of this size at any point in the future – the number is just too massive.  Second, it seems to me that the life expectancy estimates and the population size estimates contradict one another – as Charles Kenny quite ably demonstrates in Getting Better, as life expectancies rise and more children reach adulthood, the general trend is to lower total fertility.  The only way Ghana’s projection can be made to work is to assume massive demographic momentum that I am not sure will play out in the face of expected declines in infant mortality and the increased cost burden for prospective parents supporting older family members for much longer than they do today. In other words, this seems to me to be a rather dire overestimation of where Ghana is going to be in the future.
Now, this is just a quick cut at what appear to be the assumptions for one country, but I worry that this potential overestimation has a certain political utility.  The Malthusian specter, however inaccurate it may be, remains a great motivator for aid and development spending.  Further, presuming massive demographic momentum requires we assume that adequate reproductive health options are not in place in places like Ghana.  Given that the monitoring of reproductive health, presumably to better direct development interventions, seems to be a large focus of UNDESA’s and other UN organizations’ mandate, they might have a bit of a built-in bias against a lower population number because such a number would presume significant progress on the reproductive health front, thus challenging the need for this particular service.  In a wider sense, it seems to revive fears of a population bomb, albeit in this case limited to Africa.  While I have no doubt that demography will be an important challenge to address in the future, I think the current numbers, even the low estimates, seem overstated.
Besides, any projection of any social process 90 years into the future probably has gigantic error bars that could encompass anything from negative growth to massive overgrowth . . . the problem here is that policy makers often fail to grasp this uncertainty, see the 100-year projection, freak out entirely and reorient the next 5 years worth of aid programming to address a problem that may not exist.

Posted on by Ed 2

Fisheries . . . this is a development challenge

A while back, I had a blog post on a report for ActionAid, written by Alex Evans, on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020.  One of the big uncertainties Alex identified were environmental shocks, though in that version of the report he limited these shocks to climate-driven environmental shocks.  In my post, I suggested to Alex that he widen his scope, for environmental shocks might also include ecosystem collapse, such as in major global fisheries – such environmental shocks are not really related to climate change, but are still of great importance.  The collapse of the Gulf of Guinea large marine ecosystem (largely due to commercial overfishing from places other than Africa) has devastated local fish hauls, lowering the availability of protein in the diets of coastal areas and driving enormous pressure on terrestrial fauna as these populations seek to make up for the lost protein.  Alex was quite generous with my comments, and agreed with this observation wholeheartedly.
And then today, I stumbled on this – a simple visualization of Atlantic Fisheries in 1900 and 2000, by fish haul.  The image is striking (click to expand):

Now, I have no access to the datasets used to construct this visualization, and therefore I can make no comments on its accuracy (the blog post on the Guardian site is not very illuminating).  However, this map could be off by quite a bit in terms of how good hauls were in 1900, and how bad they are now, and the picture would still be very, very chilling.  As I keep telling my students, all those new, “exotic” fish showing up in restaurants are not delicacies – they are just all that is left in these fisheries.
This is obviously a development problem, as it compromises livelihoods and food supplies.  Yet I don’t see anyone addressing it directly, even aid organizations engaged with countries on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where this impact is most pronounced.  And how long until even the rich really start to feel the pinch?
Go here to see more visualizations – including one of the reach of the Spanish fishing fleet that makes clear where the pressure on the Gulf of Guinea is coming from.

Posted on by Ed 1

And now everyone is implicated . . .

Updated 7 June 2011: I can find no evidence that any of my TIAA-CREF funds are holding Glencore.  So far, so good . . .

aaannnnddd

No Glencore in my Vanguard 2025 Fund (kid’s college fund).  Sadly, though, there is Gazprom.  And probably a hell of a lot of other problematic stuff . . . nobody is clean, I tell you.

 

 

As a geographer, I spend a lot of time thinking about interconnections – how events and processes in one place influence events and processes in other places.  I use these interconnections as a teaching tool in my courses, to help students understand how, for example, our levels of consumption here in the US preclude similar levels of consumption for the rest of the world (not enough resource out there to make that happen).  I am always careful to make sure that the students understand that I am as bound up in these linkages as they are – I certainly do not live off the grid, walking/riding a bike everywhere and eating only food I grow (or that is grown locally).  But it still hurts every time a find a new way in which I am bound to, and therefore a cause of, some of the processes I find most frustrating in the world.  So, this excellent post on FairPensions was a bit tough.  Simply put, Glencore, a well-known problem company that trades heavily in the food commodities markets (and appears to be making those markets, as it were, to its own advantage) has been fast-tracked into the FTSE 100, and therefore is now likely part of a lot of the mutual funds and pension plans to which we all make contributions.  I’m going to have to check on this, and pray that TIAA-CREF has some sense, but . . . dammit.
For an earlier discussions of food insecurity and the commodities markets, see here, here and here.

Posted on by Ed 0

The Qualitative Research Challenge to RCT4D: Part 2

Well, the response to part one was great – really good comments, and a few great response posts.  I appreciate the efforts of some of my economist colleagues/friends to clarify the terminology and purpose behind RCTs.  All of this has been very productive for me – and hopefully for others engaged in this conversation.
First, a caveat: On the blog I tend to write quickly and with minimal editing – so I get a bit fast and loose at times – well, faster and looser than I intend.  So, to this end, I did not mean to suggest that nobody was doing rigorous work in development research – in fact, the rest of my post clearly set out to refute that idea, at least in the qualitative sphere.  But I see how Marc Bellemare might have read me that way.  What I should have said was that there has always been work, both in research and implementation, where rigorous data collection and analysis were lacking.  In fact, there is quite a lot of this work.  I think we can all agree this is true . . . and I should have been clearer.
I have also learned that what qualitative social scientists/social theorists mean by theory, and what economists mean by theory, seems to be two different things.  Lee defined theory as “formal mathematical modeling” in a comment on part 1 of this series of posts, which is emphatically not what a social theorist might mean.  When I say theory, I am talking about a conjectural framing of a social totality such that complex causality can at least be contained, if not fully explained.  This framing should have reference to some sort of empirical evidence, and therefore should be testable and refinable over time – perhaps through various sorts of ethnographic work, perhaps through formal mathematical modeling of the propositions at hand (I do a bit of both, actually).  In other words, what I mean by theory (and what I focus on in my work) is the establishment of a causal architecture for observed social outcomes.  I am all about the “why it worked” part of research, and far less about the “if it worked” questions – perhaps mostly because I have researched unintended “development interventions” (i.e. unplanned road construction, the establishment of a forest reserve that alters livelihoods resource access, etc.) that did not have a clear goal, a clear “it worked!” moment to identify.  All I have been looking at are outcomes of particular events, and trying to establish the causes of those outcomes.  Obviously, this can be translated to an RCT environment because we could control for the intervention and expected outcome, and then use my approaches to get at the “why did it work/not work” issues.
It has been very interesting to see the economists weigh in on what RCTs really do – they establish, as Marc puts it, “whether something works, not in how it works.”  (See also Grant’s great comment on the first post).  I don’t think that I would get a lot of argument from people if I noted that without causal mechanisms, we can’t be sure why “what worked” actually worked, and whether the causes of “what worked” are in any way generalizable or transportable.  We might have some idea, but I would have low confidence in any research that ended at this point.  This, of course, is why Marc, Lee, Ruth, Grant and any number of other folks see a need for collaboration between quant and qual – so that we can get the right people, with the right tools, looking at different aspects of a development intervention to rigorously establish the existence of an impact, and the establish an equally rigorous understanding of the causal processes by which that impact came to pass.  Nothing terribly new here, I think.  Except, of course, for my continued claim that the qualitative work I do see associated with RCT work is mostly awful, tending toward bad journalism (see my discussion of bad journalism and bad qualitative work in the first post).
But this discussion misses a much larger point about epistemology – what I intended to write in this second part of the series all along.  I do not see the dichotomy between measuring “if something works” and establishing “why something worked” as analytically valid.  Simply put, without some (at least hypothetical) framing of causality, we cannot rigorously frame research questions around either question.  How can you know if something worked, if you are not sure how it was supposed to work in the first place?  Qualitative research provides the interpretive framework for the data collected via RCT4D efforts – a necessary framework if we want RCT4D work to be rigorous.  By separating qualitative work from the quant oriented RCT work, we are assuming that somehow we can pull data collection apart from the framing of the research question.  We cannot – nobody is completely inductive, which means we all work from some sort of framing of causality.  The danger is when we don’t acknowledge this simple point – under most RCT4D work, those framings are implicit and completely uninterrogated by the practitioners.  Even where they come to the fore (Duflo’s 3 I s), they are not interrogated – they are assumed as framings for the rest of the analysis.
If we don’t have causal mechanisms, we cannot rigorously frame research questions to see if something is working – we are, as Marc says, “like the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp when he knows he lost them elsewhere, because the only place he can actually see is under the street lamp.”  Only I would argue we are the drunk looking for his keys under a streetlamp, but he has no idea if they are there or not.
In short, I’m not beating up on RCT4D, nor am I advocating for more conversation – no, I am arguing that we need integration, teams with quant and qual skills that frame the research questions together, that develop tests together, that interpret the data together.  This is the only way we will come to really understand the impact of our interventions, and how to more productively frame future efforts.  Of course, I can say this because I already work in a mixed-methods world where my projects integrate the skills of GIScientists, land use modelers, climate modelers, biogeographers and qualitative social scientists – in short, I have a degree of comfort with this sort of collaboration.  So, who wants to start putting together some seriously collaborative, integrated evaluations?

Posted on by Ed 6

The Qualitative Research Challenge to RCT4D: Part 1

Those following this blog (or my twitter feed) know that I have some issues with RCT4D work.  I’m actually working on a serious treatment of the issues I see in this work (i.e. journal article), but I am not above crowdsourcing some of my ideas to see how people respond.  Also, as many of my readers know, I have a propensity for really long posts.  I’m going to try to avoid that here by breaking this topic into two parts.  So, this is part 1 of 2.
To me, RCT4D work is interesting because of its emphasis on rigorous data collection – certainly, this has long been a problem in development research, and I have no doubt that the data they are gathering is valid.  However, part of the reason I feel confident in this data is because, as I raised in an earlier post,  it is replicating findings from the qualitative literature . . . findings that are, in many cases, long-established with rigorously-gathered, verifiable data.  More on that in part 2 of this series.
One of the things that worries me about the RCT4D movement is the (at least implicit, often overt) suggestion that other forms of development data collection lack rigor and validity.  However, in the qualitative realm we spend a lot of time thinking about rigor and validity, and how we might achieve both – and there are tools we use to this end, ranging from discursive analysis to cross-checking interviews with focus groups and other forms of data.  Certainly, these are different means of establishing rigor and validity, but they are still there.
Without rigor and validity, qualitative research falls into bad journalism.  As I see it, good journalism captures a story or an important issue, and illustrates that issue through examples.  These examples are not meant to rigorously explain the issue at hand, but to clarify it or ground it for the reader.  When journalists attempt to move to explanation via these same few examples (as far too often columnists like Kristof and Friedman do), they start making unsubstantiated claims that generally fall apart under scrutiny.  People mistake this sort of work for qualitative social science all the time, but it is not.  Certainly there is some really bad social science out there that slips from illustration to explanation in just the manner I have described, but this is hardly the majority of the work found in the literature.  Instead, rigorous qualitative social science recognizes the need to gather valid data, and therefore requires conducting dozens, if not hundreds, of interviews to establish understandings of the events and processes at hand.
This understanding of qualitative research stands in stark contrast to what is in evidence in the RCT4D movement.  For all of the effort devoted to data collection under these efforts, there is stunningly little time and energy devoted to explanation of the patterns seen in the data.  In short, RCT4D often reverts to bad journalism when it comes time for explanation.  Patterns gleaned from meticulously gathered data are explained in an offhand manner.  For example, in her (otherwise quite well-done) presentation to USAID yesterday, Esther Duflo suggested that some problematic development outcomes could be explained by a combination of “the three I s”: ideology, ignorance and inertia.  This is a boggling oversimplification of why people do what they do – ideology is basically nondiagnostic (you need to define and interrogate it before you can do anything about it), and ignorance and inertia are (probably unintentionally) deeply patronizing assumptions about people living in the Global South that have been disproven time and again (my own work in Ghana has demonstrated that people operate with really fine-grained information about incomes and gender roles, and know exactly what they are doing when they act in a manner that limits their household incomes – see here, here and here).  Development has claimed to be overcoming ignorance and inertia since . . . well, since we called it colonialism.  Sorry, but that’s the truth.
Worse, this offhand approach to explanation is often “validated” through reference to a single qualitative case that may or may not be representative of the situation at hand – this is horribly ironic for an approach that is trying to move development research past the anecdotal.  This is not merely external observation – I have heard from people working inside J-PAL projects that the overall program puts little effort into serious qualitative work, and has little understanding of what rigor and validity might mean in the context of qualitative methods or explanation.  In short, the bulk of explanation for these interesting patterns of behavior that emerges from these studies resorts to uninterrogated assumptions about human behavior that do not hold up to empirical reality.  What RCT4D has identified are patterns, not explanations – explanation requires a contextual understanding of the social.
Coming soon: Part 2 – Qualitative research and the interpretation of empirical data

Posted on by Ed 15

On explanation in development research

I was at a talk today where folks from Michigan State were presenting research and policy recommendations to guide the Feed the Future initiative.  I greatly appreciate this sort of presentation – it is good to get real research in the building, and to see USAID staff that have so little time turn out in large numbers to engage.  Once again, folks, its not that people in the agencies aren’t interested or don’t care, its a question of time and access.
In the course of one of the presentations, however, I saw a moment of “explanation” for observed behavior that nicely captures a larger issue that has been eating at me as the randomized control trials for development (RCT4D) movement gains speed . . . there isn’t a lot of explanation there.  There is really interesting data, rigorously collected, but explanation is another thing entirely.
In the course of the presentation, the presenter put up a slide that showed a wide dispersion of prices around the average price received by farmers for their maize crops around a single market area (near where I happen to do work in Malawi).  Nothing too shocking there, as this happens in Malawi, and indeed in many places.  However, from a policy and programming perspective, it’s important to know that the average price is NOT the same thing as what a given household is taking home.  But then the presenter explained this dispersion by noting (in passing) that some farmers were more price-savvy than others.
1) there is no evidence at all to support this claim, either in his data or in the data I have from an independent research project nearby
2) this offhand explanation has serious policy ramifications.
This explanation is a gross oversimplification of what is actually going on here – in Mulanje (near the Luchenza market area analyzed in the presentation), price information is very well communicated in villages.  Thus, while some farmers might indeed be more savvy than others, the prices they are able to get are communicated throughout the village, thus distributing that information.  So the dispersion of prices is the product of other factors.  Certainly desperation selling is probably part of the issue (another offhand explanation offered later in the presentation).  However, what we really need, if we want a rigorous understanding of the causes of this dispersion and how to address it, is a serious effort to grasp the social component of agriculture in this area – how gender roles, for example, shape household power dynamics, farm roles, and the prices people will sell at (this is a social consideration that exceeds explanation via markets), or how social networks connect particular farmers to particular purchasers in a manner that facilitates or inhibits price maximization at market.  These considerations are both causal of the phenomena that the presenter described, and the points of leverage on which policy might act to actually change outcomes.  If farmers aren’t “price savvy”, this suggests the need for a very different sort of intervention than what would be needed to address gendered patterns of agricultural strategy tied to long-standing gender roles and expectations.
This is a microcosm of what I am seeing in the RCT4D world right now – really rigorous data collection, followed by really thin interpretations of the data.  It is not enough to just point out interesting patterns, and then start throwing explanations out there – we must turn from rigorous quantitative identification of significant patterns of behavior to the qualitative exploration of the causes of those patterns and their endurance over time.  I’ve been wrestling with these issues in Ghana for more than a decade now, an effort that has most recently led me to a complete reconceptualization of livelihoods (shifting from understanding livelihoods as a means of addressing material conditions to a means of governing behaviors through particular ways of addressing material conditions – the article is in review at Development and Change).  However, the empirical tests of this approach (with admittedly tiny-n size samples in Ghana, and very preliminary looks at the Malawi data) suggest that I have a better explanatory resolution for explained behaviors than possible through existing livelihoods approaches (which would end up dismissing a lot of choices as illogical or the products of incomplete information) – and therefore I have a better foundation for policy recommendations than available without this careful consideration of the social.
See, for example, this article I wrote on how we approach gender in development (also a good overview of the current state of gender and development, if I do say so myself).  I empirically demonstrate that a serious consideration of how gender is constructed in particular places has large material outcomes on whose experiences we can understand, and therefore the sorts of interventions we might program to address particular challenges.  We need more rigorous wrestling with “the social” if we are going to learn anything meaningful from our data.  Period.
In summary, explanation is hard.  Harder, in many ways, than rigorous data collection.  Until we start spending at least as much effort on the explanation side as we do on the collection side, we will not really change much of anything in development.

Posted on by Ed 3

On field experience and playing poor

There is a great post up at Good on “Pretending to be Poor” experiments, where participants try to live on tiny sums of money (i.e. $1.50/day) to better understand the plight of the global poor.  Cord Jefferson refers to this sort of thing as “playing poor”, at least in part because participants don’t really live on $1.50 a day . . . after all, they are probably not abandoning their secure homes, and probably not working the sort of dangerous, difficult job that pays such a tiny amount.  Consuming $1.50/day is one thing.  Living on it is entirely another.  (h/t to Michael Kirkpatrick at Independent Global Citizen for pointing out the post).
This, for me, brings up another issue – the “authenticity” of the experiences many of us have had while doing fieldwork (or working in field programs), an issue that has been amplified by what seems to be the recent discovery of fieldwork by the RCT trials for development crowd (I still can’t get over the idea that they think living among the poor is a revolutionary idea).  The whole point of participant observation is to better understand what people do and why they do it by experiencing, to some extent, their context – I find it inordinately difficult to understand how people even begin to meaningfully parse social data without this sort of grounding.  In a concrete way, having malaria while in a village does help one come to grips with the challenges this might pose to making a living via agriculture in a rather visceral way.  So too, living in a village during a drought that decimated a portion of the harvest, by putting me in a position where I had to go a couple of (intermittent) days without food, and with inadequate food for quite a few more, helped me to come to grips with both the capacity and the limitations of the livelihoods strategies in the villages I write about in Delivering Development, and at least a limited understanding of the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that can arise when things go wrong in rural Africa, even as livelihoods strategies work to prevent the worst outcomes.
But the key part of that last sentence was “at least a limited understanding.”  Being there is not the same thing as sharing the experience of poverty, development, or disaster.  When I had malaria, I knew what clinics to go to, and I knew that I could afford the best care available in Cape Coast (and that care was very good) – I was not a happy guy on the morning I woke up with my first case, but I also knew where to go, and that the doctor there would treat me comprehensively and I would be fine.  So too with the drought – the villages I was living in were, at most, about 5 miles (8km) from a service station with a food mart attached.  Even as I went without food for a day, and went a bit hungry for many more, I knew in the back of my mind that if things turned dire, I could walk that distance and purchase all of the food I needed.  In other words, I was not really experiencing life in these villages because I couldn’t, unless I was willing to throw away my credit card, empty my bank account, and renounce all of my upper-class and government colleagues and friends.  Only then would I have been thrown back on only what I could earn in a day in the villages and the (mostly appalling) care available in the rural clinic north of Eguafo.  I was always critically aware of this fact, both in the moment and when writing and speaking about it since.  Without that critical awareness, and a willingness to downplay our own (or other’s) desire to frame our work as a heroic narrative, there is a real risk in creating our own versions of “playing poor” as we conduct fieldwork.

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I'm a talking head . . .

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.

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