The other day I posted on the need to reorient how we think about relief work, especially disaster risk reduction (DRR), if we are to connect relief to development, and DRR to adaptation. Well, for those who share my concerns, I have good news. I’m on the US Government review panel for the IPCC’s Special Report on Extreme Weather Events (SREX), which means I just got four second order drafts of chapters for the report. They are brutally long and detailed . . . and they are fantastic. They are an amazing effort to link disaster risk reduction (DRR) and the way that relief folks think about the world to adaptation and the way development people think. I can’t excerpt the report yet (not for circulation, and besides, not yet out of the review process), but I think it is safe to say I can shelve the report I thought I was going to have to co-author with a colleague at work about the DRR-to-adaptation link. We’ll just condense this into a few pages and make it something the agency and missions can wrap their heads around.
Seriously, those in academia will be able to teach from this report – and to be honest, it should be required reading for anyone employed by one of the large agencies that does both development and relief – and that includes all of those who work for “implementing partners.” How often can you say that about an assessment report?
I’ll post when the document goes public – I have no idea what the timeline is, except that we are managing the comments on the second order draft, which typically means we are getting down to the end of the process.
Category: sustainable development
Measuring poverty to address climate change
Otaviano Canuto, the World Bank’s Vice President for Poverty Reduction, had an interesting post on HuffPo yesterday in which he argues that we cannot understand the true cost of climate change until we can better measure poverty – “as long as we are unable to measure the poverty impact of climate change, we run the risk of either overestimating or underestimating the resources that will be needed to face it.” I agree – we do not have a particularly good handle on the economic costs of climate change right now, just loose estimates that I fear are premised on misunderstandings of life in the Global South (I have an extended discussion of this problem in the second half of my book).
However, I find the phrasing of this concern a bit tortured – we need to better understand the impact of climate change on poverty so we can figure out how much it will cost us to solve the problem . . . but which problem? Climate change or poverty? Actually, I think this tortured syntax leads us to a more productive place than a focus on either problem – just as I am pretty sure we can’t address poverty for most living in the Global South unless we do something about climate change (which I think is what Canuto was after), I don’t think you can address climate change without addressing poverty. As I argue in my book:
Along globalization’s shoreline the effects of climate change are felt much more immediately and more directly than in advanced economies. More and more, as both climate change and economic change impact their capacity to raise the food and money they need to get through each day, residents of this shoreline find themselves forced into trade-offs they would rather not make.
For example, most of the farmers in Dominase and Ponkrum agree that deforestation lowers the agricultural productivity of their farms, due to both the loss of local precipitation that accompanies deforestation and the loss of shade that enables the growth of sensitive crops, such as cocoa. At the same time, the sound of chainsaws can still be heard around these villages every once in a while, as a head of lineage allows someone from town to cut down one of the few remaining trees in the area for a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. These heads of family know that in allowing the cutting of trees they are mortgaging the future fertility of this land, but they see little other choice when crops do not come in as expected or jobs are hard to find.
From a global perspective, this example may not seem that dire. After all, when one tree falls, the impact on the global carbon cycle is minuscule. However, if similar stresses and decisions result in the cutting of thousands of trees each day, the impact can be significant. All along the shoreline, people are forced into this sort of trade-off every day, and in their decision- making the long-term conservation of needed natural resources usually falls by the wayside.
Simply put, we have no means of measuring or even estimating the aggregate effect of many, many small livelihoods choices and the land use impacts of those choices, yet in aggregate these will have impacts on regional and global biophysical processes. When we fail to address poverty, and force the global poor into untenable decisions about resource use and conservation, we create conditions that will give us more climate change. If we don’t do a better job of measuring poverty and the relationship of the livelihoods and land use decision-making of the poor (something I have addressed here), we are going to be caught by surprise by some of the biophysical changes that persistent poverty might trigger.
On Math, Climate Change and Food Security
Idiot Tracker has a post on food security that uses food security as a means of focusing the reader on the challenges that climate change are likely to present in the near future. In short, the argument goes that climate change will negatively impact our future agricultural productivity, making it difficult to increase that productivity as our population grows. If we do hit nine billion people by mid-century (barring cataclysm this seems to be the minimum number we will hit), the author calculates that we will need to come up with 14.5 trillion calories per day, and notes that climate change is likely to present significant barriers to meeting this need.
I agree . . . in a general way. We are losing huge amounts of arable land each year to soil degradation, and we are running out of productive places in which to extend new farms that do not create really problematic ecological tradeoffs (like massive deforestation that speeds climate change). Climate change is likely to force the transformation of entire agricultural regimes in otherwise sustainable areas – for example, by changing temperatures and precipitation such that most strains of maize will have difficulty germinating in Southern Africa in a few decades. This is all a very big deal. But this post is also very, very thin on support for its argument.
As the post does not present any hard data, including how the 14.5 trillion calorie per day figure was derived, I cannot be sure if the author did any real math on our current production or the likely loss of caloric production that might occur under any number of likely climate scenarios (a problem unto itself, at global circulation models are much better for temperature than they are for rainfall, and there are few regional circulation models that can correct this problem – see the fascinating recent work of FEWS-NET on modeled versus empirically-measured patterns of precipitation in East Africa). All of these might create significant error bars around likely future caloric production. Further, I cannot tell if the author has considered whether or not crops will migrate as their ecological zones shift – surely farmers that previously could not raise a certain crop will start to take it up as the local environment allows and as other producing areas fall out of favor. We know that some ecosystems will at least start to migrate if corridors for such movement are available – and agricultural systems are just another form of (heavily managed) ecosystem. As cropping areas shift, what will the net caloric impact be? It is not enough to say that we will lose a lot of calories when maize stops germinating in southern Africa. We will need to get a net figure by calculating in all of the new areas in which maize will germinate.
Of course, such math only works at the global scale, and issues of hunger have very little to do with global production – hunger is local, shaped more by the intersection of markets, the environment, politics and society. So noting that maize will germinate in new areas does nothing for the people in southern Africa who will be without maize. However, we have to obtain another net figure: the lost calories from maize versus the new calories from new crops that people can grow, but chose not to before. This may still total a net decrease in calories (indeed, it probably will), but this is not the same as simply subtracting maize from the equation.
Finally, what of plants that are edible, but that we currently choose not to eat? The clearest analogy, to me, is the evolution of seafood here in the US. I like to explain to my students that these new, exotic fish that are showing up at restaurants are the species that no self-respecting chef would touch two decades ago. But when you wipe out the cod, you start getting creative. And don’t get me started about tilapia. It’s the rat of fish. Seriously, it likes murky, stagnant water. It will grow anywhere. There is nothing I find funnier than hearing a server say “we have a very nice tilapia today.” Yeah, I’d love to pay $20 for the swimming pigeon, thanks! That said, people do eat tilapia and all sorts of other hilarious species because they are hungry and willing to pay. So what new species of plant and animal will we be willing to eat a decade from now? Three decades from now? This is hard to predict, but I’ll bet quite a lot that we will find new species to exploit and offset even more of this caloric loss.
Despite all of this, I do think we face significant food challenges in the next three to four decades. These will be felt very unevenly around the world, but they will be felt in significant ways. To figure out what these impacts will look like, and who will experience them, requires that we carefully think through not only the exposure of crops to climate change impacts, but also the sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the agroecological system to those impacts. It is only when we understand how such systems are likely to respond that we can begin to really plan for the challenges ahead.
Don't tell us the food price index is rising! Tell us why . . .
The rising price of food has been a subject of many news stories over the past few months, with the intensity of attention ratcheting up recently upon news that the FAO’s food price index has just surpassed its 2008 peak. Stories about this issue – well, at least the good stories – point out the highly variable way in which this increase in the price of food has played out in different places. One good example of this sort of reportage is from Saturday’s Washington Post.
This variability, however, tends to be illustrated instead of interrogated, with explanations remaining remarkably shallow (see my earlier complaints about how explanations related to “local specificity” and “cultural difference” tend to obscure important processes and blame the victims of larger processes). However, a quick examination of the information we have about food prices and their impacts points to the fact that global food prices are not all that useful for understanding the variable food outcomes we see in the Global South. First, we have to understand that the increase everyone is talking about is in an index of food prices – that is, the price data drawn from a number of different foods. Though the index is going up, this does not mean that the prices of all foods are rising equally. As the WaPo and others have noted (and is quite clear in the FAO presentation of the data), when you disaggregate the crops and their prices, the biggest increases globally are in sugar, cooking oils and some fats (there are, of course, local surges in price for particular crops, but those are often independent of the larger global markets). While cereal prices are increasing, they are not rising as quickly as these other foods, and they remain below 2008 levels. So who is hit by these prices has a lot to do with who consumes sugar, or products heavily constituted by sugar and oils. Oils are widely distributed in diets, but sugar is not – the poorest tend to have the least access outside the Global North (ironically, this is reversed in the Global North, as noted by Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me). Meanwhile, staple crop prices are not rising anywhere near as rapidly. So the principal drivers of the rising price index are not a huge portion of the diets of those in Global South . . . with one key exception: urban populations. More on that in a second.
Second, who is hit by these prices has to do with the degree to which producers and consumers are linked to global markets. Many rural producers are consumers of their own produce, or the produce of their neighbors. As a result, they are somewhat insulated from shifts in commodity prices. I’ve seen this at work in Ghana firsthand – it is a disaster for incomes in these areas, but not for food security. Instead, people just eat the crops they might otherwise have sold at market. Of course, this comes with other costs, such as in terms of the purchases of needed household goods, and sometimes in terms of children’s education (in places where school fees are still charged). But in terms of food security, not so much. FEWS-NET has offered this same interpretation of the impact of rising food prices on the countries in which it operates, arguing that this increase in this index is not as worrying as what we saw in 2008. This is one of those instances where integration with global markets, long seen as a goal of development programs and a clear pathway to prosperity, can also produce significant new challenges for the global poor . . . or at least that segment of the rural poor whose livelihoods and production are highly integrated with global markets.
So, where people are dependent on global commodities that are internationally sourced for their food or incomes, shifting global food prices are more likely to result in direct shocks to their food security. While there are certainly rural populations that fit this description, once again it is the urban poor who are most generally and directly exposed to this challenge. With little food production of their own, they are dependent on purchased food that has passed through one or more middlemen from the source of production. By definition, their food supply is more commodified, and more connected to global markets, than most of their rural counterparts.
Therefore, there isn’t a whole lot of point to looking at global price indexes to understand the relationship between these prices and food insecurity. Instead, we have to look at who is affected by these prices, and how – the connections are complex and often involve tracing what appear to be unrelated factors as they radiate out from these price changes. This is the only way to appropriately design interventions to address these issues . . .
Don’t tell us that the food price index is rising – tell us why it is rising . . . then we can do something about it.
Blogging gone wild
Rick Rowden wrote an article.
I wrote an 800 word response.
Rick wrote a 1000 word response to my response (the first comment).
I wrote a 1200 word response to Rick’s response (my response is directly below his comment).
It’s like an intellectual arms race, only with really, really tiny stakes. But I think it is educational for those who wonder where modernization theory went, and why nobody has warmed it over yet.
UPDATE 1-12-11
Rick comes back with 1450 words (second comment).
We are starting to agree on a few things, at least.
Stop the madness.
Poverty reduction and development: it's not either/or
A piece on the Guardian‘s Poverty Matters Blog today sets up one of the oddest, and most pointless, dichotomies I’ve seen in a discussion of development. To summarize, the post by Rick Rowden argues that a focus on aid effectiveness and poverty reduction
perpetuates a bloated aid industry that doles out millions of dollars each year to legions of contractors and NGOs to carry out projects in dozens of poor countries.
What it does not do, apparently, is work toward any definition of development
In recent decades, earlier notions of development economics have been replaced with meeting the MDGs. But poverty reduction is not development. We seem to have suffered collective amnesia about the history of development, which used to be widely understood as industrialisation – in which poor countries undergo a transformative process out of primary agriculture and extractive industries into manufacturing and services industries with higher value-added over time.
First, this is an absurdly reductionist definition of development. If Rowden wants to talk down to his readers about the history of development, he’d do well to note that his particular take fell out of currency in the late 1960s because IT DIDN’T WORK. There is a reason modernization/big push theories fell out of favor (unless you are Jeff Sachs, and then you are forever reviving the corpse of the big push at the community level via the MVP. Then again, Sachs doesn’t seem to read development history, either). In short, the borrowing required for industrial ramp-ups almost never paid off with enough revenue to pay off the loans. To understand why this happened is to understand the country-specific interplay of three key factors. First, there were (and still are) structural issues in world trade that locked much of the developing world out of key markets. Second, these policies failed because markets were dominated by large corporate entities operating with very small margins because of their huge economies of scale, basically undercutting any new competitors on price because they had the advantage of a huge head start provided by colonialism. Third, massive corruption within countries drained the productive capital out of these loans, dooming the projects there were meant to fund. Countries had to address either two or three of these factors, in varying ratios, at different times. Modernization theories pushing industrialization had little to offer in addressing them. This is why we eventually saw the rise of an attention to institutions and governance in development – not just at the level of the state, but also in markets and broader trade arenas. It is also why so many countries in the Global South found themselves saddled with crushing debt at the end of the last century – many of those debts were the original loans and continued accumulation of interest tied to these failed policies.
The other issue is that industrialization requires resources (to make products) and consumption (to sell them). At a time when our demand on the natural environment is already beginning to overshoot its capacity to serve our needs, asking countries to take on even more unsustainable activities is an absurdity that will end in failure. There is nothing sustainable in this pathway – and if you look at the post, you will see that the entire argument is framed in an unlimited world, where the only constraint on development is growth:
If countries are unable to use the industrial policies they will need to transform their domestic industries, diversify their economies and build up their own tax bases over time, how will they ever get off the foreign aid bandwagon? Here the “poverty reduction” discourse is misleading; it neglects to ask how countries are supposed develop without industrialising.
Well, that isn’t totally true unless you take a very, very narrow reading of the poverty reduction discourse. A lot of us are working in this space to imagine alternatives. Indeed, there are community level projects that, while not elevating people to the standards of living seen in the Global North, have created sustainable, substantive changes in the quality of residents’ lives. The examples are out there if people want to look.
Beyond all of this, though, is the larger issue – Rowden clearly has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to development when he dichotomizes poverty reduction and development. Even if we saw economic growth as the be-all, end-all of development, there is a lot of work out there arguing that endemic poverty is a huge drag on economic growth and therefore has to be addressed as part of a growth package (see the OECD Observer here). So even in a fairly reductionist view of development, you need poverty reduction . . . and I don’t know anyone who believes that growth adequately addresses poverty. Not even at USAID. Really.
So poverty reduction and development are not an either/or proposition, from any reasonable perspective on development. Rowden’s piece would have been interesting . . . in 1960. I have no idea what the point was in publishing it today.
Development isn't impossible, just hard to understand
A few comments on the blog related to some earlier posts on a Grand Challenge for Development have gotten me thinking a bit about development (the concept and the project) and if it is achievable. There are those who would argue it is not, that development is an ill-conceived idea that invokes pathways of change that are now closed due to the changing global political economy, and treats life in the advanced economies as the apotheosis of human existence toward which everyone else is (and should be) marching. To the extent development is taken to mean this sort of change, I agree completely – development is unattainable and meaningless. There are not enough resources on Earth to allow everyone to live the way we do in the advanced economies, so the idea of a march toward that standard of living as a goal is gone regardless of how one might feel about it morally/ethically/etc.
But that does not mean that change cannot happen, that things cannot improve in a manner that is appreciated by people living in particular places. Certainly, a shift from a post-subsistence income of $1 a day to $5 a day is a huge change that, in many parts of the world, would enable very different standards of health, education and well-being. Surely this is worth striving for – and certainly, the people with whom I have worked in Ghana and Malawi would take that kind of a change over no change at all – and they would much rather than kind of change, than endless, pride-killing aid dependence. There is no doubt that this sort of change can be attained in many, if not most places. Indeed, it has been accomplished. Further, there are places where life expectancy has risen dramatically, infant mortality has fallen, nutrition and education levels have improved, and by any qualitative measure the quality of life has improved as a direct result of aid interventions (often termed development, but this should only count as development if the changes are sustained after the aid ends). The real question at hand is not if it can be done, but why the results of our aid/development efforts are so erratic.
You see, for every case of improved life expectancy, there is the falling expectancies in Southern Africa. For every case of improved nutrition and food availability, there are cases of increasing malnutrition and food insecurity (such that in sub-Saharan Africa, the balance has tipped toward less food availability per capita than two decades ago), and so on. What works in one place often fails in another. And the fact is that we don’t understand why this is in a systematic way. I am a geographer and an anthropologist, so I am quite sympathetic to the argument that the local specificity of culture and society have a lot to do with the efficacy of particular interventions, and therefore explain a lot of the variability we see in project outcomes. However, “local specificity” isn’t an answer, it is a blanket explanation that isn’t actionable in a specific way. We persist in this answer because it pushes development (and aid) failure into the realm of the qualitative, the idiosyncratic. And this attitude absolves us, the development community, from blame when things don’t work out. Your project failed? Ah, well, who could have known that local land tenure rules would prevent the successful adoption of tree crops by women? Subtly, we blame the victims with this mentality.
What it comes down to, I think, is a need to admit that we have at best a shaky idea of what works because in many areas (both geographic and technical) we really don’t understand what it is we are trying to transform when we engage in aid and development work. We are better in some areas (health) because, frankly, they do a better job of gathering data and analyzing it than we do in, say, rural development (hey, don’t take my word for it – read some Robert Chambers, for heaven’s sake!). But, in the end, we are driven by our myths about how markets and globalization work, how development/aid is linked to change, and how the problems we claim to address through development and aid came about in the first place. This argument is the heart of my book (Amazon link here) – and I spend the first half using the story of two villages in Ghana to lay out how our assumptions about the world and how it works are mostly wrong, the next quarter explaining why this is a major problem for everything from economics to the environment, and the last quarter thinking about how to change things.
My take is but one take – and a partial one at that. We need more people to think about our assumptions when we identify development challenges, design programs, and implement projects. We need to replace assumptions with evidence. And we need to be a lot more humble about our assumptions AND our evidence – so we stay open to new ideas and evidence as they inevitably flow in.
Is the Aid/Development divide the Grand Challenge for Development?
A few conversations on the blogs over the past two weeks have me thinking about the divide between aid/relief work and development – one of those minor issues I am supposed to be addressing in my current job. I am nothing if not ambitious. However, as folks have tried to clarify the difference between aid and development, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable because I really think these two areas need more blending, not more distinction.
And so now I am wondering if, in fact, the gap between aid and development is part of the reason so many “development” projects don’t work out. I put development in quotes there for a reason – most of these projects never actually get to the development phase. Take my ongoing rants about the Millennium Village Project. Here is an ambitious program of interventions that is meant to be a development project. However, at this point it is really an aid project – at least by the definitions I am seeing circulate. The MVP is still completely dependent on external interventions and expertise for its outcomes. Where it seems to me the MVP falls down is in the transition from the aid phase to the development phase, when these changes in people’s lives become self-sustaining, and engender new changes that do not require any sort of external intervention. In short, the MVP seems to assume that with enough aid over enough time, change becomes self-sustaining and the processes necessary to bring about well-being spontaneously emerge. This is what I like to call the “then a miracle happens” moment. As in:
Dump money, aid and material into a place over a series of years –> then a miracle happens –> change is self-sustaining
The MVP is hardly the only project guilty of this – hell, this thinking is endemic to development. We can back up to Rostow’s Stages of Growth in the 1950s (at least) and find the exact same fallacy. Big push/modernization theories, the Washington Consensus, basically every program founded on the core idea that economic growth drives everything else, they all suffer from this fallacy. This, ladies and gentlemen, is your grand challenge for development – the “big question” that could really change how we do what we do. We need to articulate how our initial interventions, our “aid”, is/can be transformed/built upon/leveraged/instrumentalized/whatever to result in the self-sustaining changes we see as development.
Challenging development dogma
On his blog Shanta Devarajan, the World Bank Chief Economist for Africa, has a post discussing the debate about the performance and results of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP). The debate, which takes shape principally in papers by Matt Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes of Center for Global Development and Paul Pronyk, John McArthur, Prabhjot Singh, and Jeffrey Sachs of the Millennium Villages Project, questions how the MVP is capturing the impacts of its interventions in the Millennium Villages. As Devarajan notes, the paper by Clemens and Demombynes rightly notes that the MVP’s claims about its performance are not really that clearly framed in evidence, which makes it hard to tell how much of the changes in the villages can be attributed to their work, and how much is change driven by other factors. Clemens and Demombynes are NOT arguing that the MVP has had no impact, but that there are ways to rigorously evaluate that impact – and when impact is rigorously evaluated, it turns out that the impact of MVP interventions is not quite as large as the project would like to claim.
This is not all that shocking, really – it happens all the time, and it is NOT evidence of malfeasance on the part of the MVP. It just has to do with a simple debate about how to rigorously capture results of development projects. But this simple debate will, I think, have long-term ramifications for the MVP. As Devarajan points out:
In short, Clemens and Demombynes have undertaken the first evaluation of the MVP. They have shown that the MVP has delivered sizeable improvements on some important development indicators in many of the villages, albeit with effects that are smaller than those described in the Harvests of Development paper. Of course, neither study answers the question of whether these gains are sustainable, or whether they could have been obtained at lower cost. These should be the subject of the next evaluation.
I do not, however, think that this debate is quite as minor as Devarajan makes it sound – and he is clearly trying to downplay the conflict here. Put simply, the last last two sentences in the quote above are, I think, what has the MVP concerned – because the real question about MVP impacts is not in the here and now, but in the future. While I have been highly critical of the MVP in the past, I am not at all surprised to hear that their interventions have had some measurable impact on life in these villages. The project arrived in these villages with piles of money, equipment and technical expertise, and went to work. Hell, they could have simply dumped the money (the MVP is estimated to cost about $150 per person per year) into the villages and you would have seen significant movement in many target areas of the MVP. I don’t think that anyone doubts that the project has had a measurable impact on life in all of the Millennium Villages.
Instead, the whole point here is to figure out if what has been done is sustainable – that is the measure of performance here. Anyone can move the needle in a community temporarily – hell, the history of aid (and development) is littered with such projects. The hard part is moving the needle in a permanent way, or doing so in a manner that creates the processes by which lasting change can occur. As I have argued elsewhere (and much earlier that in this debate), and as appears to be playing out on the ground now, the MVP was never conceptually framed in a way that would bring about such lasting changes. Clemens and Demombynes’ work is important because it provides an external critique of the MVP’s claims about its own performance – and it is terrifying to at least some in the MVP, as external evaluations are going to empirically demonstrate that the MVP is not, and never was, a sustainable model for rural development.
While I would not suggest that Clemens and Demombynes’ approach to evaluation is perfect (indeed, they make no such claim), I think it is important because it is trying to move past assumptions to evidence. This is a central call of my book – the MVP is exhibit A of a project founded on deeply problematic assumptions about how development and globalization work, and framed and implemented in a manner where data collection and evaluation cannot really question those assumptions . . . thus missing what is actually happening (or not happening) on the ground. This might also explain the somewhat non-responsive response to Clemens and Demombynes in the Pronyk et al article – the MVP team is having difficulty dealing with suggestions that their assumptions about how things work are not supported by evidence from their own project, and instead of addressing those assumptions, are trying to undermine the critique at all costs. This is not a productive way forward, this is dogma. Development is many things, but if it is to be successful by any definition, it cannot be dogmatic.
On Aid and Development
An interesting post at Blood and Milk yesterday led a commenter to note that we shouldn’t use the terms “international development” and “aid” interchangeably – that the “real big story about development is exactly that it is NOT all about aid, but about domestic elites establishing pro-growth rules.”
For me, this raises two issues – the first is about the relationship between aid and development, and the second about the character of development itself. Alanna Shaikh, who writes the Blood and Milk blog, added a new post today that addressed the first. In this post, Shaikh argues “You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.” Well, sort of. I currently work in one of the world’s largest development/aid organizations. I am the climate change coordinator for the Bureau most directly responsible for our aid activities (as opposed to our development activities). This puts me in something of an odd position – I am a development/environment person tasked with thinking and program-building for the long-term in an aid organization that is often reactive in its programming and its mandate. Why, then, did I take this position? Because of the need to better connect aid to development (and vice versa). Right now, aid and development exist in very different worlds – even in the same building, there is little communication or coordination between these two missions. This galls people on both sides of the divide, from leadership down the line. The vision of an agency like mine is that aid should transition to development, ideally seamlessly (though at this point we would take any sort of transition). Adaptation to climate change is one area where such transitions can be created out of existing programs – our aid teams work on hydrometeorological disaster risk reduction (DRR), and our development side works on adaptation to climate change. These are very similar areas of work, differentiated largely by timeframe. One of my jobs over the next few years will be to better connect our hydromet DRR and adaptation programming to build one connection between aid and development – a thread that we might use to close other aid/development gulfs (such as in food aid and agricultural development).
Aid may not be the same thing as development, but it should not be seen completely separately from development – my Bureau sees its constituency as that component of the population that is largely left behind by economic growth programming. Nobody debates that a significant percentage of the population slips through the cracks of economic development programming – our job is to ensure that those who slip through the cracks do not remain there, but have an opportunity to recover and participate in society, politics and the economy. So, when I hear someone argue that there can be development without aid, I strongly disagree – at least at the national scale (communities are a different issue). At the national scale, you cannot have socially or environmentally sustainable development that abandons a significant portion of society to its fate. Aid is critical to development – or it should be, if only we could better coordinate aid and development efforts.
Second, I am deeply concerned by the continued connection of development to economic growth. The linkages between human well-being and economic growth are shaky at best (most correlations can be readily challenged and dismantled) – largely because development, globalization and growth do not really work the way people seem to think they do (my book is an exploration of this point). Further, economic growth cannot be eternal. 3% growth per year for everyone forever is simply beyond the physical capacity of the planet. I’m pretty sure that development is going to have to detach itself from economic growth (ironically, this would mostly entail simply acknowledging the reality of what’s been happening around the world for the last 60 years) if it is ever to accomplish its end goal – the improvement of the human condition in this world.
Finally, a thought on the two metastories of development that Shaikh raises at the end of her post. I agree that development is neither all success or all failure – it plays out differently in different places, and we have better understandings of why in some areas (health, for example) than in others (transportation development, for example). I would argue that this is a symptom of a larger problem – we really don’t understand what is happening in the Global South most of the time, and as a result we are often measuring and analyzing the wrong things when we do project scoping or evaluation work. Our assumptions about how the world works shape the way we frame our questions about the world, and the data we gather to answer those questions. The problem, simply put, is that we are often asking the wrong question. Sure, every once in a while our assumptions align with events on the ground, and a project works. But the rest of the time, our assumptions do not align with reality, and we run into difficulty understanding what is happening in particular places, and why particular projects fail. The end result? A seeming random set of project outcomes, where things work in one place but not another for reasons that seem hard to discern. There are more fundamental metanarratives of development out there than success or failure – they are narratives about how globalization works and how development works that shape our very ability to assess success or failure. And those narratives actually misinform many of our best efforts.