In preparation for our last lecture in my module “Poverty and Development”, we were asked to submit questions which would then be taken by a panel consisting of David Hulme and Caroline Moser (both staff at the Institute for Development and Policy Management). One of the questions dealt with Easterly’s book, reviewed by Kurt in last week’s post. The question asked: “Is it time to consider a more bottom-up, piecemeal approach to combat global poverty, as proposed by Bill Easterly?” Good question.
David Hulme responded by saying Easterly’s ideas are great, apart from the fact that Easterly does not flesh out his idea of “searchers” with theory. How would a strategy favoring searchers actually work? Would governments still have a role? Our lecturer for the course, moderating the panel, gave his view that Easterly is actually a free-market libertarian and doesn’t expand on his theory of searchers because it has long been discredited.
An important point that Easterly makes, however, is that rich countries need to be held accountable for the promises they make to the rest of the world. Searchers are accountable to the market, at least. For example, in the panel discussion today, it was pointed out that of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the only one that puts an onus on the rich countries to do something is the one that is not subject to Results-Based Management (RBM). In other words, while the poor countries are held to account for meeting MDGs one through seven, the rich countries will not be held to account for whether or not they reach their goal.
So, does Easterly’s idea, that searchers should replace planners in international development, hold any promise? Like Kurt, I think it does. But I agree with David Hulme that the question, How?, is not answered by Easterly. I also agree with David Hulme in his assessment of Easterly as overly pessimistic in asserting that Development has done no good. In fact, many things have improved for the majority of the world’s population in terms of incomes, average life expectancy and infant mortality. That should not be discounted, even if the Development model is fraught with difficulties.
How, then, do we move forward, as a rich world, trying to do something about the huge disparity in incomes, living conditions and opportunities (freedoms) between our countries and most of the other countries in the world? This is essentially the question that at least two of my modules ask at their conclusion. And this is the question that we are left with at the end of Easterly’s book.
I come back to the idea that I put forward in my last post, that top-down and bottom-up have to work together. There is a role for planning at the state level (though maybe not at the global level), and there is a role for the entrepreneur and for the grass-roots civil society. How these work together is not straight forward and it’s unlikely that what works in one country or region can be duplicated in another. One thing is certain, however, strong, free civil society, effective institutions and transparent, competent government cannot be manufactured or planned. They must grow organically (as has been the case in all of the richest countries) through a long-term, risk-laden process. The questions we (the rich) should be asking ourselves are:
1. Is anything we’re doing right now likely to help such a process? and
2. If not, why are we doing it?
Jordan (Manchester)
Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Monday, 22 November 2010
Review of "The White Man's Burden"
So now a bit of history on the title of this blog - a topic which Jordan is far better suited to cover but we reserving his talent for a review of other development writings.
The title of this blog, “Two White Men with Burdens”, is a tip to William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden; Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much Ill and so little good”. Similarly, Easterly’s book is a tongue in cheek reference to the poem by Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (or the Wiki-link) However, Easterly's book is even more of a direct response to Jeffrey Sach's "The End of Poverty". (In fact, the two are listed as "Opposed" in their Wikipedia entries.)
I first read WMB somewhere in the middle of term term in Tanzania and it immediately struck a chord with me. As I read it, I was in the middle of my own development projects (I cringe to use that term) but more importantly I was familiar enough with my community to begin to recognize the ghosts and failures of so many projects that had gone before me.
Easterly provides a fairly easy read starting with an overview of the differences between the economic systems of western capitalism and the systems of traditional development work. His main argument is that while capitalism is driven by Searchers (entrepreneurs looking for a demand market that is not being met) , the development world is largely made up of Planners (people who assume they know the answer from their own experience disconnected from ground work developing strategies solely on paper). Throughout the book he provides case studies of development projects that have failed because they have far too much outside planning. What I found even more interesting was his contrasting of aid between various countries. With admittedly broad strokes he reviews many of the countries which received IMF money (ie BIG money) IMF over the last 50 years and where they are now. (Hint: It's not a pretty picture.) He contrasts this with places and countries that did NOT receive IMF aid and it makes for an interesting observation.
At the end of the book he does provide his own, albeit in my opinion, weak suggestion for how to reform the aid industry. He talks about "aid dollars" with which the recipients of aid project could vote, or buy, the aid projects that they were interested in from the aid agencies that they trusted. It is an interesting thought and does begin to address his criticism that there is no proper feed-back mechanism within the aid industry in which agency's are answerable to their donors and not the people they are trying to serve.
(Also read the NYTime's review of "White Man's Burden)
In some of our correspondence Jordan enlightened me to the fact that the one thing Easterly does NOT do very well is acknowledge the growing body of research that demonstrates his points very clearly. In other words, he leaves the reader to assume that he was the first to hold and promote this perspective on development. But I think Jordan may expound on this a bit more next week.
And I would be amiss not to acknowledge Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with very impressive credentials. She wrote "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa". This book is fairly high up on my to-read list and hopefully I can read it before the end of this year.
(Interesting disclosure. I had always had a bit of reservations for Bono's (lead singer from U2 - no links, you look him up) views on aid for Africa. I really appreciate Bono for a number of other reasons but in doing this research I've realised that he is on of the Sach's camp and definitely not in the Easterly / Moyo camp which is unfortunate in my opion.)
Well, there you have it, not the most interesting post but for those of you with the same sentiments (and especially anyone of differing sentiments!) please give it a read.
Kurtis (wrapping up my first semester in Waterloo)
The title of this blog, “Two White Men with Burdens”, is a tip to William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden; Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much Ill and so little good”. Similarly, Easterly’s book is a tongue in cheek reference to the poem by Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden" (or the Wiki-link) However, Easterly's book is even more of a direct response to Jeffrey Sach's "The End of Poverty". (In fact, the two are listed as "Opposed" in their Wikipedia entries.)
I first read WMB somewhere in the middle of term term in Tanzania and it immediately struck a chord with me. As I read it, I was in the middle of my own development projects (I cringe to use that term) but more importantly I was familiar enough with my community to begin to recognize the ghosts and failures of so many projects that had gone before me.
Easterly provides a fairly easy read starting with an overview of the differences between the economic systems of western capitalism and the systems of traditional development work. His main argument is that while capitalism is driven by Searchers (entrepreneurs looking for a demand market that is not being met) , the development world is largely made up of Planners (people who assume they know the answer from their own experience disconnected from ground work developing strategies solely on paper). Throughout the book he provides case studies of development projects that have failed because they have far too much outside planning. What I found even more interesting was his contrasting of aid between various countries. With admittedly broad strokes he reviews many of the countries which received IMF money (ie BIG money) IMF over the last 50 years and where they are now. (Hint: It's not a pretty picture.) He contrasts this with places and countries that did NOT receive IMF aid and it makes for an interesting observation.
At the end of the book he does provide his own, albeit in my opinion, weak suggestion for how to reform the aid industry. He talks about "aid dollars" with which the recipients of aid project could vote, or buy, the aid projects that they were interested in from the aid agencies that they trusted. It is an interesting thought and does begin to address his criticism that there is no proper feed-back mechanism within the aid industry in which agency's are answerable to their donors and not the people they are trying to serve.
(Also read the NYTime's review of "White Man's Burden)
In some of our correspondence Jordan enlightened me to the fact that the one thing Easterly does NOT do very well is acknowledge the growing body of research that demonstrates his points very clearly. In other words, he leaves the reader to assume that he was the first to hold and promote this perspective on development. But I think Jordan may expound on this a bit more next week.
And I would be amiss not to acknowledge Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist with very impressive credentials. She wrote "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa". This book is fairly high up on my to-read list and hopefully I can read it before the end of this year.
(Interesting disclosure. I had always had a bit of reservations for Bono's (lead singer from U2 - no links, you look him up) views on aid for Africa. I really appreciate Bono for a number of other reasons but in doing this research I've realised that he is on of the Sach's camp and definitely not in the Easterly / Moyo camp which is unfortunate in my opion.)
Well, there you have it, not the most interesting post but for those of you with the same sentiments (and especially anyone of differing sentiments!) please give it a read.
Kurtis (wrapping up my first semester in Waterloo)
Monday, 15 November 2010
Freedom to Aspire
Development is dead. I’m trying to be a good academic and cite everything I quote, but I can’t remember who said that, or, in fact, if anyone put it quite that way. But around the late 80s and early 90s at a time in Development history called, optimistically, the Impasse, that was the consensus of many. Someone else has commented that development studies nearly didn’t make it into the 21st Century. There’s even a development school known as post-Development. They basically say that Development should be stopped altogether. But the next question is: then what?
And why do I spell Development with a capital D? By Development, I mean the large-scale international effort by rich countries to help poor countries get to where the rich countries are in terms of GDP, industrialization, material standard of living, etc. Development has been a massive project, starting, effectively, after WWII with the Marshall Plan. The US injected (development studies loves the word injected, usually coupled with the word ‘cash’ as I will do after this next parenthesis) cash into the European and Japanese economies. The amount of cash was staggering. The US did it for two reasons, because they felt bad for nearly obliterating Japan and bombing the hell out of (or maybe into) Germany and (I think more importantly) because they knew that if Europe did not recover economically, neither would the US.
With the Marshall Plan, money seemed to be the answer. With so much cash injected at once (a tactic known as the ‘Big Push’, a term coined, I believe, by Walt William Rostow) the economy would slowly recover, until it reached a ‘take-off’ point at which time much less outside money would needed and the economy would grow under its own steam. This appeared to work in Europe and Japan in the 40s and 50s. And it failed miserably in Iraq (of late). My analysis: if a doctor loses his clinic in a fire and you build him another one, his practice will be up and running in no time. If you go to a poor person in rural Ghana who survives on subsistence agriculture and build him the same clinic, a medical practice will not magically appear.
That’s Development, trying to find scientific formulas to generate economic growth, measured by GDP increase. What about development? 'Small d' development has been defined as freedom (Amartya Sen1999) as the achievement of human rights or human justice. Paulo Freire talks about education (in many ways the core process for development) as a process of awakening an understanding of our own capacity to change our circumstances. These ideas fit with Kurt’s ideas about life, liberty and the freedom to share these things. I agree. And I want to take the idea of freedom one level deeper. Development as freedom is about nurturing the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004). To turn that into a question: can we (professionals) be involved in facilitating a long-term process of building the capacity of poor people to realize their aspirations?
Our role as professionals is not to suggest an answer or a project, or even to suggest aspirations, but to avail ourselves to the poor as a tool to help them overcome the relationships and structures of power that keep them poor. If we can do this and see development as a long term, risk-laden, learning-by-doing process and not as a project, we might just be of some use. That’s from the bottom up. I believe things have to happen from the top down as well. Governments need to reform, income needs to be spread out, good institutions need to be built to protect property rights and stand for justice. But those reforms alone will not help the poor help themselves.
Jordan (Manchester)
References:
Appadurai, A. (2004) The Capacity to Aspire: Culture in Terms of Recognition, World Bank, Stanford University Press (I apologize that full citation details are not available).
Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
And why do I spell Development with a capital D? By Development, I mean the large-scale international effort by rich countries to help poor countries get to where the rich countries are in terms of GDP, industrialization, material standard of living, etc. Development has been a massive project, starting, effectively, after WWII with the Marshall Plan. The US injected (development studies loves the word injected, usually coupled with the word ‘cash’ as I will do after this next parenthesis) cash into the European and Japanese economies. The amount of cash was staggering. The US did it for two reasons, because they felt bad for nearly obliterating Japan and bombing the hell out of (or maybe into) Germany and (I think more importantly) because they knew that if Europe did not recover economically, neither would the US.
With the Marshall Plan, money seemed to be the answer. With so much cash injected at once (a tactic known as the ‘Big Push’, a term coined, I believe, by Walt William Rostow) the economy would slowly recover, until it reached a ‘take-off’ point at which time much less outside money would needed and the economy would grow under its own steam. This appeared to work in Europe and Japan in the 40s and 50s. And it failed miserably in Iraq (of late). My analysis: if a doctor loses his clinic in a fire and you build him another one, his practice will be up and running in no time. If you go to a poor person in rural Ghana who survives on subsistence agriculture and build him the same clinic, a medical practice will not magically appear.
That’s Development, trying to find scientific formulas to generate economic growth, measured by GDP increase. What about development? 'Small d' development has been defined as freedom (Amartya Sen1999) as the achievement of human rights or human justice. Paulo Freire talks about education (in many ways the core process for development) as a process of awakening an understanding of our own capacity to change our circumstances. These ideas fit with Kurt’s ideas about life, liberty and the freedom to share these things. I agree. And I want to take the idea of freedom one level deeper. Development as freedom is about nurturing the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004). To turn that into a question: can we (professionals) be involved in facilitating a long-term process of building the capacity of poor people to realize their aspirations?
Our role as professionals is not to suggest an answer or a project, or even to suggest aspirations, but to avail ourselves to the poor as a tool to help them overcome the relationships and structures of power that keep them poor. If we can do this and see development as a long term, risk-laden, learning-by-doing process and not as a project, we might just be of some use. That’s from the bottom up. I believe things have to happen from the top down as well. Governments need to reform, income needs to be spread out, good institutions need to be built to protect property rights and stand for justice. But those reforms alone will not help the poor help themselves.
Jordan (Manchester)
References:
Appadurai, A. (2004) The Capacity to Aspire: Culture in Terms of Recognition, World Bank, Stanford University Press (I apologize that full citation details are not available).
Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Monday, 8 November 2010
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
Many of people who mention the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" come from very different perspectives than I have and I think that is important for this post. I almost named this entry "Paradigm Shifting".
So, the topics at hand are my answers to the three opening questions we of this blog; What is development? Why should I be involved in development? What is our hope for development – what to we think can be accomplished, what is our ideal outcome of development?
Before I get into things, I am a zero-sum type person, I have a strong conviction that in almost everything in life there are no gains without losses. As it applies to development, I feel that it is unreasonable to frame development in terms of bringing everyone up to a Western style of living, that is certainly unsustainable - see global footprint. And just to throw in one more wiki-link, in a very similar vein, I am often reminded of the tragedy of the commons. To me, these ideas are different perspectives of the same thread and I see them pop up often in life, not just with respect to ecology but, also economics, personal life and even my faith.
(The global footprint link obviously addresses sustainability but I was surprised how quickly the TotC link gets into ecology - I thought it was a broader theory than that. And VERY interestingly that the zero sum article was categorised under the international relations theory which really ties in well.)
So, what is development? Last night Carla and I watched a special by David Suzuki about Europe's attempts at sustainability and they mentioned quality of life. In my opinion, development is helping all people achieve a good quality of life. Yes, I just shifted the question to, "What is a good quality of life?" but I think it does help to re-frame the question like that. For example, 30 min commute times is not a decent quality of life for many reasons and therefore it is not development. Getting people involved in the rat-race (ie the global economy) does not ensure a decent quality of life. For the record I do not have any rose-coloured glasses on the traditional ways of life in Africa or South America, I am aware (or at least I KNOW that I am NOT aware) of the poor quality of life that those lifestyles offer.
I am fairly certain that there is a quality of life standard by which most people can look to their own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Many people in Africa do not have that and, unfortunately, many people in North America do not have a good quality of life either. So I'll stop there - development is achieving a better quality of life for all people.
Number two, why should I want to be involved in development? I think this segues rather nicely. I am interested in development not only because I want to help people achieve a better quality of life but I want that for myself and my family. In general, I am interested in defining what is a sustainable, good quality of life. Not only from the technical perspective (ie a house built this way and this much travel by this means per year) but also from the paradigm perspective. For myself I want to promote the mindset where people are OK with biking 20 minutes to get to work or understand that some food may not be readily available because seasonality or their geography.
As you can see, I am trying to promote the idea that there is just as much development work needed in North America or Europe as in the third world. So as for why I am interested in doing development work overseas, I think it again gets back to quality of life. Both Carla and I feel that the quality of life for us and our kids is better in many ways than here in North America. Don't get me wrong, we are very happy to be "home" now but often talk about the broader implications.
Finally, what is my hope for development – what do I think can be accomplished, what is my ideal outcome of development? To reiterate the above, my hope for development is to help people find a decent quality of life that they can share with their neighbours. And this as much about mindset as anything else.
I am reminded of one of my favourite Dilbert strips which I know most people won't find too funny but I laugh out loud every time I read it, even now - check out paradigm shift.
Personally, I found this entry flowed rather well but I am all to aware of how my ideas look when others reflect them back to me so let the criticisms fly. As well I know these thoughts are hardly novel, so please share any links for recommended reading (blogs, books, etc) of people who have expressed these thoughts better and more completely than I just did.
Kurtis (in Waterloo)
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