So, how do we fix the way we think about development to address the challenges of global environmental change? Well, there are myriad answers, but in this post I propose two – we have to find ways of evaluating the impact of our current projects such that those lessons are applicable to other projects that are implemented in different places and at various points in the future . . . and we have to better evaluate just where things will be in the future as we think about the desired outcomes of development interventions.
To achieve the first of these two is relatively easy, at least conceptually: we need to fully link up the RCT4D crowd with the qualitative research/social theory crowd. We need teams of people that can bring the randomista obsession with sampling frames and serious statistical tools – in other words, a deep appreciation for rigor in data collection – and connect it to the qualitative social theoretical emphasis on understanding causality by interrogating underlying social process – in other words, a deep appreciation for rigor in data interpretation. Such teams work to cover the weaknesses of their members, and could bring us new and very exciting insights into development interventions and social process.
Of course, everyone says we need mixed methodologies in development (and a lot of other fields of inquiry), but we rarely see projects that take this on in a serious way. In part, this is because very few people are trained in mixed methods – they are either very good at qualitative methods and interpretation, or very good at sampling and quantitative data analysis. Typically, when a team gets together with these different skills, one set of skills or the other predominates (in policy circles, quant wins every time). To see truly mixed methodologies, this cannot happen – as soon as one trumps the other, the value of the mixing declines precipitously.
For example, you need qualitative researchers to frame the initial RCT – an RCT framed around implicit, unacknowledged assumptions about society is unlikely to “work” – or to capture the various ways in which an intervention works. At the same time, the randomista skill of setting up a sampling frame and obtaining meaningful large-scale data sets requires attention to how one frames the question, and where the RCT is to be run . . . which impose important constraints on the otherwise unfettered framings of social process coming from the qualitative side, framings that might not really be testable in a manner that can be widely understood by the policy community. Then you need to loop back to the qualitative folks to interpret the results of the initial RCT – to move past whether or not something worked to the consideration of the various ways in which it did and did not work, and a careful consideration of WHY it worked. Finally, these interpretations can be framed and tested by the qualitative members of the team, starting an iterative interpretive process that blends qualitative and quantitative analysis and interpretation to rigorously deepen our understanding of how development works (or does not work).
The process I have just described will require teams of grownups with enough self-confidence to accept criticism and to revise their ideas and interpretations in the face of evidence of varying sorts. As soon as one side of this mixed method team starts denigrating the other, or the concerns of one side start trumping those of the other, the value of this mixing drops off – qualitative team members become fig leaves for “story time” analyses, or quantitative researchers become fig leaves for weak sampling strategies or overreaching interpretations of the data. This can be done, but it will require team leaders with special skill sets – with experience in both worlds, and respect for both types of research. There are not many of these around, but they are around.
Where are these people now? Well, interestingly the answer to this question leads me to the second answer for how development might better answer the challenges of global environmental change: development needs to better link itself with the global environmental change community. Despite titles that might suggest otherwise (UNEP’s Fourth Global Environment Outlook was titled Environment for Development), there is relatively little interplay between these communities right now. Sure, development folks say the right things about sustainability and climate change these days, but they are rarely engaging the community that has been addressing these and many other challenges for decades. At the same time, the global environmental change community has a weak connection to development, making their claims about the future human impacts of things like climate change often wildly inaccurate, as they assume current conditions will persist into the future (or they assume equally unrealistic improvements in future human conditions).
Development needs to hang out with the scenario builders of the global environmental change community to better understand the world we are trying to influence twenty years hence – the spot to which we are delivering the pass, to take up a metaphor from an earlier post on this topic. We need to get with the biophysical scientists who can tell us about the challenges and opportunities the expect to see two or more decades hence. And we need to find the various teams that are already integrating biophysical scientists and social scientists to address these challenges – the leaders already have to speak quant and qual, science and humanities, to succeed at their current jobs. The members of these teams have already started to learn to respect their colleagues’ skills, and to better explain what they know to colleagues who may not come at the world with the same framings, data or interpretations. They are not perfect, by any stretch (I voice some of my concerns in Delivering Development), but they are great models to go on.
Meanwhile, several of my colleagues and I are working on training a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars with this skill set. All of my current Ph.D. students have taken courses in qualitative methods, and have conducted qualitative fieldwork . . . but they also have taken courses on statistics and biogeographic modeling. They will not be statisticians or modelers, but now they know what those tools can and cannot do – and therefore how they can engage with them. The first of this crew are finishing their degrees soon . . . the future is now. And that gives me reason to be realistically optimistic about things . . .
Category: Higher Education
Faculty mindsets?
As a sort of answer to Beloit College’s annual mindset list (where the authors remind faculty of all of the things that we might think of as watershed events, but which took place before our current freshmen were born), Douglas Paulin Bruce Krajewski has written “The 2011 Mind-Set of Faculty (Born before 1980)” for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Well, I am faculty, and I was born before 1980. I remember 1980, dimly, as it involved the end of first grade and the beginning of second grade. In any case, I am clearly supposed to be represented by this list, so I thought I would have a look through. Then I decided, as part of the target group, that I had the right to annotate the list. And therefore I have:
1. The faculty members freshmen will encounter are likely teaching more and larger classes and doing more “service” than ever before at the same pay or less as faculty were three or four years ago.
Yeah, this is true. Depressingly true.
2. A growing percentage of faculty members rarely meet in person the students they are teaching, thanks to absentee learning, more commonly known as online education.
I don’t meet my students because they never come to office hours. Seriously. Even when I beg and explain that coming to review a test with me has an average impact of more than a dozen points on the next test . . .
3. Freshmen will encounter some faculty members who first used “iPhone” as a noun and a verb, as in “I will phone, I have phoned,” etc.
Dude, save the cranky for someone else. Put it on a list of faculty born before 1960. The rest of us are not so weirded out by technology.
4. Faculty members who have been teaching for more than a decade are most likely indifferent to the Kardashians, celebrity-wannabe housewives, desperate or otherwise, from any city or county on either coast, especially the ones from New Jersey.
Yep. But lord how I did love me the MTV music awards back in the day. When they were live, and people did stupid things on the show. It was like watching the collapse of Western Civilization condensed into a few hours. I’m still unclear as to how the world survived the Spice Girls. For a number of postmodernists, there was nothing left after them . . .
5. Those same faculty members are regarded by many parents, administrators, and state legislators as lazy, inefficient, and unaccountable. If it were not for all the work the faculty members must do, they would have the time to live down to those expectations.
Whiny, but true. We do need much better PR.
6. The faculty members freshmen will encounter in the classroom are probably untenured and working part time, with many employed at more than one institution and feeling loyalty to no employer.
This is an appalling trend in higher ed, and nobody seems to care. It is going to blow up higher ed in the United States within a generation if it is not addressed. Simply put, we won’t get the best people teaching in universities if the jobs go to crap. As my mother said about teaching elementary school, once people viewed that as a good career. Now very few people seem to take it seriously – I fear that faculty positions will be headed that way soon.
7. Faculty members born before 1970—we have to reach back a bit further here—are usually willing to help students learn how to pretend to give a damn about their education, and are involved in less absentee teaching and learning than their younger colleagues.
Er, we give a damn. So do the younger folks. But universities make it hard to show this for a lot of structural reasons . . .
8. Faculty members born before 1980 said “Wii” to express the euphoria they felt as children when sledding down a hill.
See my comment for #3, cranky.
9. Faculty members born before 1980 rarely feel a need to respond immediately to anything and have particularly “procrastinaty” reactions to messages that students label “urgent.”
Um, no. But thanks for perpetuating that stereotype, which works against serious engagement with the policy community (who assume we procrastinate and cannot work to deadlines).
10. Faculty members born before 1980 remember a world in which people lived entire days without access to bottled water.
Yep. I do not understand bottled water at all.
11. Faculty members born before 1980 (and who didn’t live in Seattle) remember a world without Starbucks, in which people made their own coffee each morning. In those days, tap water was potable and “barista” was not yet a word typically spoken outside of Italy.
Also yep. I make my own coffee at work (admittedly, with a press, which makes me half pretentious, I guess. But it costs me about $.25 for a huge mug of coffee, which also makes me frugal!)
12. Freshmen will encounter some faculty members who used to work at institutions where faculty governance did not require the inclusion of administrators, advisory boards, and regents in academic decisions.
<<chuckling>> No comment . . .
13. Faculty members born before 1980 grew up during a time when “like” represented the beginning of a simile, rather than a piece of verbal confetti.
See comments on #3 and #8. Please, please don’t let me be this cranky in two decades. This guy is busy leading a lot of students to assume that we are all living the life of the mind, without interest in TVs, pop culture or technology. He would be wrong.
14. Many faculty members prefer Mae to Kanye West.
Boring faculty members, maybe. Seriously, Mae West peaked out so long ago that the faculty that were into her are now dead.
15. Faculty members who have been teaching for more than a decade remember when C was an average grade students received in courses, because it represented an ancient concept called “satisfactory.”
Oh lord, how true. Even better are those who think they deserve an A because they tried hard. I swear, our refusal to keep score in children’s sports is killing our society. Kids need to learn that sometimes you try really hard, and sometimes you might even be the better player or team, but you might still lose. Effort is a major part of success, but not everything . . .
16. Faculty members who have been teaching for more than a decade do not refer to students as “customers,” and to anyone as a “stakeholder” (not even Buffy, if those faculty members even know who Buffy is).
I will never call a student a customer. Ever. I work for a university, which is NOT A BUSINESS. It is not a for-profit enterprise, it is a public good that needs to operate on a different set of principles.
I work in development, so the term stakeholder gets thrown around a lot . . . but not in my academic life.
17. Faculty members born before 1980 remember when the word “chancellor” referred to a short German person with a mustache. (In a way, it usually still does.)
I have no idea what this is about. Whatevs.
18. Freshmen will encounter some faculty members who can recollect a time when sports coaches were other faculty members who were not receiving million-dollar salaries. (See here what the world of student athletes has become.)
Not me – perhaps because I have always taught at large state or private research institutions. I was in high school during the Jerry Tarkanian UNLV days of college basketball, and I ran for the University of Virginia. College sports has been big business for as long as I can remember.
19. The same faculty members can recall when stadiums were built without sky boxes for indulged alumni, and when tailgating meant that you were following too closely behind someone while driving on the highway, all the while neither talking on a cellphone nor texting.
Now this I do remember. Scott Stadium at UVa used to be a mess . . . and don’t get me going about U-Hall. But then he goes all Luddite again, which translates nicely into . . .
20. We (i.e., the “they” the Beloit people use to refer to anyone older who is not “you” freshmen) never used libraries as restaurants or coffee shops. We faced books; we did not facebook.
This guy annoys me with this stuff. A lot.
21. The “you” that is you will eventually become the “they” that is us.
Thanks for the brief exposition on time. I knew this, even as an 18 year old. They’re not all that stupid . . .
22. “We” never promoted Jonas Brothers-like/Palinesque abstinence campaigns, which is why some of “you” are here, able to read this list. You’re welcome.
Was this supposed to be the politically edgy one? If so, he killed it with a dated Jonas reference. Dude, its all about the Bieber these days . . .
Summary: Neither funny nor all that accurate (I track about 8 of 22 as accurate or in any way interesting). FAIL
Remedies for the Horn of Africa Famine? Delivering Development…differently
A number of folks have contacted me asking for a post that discusses how we might address the rapidly worsening famine in the Horn of Africa. In short, folks want to know what is being done, and what they can do, both in terms of the immediate famine and to prevent this from happening again.
First, in addressing the acute situation right now: please understand that aid agencies are moving as fast as they possibly can where they possibly can. There are a lot of challenges in southern Somalia, and these political-logistical hurdles matter greatly because the only remedy for the immediate situation is massive relief efforts to address the acute food insecurity in the area. There are complex logistics behind where those supplies might come from. That said, agencies are already moving to preposition aid materials as best they can.
If you want to help with the immediate relief effort, send money. Yes, money. Don’t send clothes, shoes, or any other stuff. It’s hard and expensive to deliver, and usually the donation of material goods just screws up local economies, making recovery from the crisis much harder and prolonged. Look into the groups, such as the Red Cross and the World Food Program, that are on the ground delivering aid. Examine their philosophies and programs, and donate to those you can agree with. There is a world of advice on donating to aid organizations out there on the blogs and twitter, so do a little research before donating. Oh, and please, please stay the hell out of the Horn of Africa, as you’ll just get in the way of highly trained, experienced people who are working under enough strain. I will make an exception for those with experience in emergency relief work – feel free to work through your networks to see if you are needed. If you don’t have a network to work through, you shouldn’t be going. It’s really that simple.
The question of how we will prevent the next famine is an open one. In my personal opinion (which, incidentally, counts for exactly nothing right now), addressing the causes of this famine, and the continuing sources of insecurity in this region, are going to require a rather different approach to development than that we have taken to this point. In my book (Delivering Development – hence the title of the post) I argue that part of the reason that development programs don’t end up solving the challenges that lead to things like famine is because we fundamentally misunderstand how development and globalization work. We are going to have to step back and move beyond technical fixes to particular challenges, and start to think about development as a catalyst for change. This means thinking broadly about what changes we want to see in the region, and how our resources might be used to initiate processes that bring those changes about. As I keep telling my students, there is no such thing as a purely technical, apolitical development intervention. Even putting a borehole in a village invokes local politics – who gathered the water before? Who gathers it now? Who can access the borehole, and who cannot? If the borehole has resulted in the creation of free time for whoever is responsible for water collection, what do they do with that free time? The answers to these questions and dozens of others will vary from place to place, but they shape the outcome of that borehole.
At the same time, such a process requires redefining the “we” in the sentence “thinking broadly about what changes we want to see in the region . . .,” because it really doesn’t matter what people, living in the United States or anywhere else outside the Horn of Africa, want to see in the region. It’s not their region. Instead, this “we” is going to have to emerge from a real partnership between those who live in the Horn of Africa, their governments, and the aid agencies with the resources to make particular programs and projects happen. For example, we are going to have to use our considerable science and technology capacity to really explore the potential of mobile communications as a source of rapidly-updated, geolocatable information about conditions on the ground to which people are responding with their livelihoods strategies. However, this technology and data will only be useful if it is interpreted into programs in concert with the sources of that data: people who are already managing tremendous challenges with few resources. Information about rainfall is just a data point, until we place it into social context – whose crops are most impacted by the absence/overabundance of water? Whose boreholes will dry up first? Whose cattle will be the first to die off? You can see how even changes in rainfall are nothing more than catalysts for local social process, as the answers to these latter questions will vary dramatically, but in the context of trying to understand how things will play out, they are far, far more important than simple biophysical measures of the environment (or quantitative analyses of the economy, for that matter).
In other words, I think that any effort to really address the next famine before it happens is going to be long and extraordinarily involved – and is going to require the help of agencies, implementing partners, academics, affected governments, and the people on the ground living through these challenges. It sounds utopian . . . but it is not. It is necessary. To end up doing the Horn of Africa famine dance again in a few years for lack of ambition, or because of an unwillingness to take a hard look at how we think about development and how it does not work, is an outcome I cannot accept. We will be judged by history for how we respond (if you have doubts, feel free to read Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts and look at how the British come off).
If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right (Part 2)
In part 1, I argued that most academics who study development and aid have a very weak understanding of the processes they critique and seek to influence . . . and the only real way to build that understanding is to engage more seriously with development agencies. Why, then, have so few academics in the social sciences sought out such engagement – that is, why do so few academics work in development agencies as part of their training/research/practice? I think it has something to do with an unachievable desire to alter development practice and outcomes without unsettling ourselves. For example, many academics limit themselves to the critique of development practice to preserve some distance between themselves and the messy world of practice and policy. However, limiting oneself to critique still invokes an ethics of engagement, for if these critiques come too late to be acted upon, or do not speak to the institutional context from which these practices spring, the end result will be writing accessible only by other academics that has little if any benefit to those with whom we work in the Global South. This de facto extractive knowledge industry can hardly be seen as progressive, and its existence should upset us.
At the same time, holding ourselves apart from development practice out of a concern for being co-opted by (or used to legitimize) problematic political-economic agendas only makes sense if we treat development organizations as largely unchanging monoliths. This is a terribly ironic failure for a body of critical scholarship that otherwise spends so much time identifying and celebrating difference. Development agencies are not monoliths. For example, within these agencies are individuals deeply concerned about the rights of those affected by new forest carbon programmes, who object to the framing of development objectives in terms of economic growth, and who lament and struggle against the historical amnesia that marks the cyclical re-emergence of problematic and failed development initiatives. When we see development organizations as sites of contestation, unsettling questions arise. What is the point of critically-informed scholarship if not to provide support to individuals in their struggles to reshape policy, budget and programming into something more productive? What good will the most progressive, community-level effort come to if it can be plowed under by a single bad Country Development Cooperative Strategy (USAID) or Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (World Bank)? What is the point of studying development, if not to intervene?
We cannot alter development without unsettling ourselves, as development requires us to think about the ideas of change and progress, and our role in both. I wrestle with this when I find myself arguing that the application of critical social theory to ‘development challenges’ can result in different and arguably more productive empirical understandings of events in the world (see here, here, here and here). This struggle helps me evaluate of my own positionality, motivations and expectations for such interventions. It is not a struggle that will come to a neat resolution. If indeed the path of the critical development geographer is between the equally untenable poles of uncritical self-justifying judgement and self-promoting intellectual resource extraction, then it is a path that is constantly fraught with tension. If you are unsettled, it means you are paying attention to this tension and trying to address it. If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right.
If you are uncomfortable, you are probably doing it right (Part 1)
Back in April, I participated in a session on the role of geographers (and indeed academics more broadly) in development agencies. Though many outside of academia do not seem to know this, engagement with development agencies by those of us working in geography, anthropology and sociology tends to provoke both strong feelings and some controversy. Given geography’s and anthropology’s historical connection to colonialism, many academics fear that engagement with these agencies risks a return to these old relationships, where the work of academics serves to legitimize or even further neocolonial efforts. I thought the session was outstanding – the discussion was probably the most spirited I’d seen at an AAG, but it never degenerated into name-calling or other unproductive behavior.
Due to the success of and interest in the session, the participants in my panel decided to put together a forum of brief position pieces to be published in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, hopefully later this year (screaming fast by academic standards). In my short piece, I took up the argument that we should be engaging with agencies more (probably not that surprising, considering where I work these days) – a position I supported in a distressingly well-read email exchange on a few big listservs this past fall (see a related blog post here). Before I submitted it, I had to get it cleared by Legislative and Public Affairs (LPA), which led to several people reading it. It was cleared without comment, which I believe only serves to support Bill Easterly’s claim (made in the context of the World Bank) that nobody really cares what we write in the academic journals, because they don’t think anyone reads them.
Along the way, though, my office director read it. Or, more to the point, he read it three times, because, as he put it, it was “impenetrable.” He did not say this dismissively, but instead to point out that the jargon in which I engaged in the piece (and I fully admit that my piece is very, very jargon-laden) made it nearly impossible to follow for the non-academic. To his credit, he read it three times to get my point . . . how many people do you know who are willing to do that?
So, in the spirit of his intervention, I offer a translation of my piece, in two parts. This is part 1.
Engagement with international development is fraught with tension. On one side lies a belief in improvement that carries with it judgment of the lives of others. At its worst, this judgment can become a justification for the lifestyles and foreign policy of “the developed” by placing both at the top of a pyramid of human progress to which everyone should aspire. On the other side is the peril of an extractive intellectual industry. When academic research and writing on development has no impact on policy and practice, it serves only to further the career of the researcher who gains from those s/he researches. It is not possible for an academic to engage development and remain unsullied by one, the other, or both. I see the job of the academic in development as walking between these extremes, balancing the risks of each. Therefore it is incumbent upon each of us to evaluate critically the path we walk between them.
It is very difficult for the contemporary academic to make such a critical evaluation. Critical development studies are often based upon a surprisingly thin understanding of the object of research. I can count on the fingers of one hand the development geographers who have worked in a development agency (receiving a contract from a development agency as a consultant or subcontractor does not count, as in that case one is only seeing the end product of a long process of policy building, budgeting, programming and contracting). Yet without an understanding of mundane bureaucratic moments such as budgeting, contracting and monitoring and evaluation it is simply impossible to understand why agencies do what they do, or reliably to identify points of intervention that might change practice in the world.
Though it was a book that brought me to critical development studies, Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine is exemplary of this problem. Ferguson’s analysis of the Canadian International Development Agency’s (CIDA) Thaba-Tseka project is constrained largely to the reports and field programmes that are the outputs of this complex process. There is no doubt that he is correct about the ways in which CIDA’s representation of Lesotho and its challenges bore little resemblance to events on the ground. However, without a link to the institutional practices and structures that are inextricably bound up with these (mis)representations, Ferguson’s explanation for development failure comes to rest on a vague sense that language/representations (largely reflected in documents related to development projects and agencies) shape action. But this language, and these representations, are produced and reproduced in the often-byzantine interplay of policy, budget, programme and contracting that currently happens outside the scope of analysis for the bulk of academics. Pointing out the problematic character of CIDA’s representations of Lesotho is not in itself a productive intervention – we must know when this construction was put into play, by whom, and to what end. This information cannot be inferred from an organizational chart or a history of organizational actions. Instead, it requires ethnographic attention in its own right.
A very large proportion of critical development studies rests on this sort of incomplete analysis, resulting in critiques and questions that often have limited relevance to the experience of development practice. The mismatch of the products of such analysis with the experiences of those who occupy positions in development institutions is a source of the widening gulf between academic studies of development and the work of the development agencies we criticize and seek to influence. This suggests that productive critical interventions require greater direct engagement with development agencies.
Next up, Part 2: Why does this failure of understanding prevent serious engagement?
Communication: It's not just for climate science
As regular readers of this blog know, I find myself occasionally embroiled in discussions of how those of us working on climate change might best engage the media and the public. It happened in the earliest days of this blog, and again more recently – and my thoughts on this have turned up on Dot Earth at the New York Times site here and here (h/t to Andrew Revkin). In the end, I think we need to be very open and transparent in what we do, but we need to engage people who work on messaging as professionals – scientists are generally poorly trained in this area, and our universities are mired in the idea that press releases will be sufficient for disseminating important ideas to the public or the policy community (see a good post on this at Marc Bellemare’s blog).
So, I was mortified today when I saw that Tom Paulson, a journalist in Seattle, was more or less denied permission to ask a question of a panel at the Pacific Health Summit . . . even when he was willing to follow Chatham House Rules (where comments made in a session are not for external attribution unless the speaker explicitly gives permission – it allows people to speak more freely, and resolve/address difficult issues more directly). It is one thing to protect people talking about a sensitive issue (in this case, vaccinations) so they can speak freely at an event aimed at specialists, but entirely another to actively prevent the press from asking questions, even when panelists are free to refuse to answer, or to answer as they please, without fear of identification. This does nothing to enhance the dialogue within the sessions, nor does it help to foster productive relations with the media.
Now, I was not at the event, and Paulson notes that there were prohibitions against the press asking questions at the event, so to some extent he walked into this one . . . but that does not absolve the organizers of this Summit of blame. The rules themselves make little sense, unless there is such remarkable mistrust of the media in this community (and I speak from a pretty media-averse community these days) that the organizers felt nobody could be trusted.
This is not a press/media relations plan designed by professionals. We in the scientific and academic communities need to get over ourselves – our data is not truth/justification/validation to anyone but us. To most of the rest of the world, our findings are just different viewpoints to be considered. I’m not saying this is how it should be . . . but this is how the world works. We can sit around and demand that everyone understand us on our terms, but we’ve seen how that has played out for climate science, for those who argue against the “vaccines are dangerous” crowd, etc. (For those unclear on this, it has played out very, very poorly). This strikes me as completely pointless, and forever doomed to failure. My life is too short for pointless – I’m a pragmatist. This is yet another screaming argument for the need to engage the professional messaging community. It doesn’t ruin science to engage – it will make what we do a lot more effective.
Academic Adaptation and "The New Communications Climate"
Andrew Revkin has a post up on Dot Earth that suggests some ways of rethinking scientific engagement with the press and the public. The post is something of a distillation of a more detailed piece in the WMO Bulletin. Revkin was kind enough to solicit my comments on the piece, as I have appeared in Dot Earth before in an effort to deal with this issue as it applies to the IPCC, and this post is something of a distillation of my initial rapid response.
First, I liked the message of these two pieces a lot, especially the push for a more holistic engagement with the public through different forms of media, including the press. As Revkin rightly states, we need to “recognize that the old model of drafting a press release and waiting for the phone to ring is not the path to efficacy and impact.” Someone please tell my university communications office.
A lot of the problem stems from our lack of engagement with professionals in the messaging and marketing world. As I said to the very gracious Rajendra Pachauri in an email exchange back when we had the whole “don’t talk to the media” controversy:
I am in no way denigrating your [PR] efforts. I am merely suggesting that there are people out there who spend their lives thinking about how to get messages out there, and control that message once it is out there. Just as we employ experts in our research and in these assessment reports precisely because they bring skills and training to the table that we lack, so too we must consider bringing in those with expertise in marketing and outreach.
I assume that a decent PR team would be thinking about multiple platforms of engagement, much as Revkin is suggesting. However, despite the release of a new IPCC communications strategy, I’m not convinced that the IPCC (or much of the global change community more broadly) yet understands how desperately we need to engage with professionals on this front. In some ways, there are probably good reasons for the lack of engagement with pros, or with the “new media.” For example, I’m not sure Twitter will help with managing climate change rumors/misinformation as it is released, if only because we are now too far behind the curve – things are so politicized that it is too late for “rapid response” to misinformation. I wish we’d been on this twenty years ago, though . . .
But this “behind the curve” mentality does not explain our lack of engagement. Instead, I think there are a few other things lurking here. For example, there is the issue of institutional politics. I love the idea of using new media/information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) to gather and communicate information, but perhaps not in the ways Revkin suggests. I have a section later in Delivering Development that outlines how, using existing mobile tech in the developing world, we could both get better information about what is happening to the global poor (the point of my book is that, as I think I demonstrate in great detail, we actually have a very weak handle on what is going on in most parts of the developing world) and could empower the poor to take charge of efforts to address the various challenges, environmental, economic, political and social, that they face every day. It seems to me, though, that the latter outcome is a terrifying prospect for some in development organizations, as this would create a much more even playing field of information that might force these organizations to negotiate with and take seriously the demands of the people with whom they are working. Thus, I think we get a sort of ambiguity about ICT4D in development practice, where we seem thrilled by its potential, yet continue to ignore it in our actual programming. This is not a technical problem – after all, we have the tech, and if we want to do this, we can – it is a problem of institutional politics. I did not wade into a detailed description of the network I envision in the book because I meant to present it as a political challenge to a continued reticence on the part of many development organizations and practitioners to really engage the global poor (as opposed to tell them what they need and dump it on them). But my colleagues and I have a detailed proposal for just such a network . . . and I think we will make it real one day.
Another, perhaps more significant barrier to major institutional shifts with regard to outreach is the a chicken-and-egg situation of limited budgets and a dominant academic culture that does not understand media/public engagement or politics very well and sees no incentive for engagement. Revkin nicely hits on the funding problem as he moves past simply beating up on old-school models of public engagement:
As the IPCC prepares its Fifth Assessment Report, it does so with what, to my eye, appears to be an utterly inadequate budget for communicating its findings and responding in an agile way to nonstop public scrutiny facilitated by the Internet.
However, as much as I agree with this point (and I really, really agree), the problem here is not funding unto itself – it is the way in which a lack of funding erases an opportunity for cultural change that could have a positive feedback effect on the IPCC, global assessments, and academia more generally that radically alters all three. The bulk of climate science, as well as social impact studies, come from academia – which has a very particular culture of rewards. Virtually nobody in academia is trained to understand that they can get rewarded for being a public intellectual, for making one’s work accessible to a wide community – and if I am really honest, there are many places that actively discourage this engagement. But there is a culture change afoot in academia, at least among some of us, that could be leveraged right now – and this is where funding could trigger a positive feedback loop.
Funding matters because once you get a real outreach program going, productive public engagement would result in significant personal, intellectual and financial benefits for the participants that I believe could result in very rapid culture change. My twitter account has done more for the readership of my blog, and for my awareness of the concerns and conversations of the non-academic development world, than anything I have ever done before – this has been a remarkable personal and intellectual benefit of public engagement for me. As universities continue to retrench, faculty find themselves ever-more vulnerable to downsizing, temporary appointments, and a staggering increase in administrative workload (lots of tasks distributed among fewer and fewer full-time faculty). I fully expect that without some sort of serious reversal soon, I will retire thirty-odd years hence as an interesting and very rare historical artifact – a professor with tenure. Given these pressures, I have been arguing to my colleagues that we must engage with the public and with the media to build constituencies for what we do beyond our academic communities. My book and my blog are efforts to do just this – to become known beyond the academy such that I, as a public intellectual, have leverage over my university, and not the other way around. And I say this as someone who has been very successful in the traditional academic model. I recognize that my life will need to be lived on two tracks now – public and academic – if I really want to help create some of the changes in the world that I see as necessary.
But this is a path I started down on my own, for my own idiosyncratic reasons – to trigger a wider change, we cannot assume that my academic colleagues will easily shed the value systems in which they were intellectually raised, and to which they have been held for many, many years. Without funding to get outreach going, and demonstrate to this community that changing our model is not only worthwhile, but enormously valuable, I fear that such change will come far more slowly than the financial bulldozers knocking on the doors of universities and colleges across the country. If the IPCC could get such an effort going, demonstrate how public outreach improved the reach of its results, enhanced the visibility and engagement of its participants, and created a path toward the progressive politics necessary to address the challenge of climate change, it would be a powerful example for other assessments. Further, the participants in these assessments would return to their campuses with evidence for the efficacy and importance of such engagement . . . and many of these participants are senior members of their faculties, in a position to midwife major cultural changes in their institutions.
All this said, this culture change will not be birthed without significant pains. Some faculty and members of these assessments want nothing to do with the murky world of politics, and prefer to continue operating under the illusion that they just produce data and have no responsibility for how it is used. And certainly the assessments will fear “politicization” . . . to which I respond “too late.” The question is not if the findings of an assessment will be politicized, but whether or not those who best understand those findings will engage in these very consequential debates and argue for what they feel is the most rigorous interpretation of the data at hand. Failure to do so strikes me as dereliction of duty. On the other hand, just as faculty might come to see why public engagement is important for their careers and the work they do, universities will be gripped with contradictory impulses – a publicly-engaged faculty will serve as a great justification for faculty salaries, increased state appropriations, new facilities, etc. Then again, nobody likes to empower the labor, as it were . . .
In short, in thinking about public engagement and the IPCC, Revkin is dredging up a major issue related to all global assessments, and indeed the practices of academia. I think there is opportunity here – and I feel like we must seize this opportunity. We can either guide a process of change to a productive end, or ride change driven by others wherever it might take us. I prefer the former.
Geographers had (sorta) found Bin Laden?
Inquiry is dead when the flagship journal Science starts ambulance-chasing . . . but hey, its Osama bin Laden week in all media, so I guess it should be of no surprise that they are running a story on three-ish year old efforts to get a sense of where bin Laden might be hiding. To their credit, the folks at UCLA are hardly crowing – it was a student project, and Thomas Gillespie, the faculty leader of the project openly noted “It’s not my thing to do this type of [terrorism] stuff,” and made it clear that he had no intention of shifting from his biogeographic interests:
“Right now, I’m working on the dry forests of Hawaii where 45% of the trees are on the endangered species list,” says Gillespie. “I’m far more interested in getting trees off the endangered species list.”
I’m waiting for the gentlemen over at floatingsheep.org to weigh in on this particular project – they are much more qualified to comment on the substance of the study. However, I applaud Gillespie for refusing to get caught up in the hype. Sadly, I’m sure some of my disciplinary colleagues will want to trumpet this as an example of how useful geography is, and why it should get more attention. Because, you know, we’ve just recently shaken off the colonial origins of our discipline, where we proved our usefulness by mapping local populations and resources to facilitate their control, and lord knows we wouldn’t want to put that sort of thing behind us. As one of my colleagues in grad school once pointed out (tongue-in-cheek) after listening to some of our colleagues complain about how some engineering and science departments had much larger budgets, “if we were willing to help kill people, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
And people wonder why I get itchy about the militarization of aid and development.
Revisionist history
REVISED 6 April 2011, 11:35am
Esther Duflo responded in a comment below – you should read it. She is completely reasonable, and lays out a clearer understanding of the discipline and her place in it than did the article I am critiquing here. I have edited the post below to reflect what I think is a more fair reading of what went wrong in the article
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Esther Duflo is a fairly impressive person. So why does she, and the Guardian, feel the need to inflate her resume?
Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.
“It was not considered a fancy area of study,” she says. “There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have some advisers and mentors.”
Er, no. Development economics as a formal field had been around since the early 1980s (Note: Marc Bellemare and Duflo have both pointed out that the real roots of this discipline go back to the 1940s), and economists had been working on development issues since . . . colonialism, actually. I imagine there are a lot of senior Ph.D. economists at the IMF, World Bank and various other organizations who will be amused to hear that they were beaten to their degrees by Duflo. She was not at all one of the first doctoral students to work on this, and there are/were plenty of faculties that look at development economics.
I suspect that this might have something to do with what Mark Blaug was talking about in his article “No History of Ideas, Please, We’re Economists.” In short, one of Blaug’s arguments is that disciplinary history has largely disappeared from doctoral programs in economics, with the predictable effect of dooming the discipline to repeat its errors. I would extend Blaug’s point to many who work in the larger field of development – we have a lot of technical specialists out there with excellent training and experience, but relatively few of them understand development as a discipline with a history and a philosophy. As a result, we see “new” projects proposed and programmed despite their odd resemblance to previous efforts that failed.
There is a hint of this in the article – after all, Duflo is correct in noting that she emerged as an academic at a time when other social science fields were on the ascendancy, but she the Guardian fails to ask why this was the trend at the time – especially after economics’ dominance of the field for so long. A little disciplinary history here would have helped – these other fields rose to prominence in the aftermath of the collapse of development economics as a formal field in the late 1980s…
So, Guardian, anyone over there actually schooled in development? Or interested in fact-checking?
You teach, therefore you can't?
Naomi Schaefer Riley published a particularly stunning op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday asking “Should Professors be Political?” I am actually working on a response op-ed, because despite her framing of this piece as an effort to lay out the educational cost of academic political engagement, this op-ed is not really an argument about education as much as it is an effort to bottle up voices, viewpoints and evidence with which she disagrees in the “safe space” of the university classroom, where these ideas cannot do any harm by influencing society at large.
For example, Riley argues that University of Wisconsin professor William Cronin’s involvement with the Wilderness Society, an environmental organization working to (among other things) stop mining in the Otero Mesa of New Mexico, is an example of run-of-the-mill partisanship. Really? Certainly the arguments of the Wilderness Society are political insofar as they suggest policy directions, but what, exactly, is partisan about a concern for environmental quality? Hell, even the basically libertarian governor Appalachian Trail in SC was in favor of environmental protection. And what of the fact that the Wilderness Society’s claims are rooted in empirical evidence gathered through just the sorts of research that Riley otherwise sees as appropriate for academics, and therefore not rooted in a political agenda as much as in evidence about events in the world, and how they impact human beings.
Even more odd are Riley’s objections to Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute. How, in an era of budget cutting and calls for universities to demonstrate greater relevance to the taxpayers who support them, could one critique the Institute’s mission of acting as a “catalyst and model for interdisciplinary collaboration on environmental initiatives across departments, schools, and colleges, and including governmental, private, and non-profit entities”? Environmental challenges are complex, and require the collaboration of academics and policymakers across a set of institutions and disciplines. Good policy requires good data, and good data requires good research – so why not foster greater collaboration between policymakers and researchers, between politicians and academics? What, exactly, is Riley really concerned with?
Simply put, her concerns have nothing to do with educational quality, and in the end are not really about academic engagement with politics. Instead, they reflect a fear of a wider, clearer voice for academics with whom she does not agree. When she suggests that Cronin’s engagement with the Wilderness Society is run-of-the-mill political activism and partisanship, or complains that Ohio State’s African American and African studies department overtly sees its mission as contributing “ideas for the formulation and implementation of progressive public policies with positive consequences for the black community,” she is not-so-implicitly telling academics to get back into their ivory tower where their ideas will remain marginal to the public discourse. In a reversal of the old adage, she is arguing, “you teach, therefore you can’t.”
This argument for the traditional model for academic engagement, where the researcher’s responsibility for their data and findings ends with the publication of results, willfully distorts how science and other forms of inquiry are used in the political debates that shape the world and our quality of life. Research findings, no matter how rigorous or replicable, are not seen as truths in the political arena. They are just viewpoints, to be considered alongside other viewpoints, as political debates about policy unfold. If the findings of the academic enterprise are to be useful to society at large, academics have a responsibility to interpret their findings into policy, to make political arguments based upon their evidence. If we are not doing so, why are we doing research at all?
In short, the fact that some professors are politically engaged is nothing to lament. Indeed, far too few of my colleagues take up this challenge, with disastrous results for both policy and the academy. On one hand, excellent research, and fascinating research findings, never finds its way into the public or policy discourse, resulting in intellectually and even factually impoverished policy that has negative consequences? On the other, as academia becomes more and more divorced from the concerns and needs of those who support it with their tax dollars and tuition, it becomes harder to see what we need academics for, and easier to argue for ever-deeper cuts to higher education budgets. We need more public intellectuals, not less, if we are to continue as a robust, functional democracy.