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.
Tag: World Bank
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.”
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.
Shouldn't accounting rules apply to everyone?
Hoorah! The World Bank is officially recognizing that environmental impacts are an example of a colossal market failure, and moving aggressively to get the cost of these impacts built into country’s national accounts. To quote World Bank President Robert Zoellick:
“We know that human well-being depends on ecosystems and biodiversity,” said Mr Zoellick.
“We also know they’re degrading at an alarming rate.
“One of the causes is our failure to properly value ecosystems and all they do for us – and the solution therefore lies in taking full account of our ecosystem services when countries make policies.”
Well, super. We’ll see how this goes over when a bunch of countries see the accounts they use for planning head into the toilet – my guess is massive pushback from countries that can (China, India, pretty much the entire Global North), which means the only countries that will be forced to deal with this revaluation are those in the Global South too small to resist World Bank pressure. Enforcing this change in accounting unevenly will be remarkably unfair, if this is how it plays out. Think I’m a bit alarmist? Continue reading the article, right down at the end:
The draft agreement ministers are considering in the main negotiations here calls for “the values of biodiversity” to be integrated into countries’ development and poverty reduction strategies.
But delegates are still arguing over whether to call for integration into national accounts.
Only developing countries have to create poverty reduction strategies and development strategies. So if these values are used in these strategies, but not in national accounts more widely, we are going to be hitting the poorest countries pretty hard while doing nothing ourselves.
However, there is a larger problem here – the valuing of everything via markets. While this is an interesting effort, neither the science nor the economics are very well worked out, so the value of many ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) is hard to calculate. So, will we end up only dealing with this in ecosystems where the economics and science is further along (forests, for example – and temperate forests, at that)? Or will we risk arbitrary valuations that lead to their own kinds of market failures? The first option runs into the uneven enforcement problem I raised above – not every country has well-understood forests, so only some countries would have to deal with this revaluation. The second is not an improvement on the current situation – indeed, it would give us the false impression we know what we are doing, when we do not.
Watch this space . . .
Are we really that bad?
So, the Center for Global Development, a non-partisan think tank focused on reducing poverty and making globalization work for the poor (a paraphrase of their mission statement, which can be found here), has issued a report that more or less says that USAID’s quality and effectiveness of aid is very low when compared to other agencies.
Well, I’m not all that freaked out by this assessment, principally because it fails to ask important questions relevant to understanding development needs and development outcomes. In fact, the entire report is rigged – not intentionally, mind you, but I suspect out of a basic ignorance of the difference between the agencies being evaluated, and an odd (mis)understanding of what development is.
For me, the most telling point in the report came right away, on pages 3 and 4:
Given these difficulties in relating aid to development impact on the ground, the scholarly literature on aid effectiveness has failed to convince or impress those who might otherwise spend more because aid works (as in Sachs 2005) or less because aid doesn’t work often enough (Easterly 2003).
Why did this set me off? Well, in my book I argue that the “poles” of Sachs and Easterly in the development literature are not poles at all – they operate from the same assumptions about how development and globalization work, and I just spent 90,000 words worth of a book laying out those assumptions and why they are often wrong. In short, this whole report is operating from within the development echo chamber from which this blog takes its name. But then they really set me off:
In donor countries especially, faced with daunting fiscal and debt problems, there is new and healthy emphasis on value for money and on maximizing the impact of their aid spending.
Folks, yesterday I posted about how the desire to get “value for our money” in development was putting all the wrong pressures on agencies . . . not because value is bad, but because it puts huge pressures on the development agencies to avoid risk (and associated costs), which in turn chokes off innovation in their programs and policies. And here we have a report, evaluating the quality of aid (their words) in terms of its cost-effectiveness. One of their four pillar analyses is the ability of agencies to maximize aid efficiency. This is nuts.
Again, its not that there should be no oversight of the funds or their uses, or that there should be no accountability for those uses. But to demand efficiency is to largely rule out high risk efforts which could have huge returns but carry a significant risk of failure. Put another way, if this metric was applied to the Chilean mine rescue, then it would score low for efficiency because they tried three methods at once and two failed. Of course, that overlooks the fact that they GOT THE MINERS OUT ALIVE. Same thing for development – give me an “inefficient” agency that can make transformative leaps forward in our understandings of how development works and how to improve the situation of the global poor over the “efficient” agency that never programs anything of risk, and never makes those big leaps.
Now, let’s look at the indicators – because they tell the same story. One of the indicators under efficiency is “Share of allocation to well-governed countries.” Think about the pressure that places on an agency that has to think about where to set up its programming. What about all of the poor, suffering people in poorly-governed countries? Is USAID not supposed to send massive relief to Haiti after an earthquake because its government is not all we might hope? This indicator either misses the whole point of development as a holistic, collaborative process of social transformation, or it is a thinly-veiled excuse to start triaging countries now.
They should know better – Andrew Natsios is one of their fellows, and he has explained how these sorts of evaluation pressures choke an agency to death. Amusingly, they cite this work in here . . . almost completely at random on page 31, for a point that has no real bearing on that section of the text. I wonder what he thinks of this report . . .
In the end, USAID comes out 126th of 130 agencies evaluated for “maximizing efficiency.” Thank heavens. It probably means that we still have some space to experiment and fail left. Note that of the top 20% of donors, the highest scores went to the World Bank and UN Agencies, arguably the groups that do the least direct programming on the ground – in other words, the “inefficiencies” of their work are captured elsewhere, when the policies and programs they set up for others to run begin to come apart. The same could be said of the Millennium Challenge Corporation here in the US, which also scored high. In other words, they are rewarding the agencies that don’t actually do all that much on the ground for their efficiency, while the agencies that actually have to deal with the uncertainties of real life get dinged for it.
And the Germans ended up ranking high, but hey, nothing goes together like Germans and efficiency. That one’s for you, Daniel Esser.
What a mess of a report . . . and what a mess this will cause in the press, in Congress, etc. For no good reason.