Tag: Millennium Village Project

Disciplinary history and theory are useful II: Understanding the MVP’s enduring popularity

In my guest post on Aid Watch yesterday, I argued that a basic familiarity with the history and philosophy of development, and some training in critical approaches to development, might have averted at least one of the problems currently associated with the Millennium Village Project (a conflict of interest for project workers when the stated goals and interventions of the project and the needs of MVP communities do not align) before it happened.
A failure of background knowledge also lies at the heart of the MVP’s enduring popularity, even in the face of mounting empirical evidence that it is not working.  It is one thing to ignore the predictions of a lone academic (or a few academics).  It is another to overlook evidence of problems trickling in from around the world. If the MVP is so flawed, why do so many continue to support it?
I argue that the MVP drew its popularity from two sources: its theoretical eclecticism, and from the ways in which it resonated with conventional understandings of development and development practice in the major agencies.  If one goes through the literature on the MVP, one will find echoes of many different bodies of development theory (I say “echoes” purposefully: the MVP has never overtly referenced any bodies of development theory in its publications, forcing critics to read between the lines).  For example, various authors (e.g. here and here) have found in the MVP the influence of “big push” theories with their foundations in the 1950s, while others hear the reverberations of Reagan-era privatization and deregulation.
While drawing upon many bodies of theory to build something new is not a problem in and of itself, doing so productively requires an understanding of each theory from which one is drawing.  The framing of the MVP shows no sign of such familiarity.  Instead, it appears to pluck “useful” bits and pieces of these theories that support the project’s larger political agenda and justifications for its technical interventions.  It adopts the language of “big push” theories when it argues for a concentrated injection of capital across sectors of a village economy to get them all moving simultaneously.  At the same time, it turns to the governance focus with echoes in modernization theory.  As I argued in my article on the MVP:

This focus, insofar as it does not consider the ways in which existing processes do function and places a priori weight on Western modes of administration and governance, echoes earlier, often ethnocentric, tenets of modernization theory, such as the need to convince societies to embrace new, Western forms of administration on their path to ‘development’. (338)

The problem is that these “useful bits” were parts of larger theories that, on the whole, often contradicted one another.

For example, as Cabral et al. (2006) have observed, ‘big push’ theories of development that see a coordinated injection of capital across all sectors of an economy as a productive means of driving economic ‘take off ’ and development (for example, Rostow 1959) run contrary to the claims of modernization theorists like Lewis (1954), who saw unbalanced growth in different sectors of the economy as a key to stimulating the overall economy. (338)

The result was a project that on one hand had something for every development perspective.  However, this came at the cost of internal coherence, and the ability to reflect upon or address the well-known historical problems encountered by those who employed the larger theories from which these bits were taken. A reasonable familiarity with the history and philosophy of development would have made these issues apparent long before there was a need to gather empirical evidence on the performance of the MVP.
But this sort of eclecticism only goes so far in explaining the popularity of a project – after all, most people do not worry much about the underlying assumptions of a given project or program.  What policymakers certainly do notice are the ways in which the MVP nicely aligns itself with conventional understandings of development policy and practice.  For example, there are broad similarities in approach and assumptions between the MVP and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) which suggest that the MVP is not only nothing new, it is nothing revolutionary (or, in fact, even that different from what is already being done by the mainstream development community):

Like the MVP, PRSPs tend to deal with development issues sectorally, without addressing either the tradeoffs or the synergies between different sectors – this is particularly true in the context of sustainable development planning. PRSPs also tend to conceive of solutions to sectoral problems without reference to local conditions. For example, lagging agricultural production is often addressed through the introduction of more inputs, which on its surface might seem like the ‘common sense’ application of ‘tested and true methods’. Such a set of solutions and rhetoric is nearly identical to that seen in the MVP. Finally, PRSPs, like the MVP, do not consider the social context and processes through which problems are identified and solutions shaped at the national or local level. Yet, national politics may influence the identification of a particular harvest as ‘insufficient’ or ‘sufficient’, a label that shapeshow people view that harvest and the needs of those who are dependent on it for their livelihoods. In short, the MVP and the PSRPs are mutually reinforcing – there is no challenge to the development status quo in the MVP, except perhaps in the form of a call for more money to fund the ‘big push’ (Cabral et al. 2006) needed to ‘kick-start’ development in these villages. (338-339)

Again, a familiarity with the conceptual literature in development studies would have allowed those who touted this project as something new to recognize its fundamentally conservative approach to development.
All of this goes to deepen an underlying point in the Aid Watch post: more practitioner training in the history and philosophy of development, and a wider exposure to critical approaches to development, are critical first steps toward the creation of (or simply the recognition of) truly revolutionary, coherent and ultimately successful projects.

Posted on by Ed 1

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.

Posted on by Ed 11

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.

Posted on by Ed 1

“Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,”

Well, there’s nothing like continued empirical evidence for the arguments I have been making about Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project (MVP), and thanks to a Tweet from Michael Clemens, I’ve now got more.  Clemens is one of the authors of a report that is very critical of the MVP, and that report was good enough to find and cite my work on this topic – but how he dug up this story from a Liberian newspaper, I will never know:

“The project is a new approach to fighting poverty in post-conflict Liberia, but residents in the District have complained that they had seen no evidence of the project getting off the ground. In a brief statement to the President, Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah indicated that the project, which seeks to improve the socio-economic and infrastructural development of the District lacked the residents’ involvement and that there was not tangible impact being felt by the villagers. He added that the people of that District were discontent about the way the project is being implemented in their village.”

But the brutal sentence is the one by Deputy Speaker Tokpah J. Mulbah that titles this post: “‘Madam President, millions of dollars have been spent on the Millennium Village Project but we have seen nothing concrete done for our people,’ he said.”
Clemens’ report is here.  My article is here.

Posted on by Ed 0

Too right . . .

Kentaro Toyama has a great piece in the Boston Review on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in development – really, though, it is a larger commentary on how we think about using technology in development generally.  Simply put, Toyama warns against treating ICT as itself a solution for poverty – instead, he argues, it is but one tool, a means to an end:

If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Alex Dehgan the other day – talking about how efforts to address particular development challenges, whether via technology or other approaches, should be focused on a systematic approach to the problem that will yield different, but locally-appropriate, outcomes in different places, instead of the search for a singular solution that could be applied anywhere and everywhere (history is littered with the wreckage of these efforts – most recently, see the Millennium Village Project).  This is what I have been after in my work on livelihoods and adaptation for the past 7 years or so – a way of approaching these issues in a rigorous manner that allows for the serious consideration of local context.  How we translate that into programming and policy remains to be seen . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

Jeff Sachs, please shut up (redux)

The Center for Global Development becomes the latest to figure out that the Millennium Villages are not producing meaningful information about their accomplishments . . . because they are not working.  I’m not a huge fan of finding new metrics to test this argument – the simple fact is this: when a project stops releasing its data, you can pretty much be assured the data is not telling the story they want.  But then, this was all completely predictable.
Folks, Jeff Sachs won’t learn anything until you stop paying attention to him and he is forced to consider why nobody is listening anymore.  Do it for him, if not for the global poor.

Posted on by Ed 2

We're not all that powerful, really . . . and Jeff Sachs, please shut up. Please.

I somehow missed this NY Times article on our impending failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  Hey, it was my first week at work.  In any case, a few thoughts on a topic that should be getting more discussion.
As I’ve told my classes time and again, the MDGs are the sort of thing that everyone can embrace.  The NYTimes gets it right:

For all the bitter debates pitting nations against one another, there is conspicuously little disagreement over the United Nations goal of eliminating dire poverty. Virtually none of the countries that signed onto the endeavor in 2000 faults the idea of eradicating hunger, educating children, improving maternal health or combating disease. It would be like opposing mother’s milk.

Ah, but saying you want to eliminate suffering, and actually doing it, are two different things.  And at the end of the day, we have two big problems.  First, we live in a finite world where some of us consume so much that it creates real challenges for the rest to get to comfort, if not affluence.  Put another way, if we want everyone to live at an average American standard, we need to come up with between 2-3 Earths worth of resources (see posts here and here).  So, there is no way to achieve the MDGs without making hard choices . . . which leads to my second point: the rich countries do not feel an impetus to make these hard choices.  At least for now, poverty/hunger/suffering are things that happen to large numbers of people somewhere else (we conveniently forget our own poverty belts, like Appalachia and the inner cities) for the average policymaker – we’ll just build really high walls to keep all “those people” out.  Big kudos to Esther Duflo for pointing this out:

“If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?” asked Esther Duflo, a development expert at M.I.T. “Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, ‘You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade’ — there is no onus.”

But while this open assertion of the problem was necessary, I think Duflo is wrong about the fact nobody is going to punish us . . . well, perhaps not literally wrong.  However, you can only limit the opportunities of the global poor for so long before we start seeing things like ecological collapse in agricultural systems, or the destruction of the rainforests, as the poor are forced into choices they would rather not make.  No wall is high enough to guard against a changing climate or a disrupted global economy.  We’re playing Russian Roulette, only adding shells to the chamber each time we miss easy goals like the MDGs, or fail to act on the changing climate.  No, the aliens may not come to get us . . . there’s no need.  They can just wait until we get ourselves.
Oh, and the Times felt the need to quote Jeff Sachs.  Again.  And he was wrong.  Again.  Jeff Sachs, for God’s sake shut your piehole.  Really.  You are a supremely arrogant man who has wasted his considerable intelligence by not listening to anyone, not reading any economic or development history, and not really learning any of the economic geography you profess to be furthering.  Your brilliant idea for development, the Millennium Village Project, is a failure – I called that one four years ago – and yet you will not shut up.  Will reality ever intrude for you?  For the press?  You are the D-list reality star of development . . . every time we try to look away, you perform the intellectual equivalent of taking off your top and running around, only we’ve seen this show before and nobody cares or wants to see it again.  Put on your shirt and go read something by someone other than yourself, then come talk to us.

Posted on by Ed 4