Charles Kenny’s* book Getting Better has received quite a bit of attention in recent months, at least in part because Bill Gates decided to review it in the Wall Street Journal (up until that point, I thought I had a chance of outranking Charles on Amazon, but Gates’ positive review buried that hope). The reviews that I have seen (for example here, here and here) cast the book as a counterweight to the literature of failure that surrounds development, and indeed Getting Better is just that. It’s hard to write an optimistic book about a project as difficult as development without coming off as glib, especially when it is all too easy to write another treatise that critiques development in a less than constructive way. It’s a challenge akin to that facing the popular musician – it’s really, really hard to convey joy in a way that moves the listener (I’m convinced this ability is the basis of Bjork’s career), but fairly easy to go hide in the basement for a few weeks, pick up a nice pallor, tune everything a step down, put on a t-shirt one size too small and whine about the girlfriend/boyfriend that left you.
Much of the critical literature on development raises important challenges to development practice and thought, but does so in a manner that makes addressing those challenges very difficult (if not intentionally impossible). For example, deep (and important) criticisms of development anchored in poststructural understandings of discourse, meaning and power (for example, Escobar’s Encountering Development and Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine) emerged in the early and mid-1990s, but their critical power was not tied in any way to a next step . . . which eventually undermined the critical project. It also served to isolate academic development studies from the world of development practice in many ways, as even those working in development who were open to these criticisms could find no way forward from them. Tearing something down is a lot easier than building something new from the rubble.
While Getting Better does not reconstruct development, its realistically grounded optimism provides what I see as a potential foundation for a productive rethinking of efforts to help the global poor. Kenny chooses to begin from a realistic grounding, where Chapters 2 and 3 of the book present us with the bad news (global incomes are diverging) and the worse news (nobody is really sure how to raise growth rates). But, Kenny answers these challenges in three chapters that illustrate ways in which things have been improving over the past several decades, from sticking a fork in the often-overused idea of poverty traps to the recognition that quality of life measures appear to be converging globally. This is more than a counterweight to the literature of failure – this book is a counterweight to the literature of development that all-too-blindly worships growth as its engine. In this book, Kenny clearly argues that growth-centric approaches to development don’t seem to be having the intended results, and growth itself is extraordinarily difficult to stimulate . . . and despite these facts, things are improving in many, many places around the world. This opens the door to question the directionality of causality in the development and growth relationship: is growth the cause of development, or its effect?
Here, I am pushing Kenny’s argument beyond its overtly stated purpose in the book. Kenny doesn’t overtly take on a core issue at the heart of development-as-growth: can we really guarantee 3% growth per year for everyone forever? But at the same time, he illustrates that development is occurring in contexts where there is little or no growth, suggesting that we can delink the goal of development from the impossibility of endless growth. If ever there were a reason to be an optimist about the potential for development, this delinking is it.
I feel a great kinship with this book, in its realistic optimism. I also like the lurking sense of development as a catalyst for change, as opposed to a tool or process by which we obtain predictable results from known interventions. I did find Getting Better’s explanations for social change to rest a bit too heavily on a simplistic diffusion of ideas, a rather exogenous explanation of change that was largely abandoned by anthropology and geography back in the structure-functionalism of the 1940s and 50s. The book does not really dig into “the social” in general. For example, Kenny’s discussion of randomized control trials for development (RCT4D), like the RCT4D literature itself, is preoccupied with “what works” without really diving into an exploration of why the things that worked played out so well. To be fair to Kenny, his discussion was not focused on explanation, but on illustrating that some things that we do in development do indeed make things better in some measurable way. I also know that he understands that “what works” is context specific . . . as indeed is the very definition of “works.” However, why these things work and how people define success is critical to understanding if they are just anecdotes of success in a sea of failure, or replicable findings that can help us to better address the needs of the global poor. In short, without an exploration of social process, it is not clear from these examples and this discussion that things are really getting better.
An analogy to illustrate my point – while we have very good data on rainfall over the past several decades in many parts of West Africa that illustrate a clear downward trend in overall precipitation, and some worrying shifts in the rainy seasons (at least in Ghana), we do not yet have a strong handle on the particular climate dynamics that are producing these trends. As a result, we cannot say for certain that the trend of the past few decades will continue into the future – because we do not understand the underlying mechanics, all we can do is say that it seems likely, given the past few decades, that this trend will continue into the future. This problem suggests a need to dig into such areas as atmospheric physics, ocean circulation, and land cover change to try to identify the underlying drivers of these observed changes to better understand the future pathways of this trend. In Getting Better (and indeed in the larger RCT4D literature), we have a lot of trends (things that work), but little by way of underlying causes that might help us to understand why these things worked, whether they will work elsewhere, or if they will work in the same places in the future.
In the end, I think Getting Better is an important counterweight to both the literature of failure and a narrowly framed idea of development-as-growth. My minor grumbles amount to a wish that this counterweight was heavier. It is most certainly worth reading, and it is my hope that its readers will take the book as a hopeful launching point for further explorations of how we might actually achieve an end to global poverty.
*Full disclosure: I know Charles, and have had coffee with him in his office discussing his book and mine. If you think that somehow that has swayed my reading of Getting Better, well, factor that into your interpretation of my review.
Category: research
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).
A guide to critically reading sources of climate misinformation (or, as I call it, mendacious crap)
. . . ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pat Michaels’ absurd Climate of Fear blog! I’ve already posted on what I thought was a remarkably problematic post from this blog, and I am coming to realize that addressing the mountain of garbage that emerges from this source could become a semi-full time job, and I just don’t have that kind of time. So, rather than work through each post (and they all need attention, as they are all rife with misdirection, internal contradictions, factual inaccuracies, and what I can only call staggering ethical lapses), I’d like to lay out a loose framework for critically reading Michaels’ entries that anyone can use.
First, look for internal contradictions: In his post “Big Science, Big Government,” Michaels subtly identifies himself as a scientist (he obviously feels the need for that legitimacy) by saying “My lobby, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) isn’t located in Washington, D.C., because its employees are fond of the city’s heat and humidity in the summer.” (Full disclosure – I am currently on an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship). Obviously, he feels fine about advocacy from his position as a scientist, as he is writing opinion pieces for Forbes.com and now works for the Cato Institute. Despite this, he sees no irony at all in arguing, in the context of a huge banner supporting AAAS advocacy for biofuels (which I have long disagreed with, incidentally), that “The image [on the banner] was hardly neutral. Backgrounding the corncob/gasoline pump is an image of a wild blue (i.e. pollution-free) ocean. This was propaganda and public relations, not science.”
Well, technically he is correct – this was advocacy, no doubt. But Pat, your blog is propaganda and PR, not science. So why is this a problem for AAAS, but fine for you? Either we are looking at a serious internal contradiction, or an ethical lapse around the failure to disclose his own advocacy.
Oh, and Pat, UVa is one of the “Public Ivies,” not one of the “Public Ivy’s.”
Second, look for misdirection: In “Voodoo Economics? How About Voodoo Climate Science,” Michaels actually rightly points out a number of problems with the last IPCC report (again, full disclosure – I am a review editor for the upcoming 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC). Well, he throws a spurious temperature claim in there, but then this is par for the course on his blog. He then constructs a stunning argumentative fallacy – he finds six errors in a report that runs several thousand pages in its entirety, argues they are all biased in the same direction, and then makes the argument that the odds of six errors in a report of this size aligning in the same direction rises to the .02 level of significance (to break out the stats).
Now, some of the errors to which he points require attention – for example, climatologists I know who focus on hurricanes and cyclones have long said that climate change would have an uncertain impact on these storms because their formation is very complex, and a lot of different factors that contribute to their formation were being altered by climate change – in other words, the uncertainty to which Michaels (rightly) points is the product of climate change. Oopsie. This is what we call misdirection . . .
Third, look for spurious arguments (and structures of argument): Aside from tiny internal fallacies such as I just described in the “Voodoo” post described above, the entire structure of Michaels’ argument in this post is crap. Michaels does not address errors of understatement in the report – which, by his standards, are examples of bias in favor of his position. For example, the Arctic Sea Ice is disappearing much faster than projected in the last report – so does this mean that the authors of that chapter are in bed with Pat Michaels and the rest of the climate denial crowd? Er, no. It means that this chapter was written with the best evidence at the time, and now we have better evidence. When we start looking for errors of understatement, we find that this report was often far too conservative – and the number of cases where the estimates or interpretations were too conservative (i.e. arctic sea ice) outweigh Michaels’ pathetic six cases. Michaels is cherrypicking the data (in this case, the data are the examples of errors in the report) to get the result he wants . . . which would get him slapped down in any scientific outlet.
Finally, look for evidence for Michaels’ real fear – that markets might not work perfectly, and that government regulation of activities that affect the environment might actually be needed to correct for the obvious market failures that are occurring around greenhouse gas emissions: For example, look at the title of the post “Voodoo Economics? How About Voodoo Climate Science”, Michaels never actually makes reference to George H. W. Bush’s critique of Reagan’s supply-side economics – yet somehow it is in this post. Perhaps because Michaels is defending that supply-side position against the threat of regulation and taxation? This blog is a frequently updated proof that Oreskes and Conway were really on to something in their exploration of the anti-science movement Merchants of Doubt. In a nutshell, they argue that people like Michaels are not motivated by real curiosity, empirical data, or scientific consensus – they are driven by a broadly neoliberal agenda that emerged in the Cold War and still sees itself as the protector of the American Way from the path of regulation and taxation that leads to Communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Except, of course, that this is more than an argument about politics and economics – this is an argument about what to do in a changing world . . . where one group participating in the argument has its fingers in its ears and is shouting “lalalalala” as loud as it can whenever actual data appears.
So, read away – you can make a game out of identifying the misdirections, misrepresentations, internal contradictions, barely concealed neoliberal freakouts, and much more rare overt neoliberal freakouts as you go. But look for all of these, and understand that Climate of Fear is not a source of information, it is an effort to obscure the problem in the name of a long-discredited political-economic agenda . . .
Wait, economists get to just guess and call it explanation?
An interesting review of Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion and Wars, Guns and Votes by Yale Anthropologist Mike McGovern has gotten a little bit of attention recently in development circles, speaking as it does to ongoing debates about the role of statistical analysis, what counts as explanation, and where qualitative research fits into all of this. I will take up McGovern’s good (but incomplete, in my opinion) review in another post. Here, I needed to respond to a blog entry about this review.
On the Descriptive Statistics, Causal Inference and Social Science blog, Andrew Gelman discusses McGovern’s review. While there is a lot going on in this post, one issue caught my attention in particular. In his review, McGovern argues that “Much of the intellectual heavy lifting in these books is in fact done at the level of implication or commonsense guessing,” what Gelman (quoting Fung) calls “story time”, the “pivot from the quantitative finding to the speculative explanation.” However, despite the seemingly dismissive term for this sort of explanation, in his blog post Gelman argues “story time can’t be avoided.” His point:
On one hand, there are real questions to be answered and real decisions to be made in development economics (and elsewhere), and researchers and policymakers can’t simply sit still and say they can’t do anything because the data aren’t fully persuasive. (Remember the first principle of decision analysis: Not making a decision is itself a decision.)
From the other direction, once you have an interesting quantitative finding,of course you want to understand it, and it makes sense to use all your storytelling skills here. The challenge is to go back and forth between the storytelling and the data. You find some interesting result (perhaps an observational data summary, perhaps an analysis of an experiment or natural experiment), this motivates a story, which in turn suggests some new hypotheses to be studied.
Now, on one hand I take his point – research is iterative, and answering one set of questions (or one set of new data) often raises new questions which can be interrogated. But Gelman seems to presume that explanation only comes from more statistical analysis, without considering what I saw as McGovern’s subtle point: qualitative social scientists look at explanation, and do not revert to story time to do so (good luck getting published if you do). We spend a hell of a lot of time fleshing out the causal processes behind our observations, including establishing rigor and validity for our data and conclusions, before we present stories. This is not to say that our explanations are immediately complete or perfect, nor is it to suggest that our explanations do not raise new questions to pursue. However, there is no excuse for the sort of “story time” analysis that McGovern is pointing out in Collier’s work – indeed, I would suggest that is why the practice is given a clearly derisive title. That is just guessing, vaguely informed by data, often without even thinking through alternative explanations for the patterns at hand (let alone presenting those alternatives).
I agree with Gelman’s point, late in the post – this is not a failing of statistics, really. It is a failure to use them intelligently, or to use appropriate frameworks to interpret statistical findings. It would be nice, however, if we could have a discussion between quant and qual on how to avoid these outcomes before they happen . . . because story time is most certainly avoidable.
Does being a middle-income country mean ANYTHING anymore?
Andy Sumner and Charles Kenny (disclosure – Andy and Charles are friends of mine, and I need to write up my review of Charles’ book Getting Better . . . in a nutshell, you should buy it) have a post on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters Blog addressing the two most recent challenges to the idea of the “poverty trap”: Ghana and Zambia’s recent elevations to middle-income status (per capita GNIs of between $1,006 and $3,975) by the World Bank.
Quick background for those less versed in development terminology: GNI (Gross National Income) is the value of all goods and services produced in a country, as well as all overseas investments and remittances (money sent home from abroad). Per capita GNI divides this huge number by the population to get a sense of the per-person income of the country (there is a loose assumption that the value of goods and services will be paid in the form of wages). So, loosely speaking, a per capita GNI of $1006 is roughly equivalent to $2.75/day. Obviously $2.75 buys a lot more in rural Africa than it does basically anywhere inside the US, but this is still a pretty low bar at which to start “Middle Income.”
I do not want to engage an argument about where Middle Income should start in this post – Andy and Charles take this up near the end of their post, and nicely lay out the issues. The important point that they are making, though, is that the idea that there are a lot of countries out there mired in situations that make an escape from food insecurity, material deprivation, absence of basic healthcare, and lack of opportunity (situations often called “poverty traps”) is being challenged by the ever-expanding pool of countries that seem to be increasing economic productivity rapidly and significantly. The whole point of a “poverty trap”, as popularized by Paul Collier’s book on The Bottom Billion and Jeffrey Sach’s various writings, is that it cannot be escaped without substantial outside aid interventions (a la Sachs) or may not be escapable at all. Well, Ghana certainly has received a lot of aid, but its massive growth is not the product of a new “big push”, a massive infusion of aid across sectors to get the country up into this new income category. Turns out the poorest people in the world might not need us to come riding to their rescue, at least not in the manner that Sachs envisions in his Millennium Villages Project.
That said, I’ve told Andy that I am deeply concerned about fragility – that is, I am thrilled to see things changing in places like Ghana, but how robust are those changes? At least in Ghana, a lot of the shift has been driven by the service sector, as opposed to recent oil finds (though these will undoubtedly swell the GNI figure in years to come) – this suggests a broader base to change in Ghana than, say, Equatorial Guinea . . . where GNI growth is all about oil, which is controlled by the country’s . . . problematic . . . leader (just read the Wikipedia post). But even in Ghana, things like climate change could present significant future challenges. The loss of the minor rainy season, for example, could have huge impacts on staple crop production and food security in the country, which in turn could hurt the workforce, exacerbate class/ethnic/rural-urban tensions, and generally hurt social cohesion in what is today a rather robust democracy. Yes, things have gotten better in Ghana . . . but this is no time to assume, a la Rostow, that a largely irreversible takeoff to economic growth has occurred. Aid and development are important and still needed in an increasingly middle-income world, but a different aid and development that supports existing indigenous efforts and consolidates development gains.
Willful misdirection (or, more mendacious crap)
Pat Michaels has a rather astonishing blog called Climate of Fear at Forbes.com. Too bad for Forbes – they are providing a platform for a serious climate crank who I think is far too well-educated and smart to misunderstand the things he misrepresents in his public statements and writing. His recent post on climate change and food security is a classic of the genre – and fits very well into the strategies that Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway so brilliantly lay out in Merchants of Doubt (which, if you want to understand the professional climate change denial camp, you absolutely must read). It requires debunking. Hell, the man’s blog requires debunking, post by post.
So, what does Michaels have to say about climate change and food security? Well, in a nutshell he doesn’t see how climate change is a problem for agriculture – indeed, he seems to suggest that climate change will do good things for agriculture. However, a careful read of the article for what it does and does not actually say, and what evidence it draws on (mostly tangential), demonstrates that this is a piece of misdirection that, in my opinion, is criminal: insofar as it causes anyone to doubt the severity of the challenge in front of us, it will cost lives. Lots of lives.
Michaels begins with a classic of the denial genre – he goes after a New York Times article not on its merits (indeed, he never addresses any of the article’s content), but by lumping it in with every previous warning of what he calls “environmental apocalypse.” Except, of course, that the only call he actually cites is the now legendary “global cooling” fear of the 1970s – a fringe belief that was never embraced by the majority of scientists (no matter how hard the denial crowd wants you to believe it). That concern was based on patterns of natural cycles of heating and cooling that some felt were timed to push us back toward another ice age, but it was not the consensus view of scientists at the time. Michaels knows this. Either that, or he was a very, very bad graduate student, as he claims to have recieved his doctorate on the wings of “global cooling.”
Then Michaels moves to a false correlation (or non-correlation) – temperatures rose by .75 degrees C over the 20th Century (about 1.35 degrees Farenheit), but Michaels argues that since “U.S. corn yields quintupled. Life expectancy doubled. People got fat” clearly there is nothing to worry about. Except, of course, that temperature/CO2 has relatively little to do with these results – biotech and improved farming techniques were much, much more important – and one could argue that these techniques and biotech have persevered in the face of conditions that might have, in many parts of the world, led to declining yields. Hell, it is well known that the increases in per-capita food availability worldwide are not evenly distributed – According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in sub-Saharan Africa there is less food per person than there was thirty years ago. Either Michaels has a distressingly flawed understanding of correlation and no real understanding of agricultural development over the past 100 years, or he is willfully misdirecting the reader. Either case should disqualify him from writing this article.
Besides, temperature is only one concern (it is possible that some parts of the globe will warm several degrees Celsius, pushing some current staple crops out of the temperature bands in which they can germinate) – Michaels makes no mention of precipitation, except to basically trot out the old “CO2 is plant food” argument by saying “greenhouse warming takes place more in the winter, which lengthens growing seasons. With adequate water, plants then fix and yield more carbohydrate.” This is almost hilarious, as one of the biggest problems we face is finding adequate water. Rising atmospheric temperatures have driven changes in wind patterns and atmospheric moisture content which, in turn, have shifted rainfall patterns over the past century or more. Today CO2 is not able to serve as plant food in many parts of the world that most need it because the very injection of more CO2 into the atmosphere is creating declines in the rain needed to make that CO2 useful to plants. Unless Michaels is willing to argue that rainfall patterns have not shifted, and therefore is willing to ignore rain gauge data from around the world, he has just offered the reader another misleading argument.
To address these empirically-documented challenges, farmers have adopted new crops, some biotech and improved irrigation tech has helped (though in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a region in which most agriculture is rain-fed, farmers are getting hammered by precipitation change) , but we are moving into an era where the vast bulk of work on GMOs is “defensive” – that is, trying to hold the line on yields as environmental conditions deteriorate. This is not a recipe for continued rising yields in the future – which makes a few of his later claims really, really embarrassing – if he had shame, that is. His claim that the continued increase in per capita grain production is going up means that climate change has had no effect is a logical fallacy – he is not factoring in how much production we have lost because of climate effects (and we are losing production – Southern Africa is one example). His claims about rising wheat production in the future, even in a world free of wheat rust, presume either current environmental conditions will hold or that there will be significant technological advances that boost yields – but these are assumptions, not facts that can be stated with certainty.
In short, Michael’s alignment of temperature change and improving human conditions are basically unrelated . . . unless one wants to (rightly) note that many of the things that allowed us to live longer and get fatter required manufacturing processes and transport mechanisms that burned fossil fuels, thus warming the atmosphere – in other words, causality runs the other way. We live longer and better, which is in part causing the warming of the atmosphere. But Michaels can’t even consider that direction of causality . . .
I do agree with Michaels that using food crops for ethanol is and was stupid. Of course, I was saying this (along with a lot of other colleagues) at author meetings of UNEP’s Fourth Global Environment Outlook in 2005. The decision to push biofuels was political, not scientific. Welcome to the party, Pat – we’ve already been here for a while, but there might still be some beer in the keg . . .
So, to summarize – Michaels has created a post that relies on false correlation, logical fallacy and misdirection to create the idea that climate change might not be a problem for agriculture, and that it might even be good for global production. But he does not cite the vast bulk of the science out there – and ignores the empirical literature (not theory, not conjecture – measured changes) to create a very deceptive picture that minimizes the slowly intensifying challenges facing people living in many parts of the Global South. I invite Dr. Michaels to look at the FEWS-NET data – not just contemporary, but historical – on the East African/Horn of Africa climate. Empirical observation (again, measured, verified observations, not projections) tells us it is drying out* . . . and has been, for some time, massively compromising both crops and livestock, the backbone of livelihoods in Southern Ethiopia, Somalia and Northeastern Kenya. As all hell breaks loose in that region, and the US Government considers using the term famine for the first time in a decade to describe the situation on the ground, it seems to me that Michaels’ efforts at misdirection rise beyond nuisance to a real question of ethics that Forbes would do well to consider before publishing such mendacious material again.
*very important note: FEWS-NET is agnostic as to the causes of the drying out – at this time, they do not care what causes it, they need to document it to better organize US Government and multilateral food aid delivery. They would have jobs even if climate change did not exist, as the weather does vary from year to year no matter what, and therefore food insecurity would vary year by year.
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?
Open Data: This is a very big deal
It appears that the World Bank, at long last, is going to really make a huge portion of its data publicly available. The New York Times has a story that outlines some of the trials and tribulations that brought us to this point, some of which will probably seem arcane to the development outsider. However, as a development researcher/practitioner hybrid, I cannot tell you how exciting or important this is – the Bank is sitting on a giant pile of interesting data. Not all of it is going to be high quality (a lot of data from the Global South is not – see chapter 9 of Delivering Development or a parallel discussion in Charles Kenny’s Getting Better). But until very recently the data you could easily access from the Bank was worthy of a lower-division undergraduate project – and getting to the really interesting stuff was brutally difficult. The new datasets are more detailed and comprehensive, but still not everything the Bank has. Andy Sumner has been trying to get at the Bank’s core data to refine and test his ideas about the New Bottom Billion (which you should all be reading, by the way), with little success because of security requirements.
I really like a quote, at the end of the NY Times piece, from Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s permanent secretary for information. When asked if there would be resistance to public dissemination of government data, he argued that transparency was inevitable because:
Information is valuable, he says, and people will find a way to get it: “This is one of those things, like mobile phones and the Internet, that you cannot control.”
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.