Category: development

Those who can't, snark

I’ve had a post or two referencing the role of celebrity in development recently, triggered by Bill Easterly’s recent Washington Post op-ed.  I was surprised to see Easterly take such heat for pointing out that celebrity engagement with development can be problematic – most of the folks I know largely agree with the op-ed.  My only intervention was to suggest that Easterly (and others who raise issues with celebrity and development) focus more on the people who feed the celebs their ideas and talking points.  Sometimes really well-meaning people can be led astray by one loud voice . . .
Having watched/been part of this conversation for a few days, though, I see the need for an intervention.  On his twitter feed, Bill Easterly has promoted a commenter who felt s/he had to remove a post critical of Bono because “Bono gives big money to my organization, and they thought that pissing off Bono could cause another Sunday Bloody Sunday.”  At first glance, this paints Bono as terribly thin-skinned, and suggests that he is unwilling to take on criticism of his efforts.  Perhaps this is true, but I see little evidence for it here – basically, you have an overly-cautious organization afraid of pissing off a celebrity, but no suggestion that Bono demanded its removal.
More telling, though, is the URL the “censored” poster left at the end of their comment – http://bonowithafricans.wordpress.com/ Oh look, let’s take a bunch of random pictures of Bono in Africa, divorce them from all context, and then stick snarky comments after them.  How clever!  And juvenile, boring, etc.  All this does is suggest to me that the commenter has a larger issue with Bono, and has used Easterly’s blog as a platform to promote them.
I pride myself on taking my work very seriously, without taking myself very seriously.  I have my foibles (too numerous to list here), and I am well aware that at least some of my grad students can do a credible impression of me (which I actually take as something of a warped complement) – but I find this sort of thing funny.  Hell, we can play the snark game with any number of pictures of me:

“Community meetings would be easier without the community”

“This garland is way outside of my color wheel”

“They told me there would be bourbon.  This . . . is not bourbon”

See, now wasn’t that fun?

The point here is that criticism really needs to be constructive, and anchored in something.  I’ve been known to lose my temper – for example at the end of the post here – but even my rants are anchored in solid analysis.  My extended frustration with Sachs is well-documented, even in the peer-reviewed literature.  I have substantive issues with his theories, and how they lead to inappropriate interventions.  I sat through what I can best describe as a horribly embarrassing lecture by Sachs at the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Boston, where he evoked a total lack of awareness of geography, the fact anyone else in the world addresses development issues, and revived the long-buried corpse of environmental determinism – all around me there were hundreds of geographers staring at him in open-mouthed shock.  The man is a disaster for development.  However, I can train a monkey to rip something down – as I tell my students, if you want to impress me, put it back together in an interesting way.  In my writing on the Millennium Village Project I have offered alternatives and suggestions.  I do the same in my forthcoming book.  Snark does nothing constructive, and makes it hard for the criticized to see through the personal attack to the useful ideas that might lead to more productive engagement.

Focus on substance, and being constructive, people.  To modify the old adage about teaching . . . Those who can’t, snark.

Posted on by Ed 1

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.

Posted on by Ed 0

Twitter is a huge time sink, but bits of it are hilarious . . .

Yeah, most of twitter is mindless crap.  But there are a number of really smart, well-connected folks out there who are posting info in real time . . . which  is a great way to stay abreast of events and conversations relevant to one’s field.  And then there are the funny feeds.  I am currently losing my mind at bill_westerly.  Basically, the feed plays off of development economist Bill Easterly (who, interestingly, follows the feed) – but it takes on a sort of bizarro Easterly, if Bill Easterly was an Austrian-bodybuilder-governor-of-California.  For example:

  • broder @bill_easterly. let us swing duh axes togedder und bring doom to der army uff churnalists und girlymen egonomists dat oppose us?
  • hur hur hur. u call yurself egonomist? war gif der axellent market penetration @mattbish War is obsolete, you end up bombing your customers!

There is a lot of hidden insight in these tweets.  Then there is a whole series, linked to an extended discussion of expat aid worker behavior that is passing under the hashtag #stuffexpataidworkerslike

  • Monitorin der urban program in “der field” cos yur naad even vun hour from Florida club und Jomo Kenyatta
  • like jargon. luff akronyms uff dat jargon more…
  • gettin der intern to write cluster minutes so yoo gots time for snark bloggin bout volnteerz in aid
  • Kipling. #stuffexpataidworkerslike Akshully reading der Kipling#stuffexpataidworkersdontlike

And then there is the just completely random

  • mebbe is time fur twitter karaokes to build der courage und appetite to fight der turkeysaurus……..

Yeah, I find this funny.  Cope.

Posted on by Ed 0

“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.

Posted on by Ed 0

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 . . .

Posted on by Ed 3

Yeah, this relates to development . . .

Hey, I’m a geographer by training, inclination, whatever . . . so this story in the New York Times is very cool.  Think of it as a very early GIS (geographic information system) plotting social data (number of slaves) on a map so they can be read spatially.  Basically, it is an early choropleth map (odd the historian writing about this did not use this term*) where shading of different areas represents different concentrations of whatever is being measured (here, the percentage of the population of a given county that was enslaved).  You can see how this map presented information about slavery that made it easy to see that secession was about preserving a labor system (as opposed to more noble principles about State’s rights).
That said, the South was fighting for its life – it was already an agrarian, raw-material supplying cousin to the Northern states, dealing with massive income inequality and poverty issues.  Which should remind people of the situation in much of today’s developing world.  The Southerners who were wealthy needed slaves to stay that way . . . the entire South risked becoming, in effect, an underdeveloped area if slavery was abolished.  And if you look at post-civil war history, that is pretty much how it turned out.  Industry concentrated in the north until the Northeast moved on to biotech, education and other services, pushing the dirty production to the poorer South.  Now even that production is headed overseas.  That the Southern US is generally poorer and less educated (and therefore with fewer options) than much of the rest of the country is therefore not an accident, random or something inherent to Southerners themselves (my children are all Southerners, after all) – the South started off as a massively unequal raw material production zone, and it has been struggling with that legacy for the past 150 years.
And we expect countries that only emerged from colonialism 50 years ago to somehow do better?
*Geographers, why the hell is a historian writing our history, dammit?  We are better than this – surely we have covered a bunch of this already, but seriously, can we reclaim our disciplinary history from the people unclear on the concept of a choropleth map?
(h/t to Micah Snead)

Posted on by Ed 0

Ah, see . . . we are paying attention

Turns out the leaks that shall not be named by federal employees have produced a document demonstrating that the State Department is, in fact, paying attention to China’s role in Africa.  The BBC is carrying the story.  Of course, the story also highlights the amusing lack of self-awareness in our own diplomacy.  Take the following from Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary for African Affairs:

“China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons,” he says. “China is in Africa primarily for China.”

He adds: “A secondary reason for China’s presence is to secure votes in the United Nations from African countries.”

Well, yes.  Of course, why exactly is the US involved?  Why has anyone been involved with Africa over the years?  To paraphrase The Who, “here comes the new expropriator, same as the old expropriator.”
On the upside, most Africans with whom I interact suffer no illusions about the sudden interest of the Chinese in their continent.  Seems a learning curve has set in . . .
Also interesting here is what appears to be a clear rationale for the apparent silence of the US Government on Chinese expansion in Africa – a set of “tripwires” that would trigger a reaction:

Have they signed military base agreements? Are they training armies? Have they developed intelligence operations? Once these areas start developing then the US will start worrying,” he says.

I would think that we would have an interest in the Chinese locking down rights to arable land, minerals, etc., instead of such narrow concerns for military and intelligence operations, as these resources have strategic value.  But who am I to question State?*
*this, more or less, summarizes State’s attitude toward AID.

Posted on by Ed 0

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 . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

You have to admire the rat bastards . . .

Man, do some of the Republicans have a slick noise machine – Bloomberg is reporting on a group of senators who are referring to the funds the United States committed as aid to get developing countries moving toward cleaner, more sustainable development as an international climate bailout.  What a soundbite.  What complete idiocy.  Senators, let’s have a chat.
First, let’s consider the idea this is a bailout – what, exactly, are we bailing out?  Developing countries were, by and large, consigned to their positions by the last four to five centuries of global history.  Hell, a large portion of these countries had their borders drawn by other people over the last four to five centuries.  Have you seen Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)?  Nobody chooses to be landlocked and primary commodity dependent, you know.  So, while the bank bailout here in the US generated outrage because we were saving people from their own irresponsible behavior, to label fast start funding as a climate bailout is to blame the victims – basically, to insinuate that developing countries put themselves in that position somehow.  Now, I am not denying that there have been irresponsible leaders and corruption in many developing countries that have contributed to the plight of their citizens, but most of these countries have only been under their own governments for fifty years or less – which means they arrived really, really late to the screw-things-up party.  Hell, the party had ended and the house had been trashed before they got there – these guys are the governance equivalent of the idiot who shows up drunk on the doorstep, pounding on the door at three AM after everyone has gone home.  No, this is not a bailout in the sense of the bank bailout.
Second, what this bunch overlooks is that this is an investment in OUR OWN FUTURE.  If we do not 1) get some sort of meaningful improvement in people’s quality of live in the developing world and 2) find some means to do so that does not involve massive carbon emissions, we are looking down the barrel of a global environmental cataclysm in my lifetime.  I go over this at length in my book – I would be happy to send a copy along to you and/or your staffs if you were at all interested (you’re not, I know, I know). Plain and simple, there will be nowhere to run to when it all goes bad.  Yes, we in the US, Europe and the rest of the OECD have far more resources with which to cope with such challenges, but our way of life will change dramatically – and not for the better.  Let me put this another way: Senators, your failure to grasp the basics of climate science, or the fundamental fact that we are all interconnected on a relatively small rock orbiting a fairly insignificant star in a mostly unimportant galaxy, leads you to believe that we can just carve off a big chunk of the (very poor) world and take care of ourselves.  We cannot.  You are on the wrong side of history here, and the evidence is already mounting.
Of course, what do you all care?
Sen. John Barraso (R-Wyoming): 58 years old
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma): 76 years old
Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana): 49 years old
Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio): 74 years old and retiring at the end of this term
Senator Vitter, you are the only one with a shot of being around long enough to see things go really bad.

Posted on by Ed 2

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 . . .

Posted on by Ed 0