Critical Thinking
Earlier this week a group of us from USAID, working on strategic planning on land issues in Liberia, met with a group of key implementing partners and consultants to discuss how land tenure can impact economic growth, especially for small farm holders or customary communities. After the main discussions were over, one of my very experienced colleagues said a joke in response to a comment that was made: “What did Zambians use to light their rooms at night before they had candles? . . . . . . . . . . . . Lightbulbs.”
This “joke” triggered a flood of thoughts that I and many of my international development colleagues (not to mention critics of international development) struggle with. I’ve been on a steep learning curve regarding my new career - much of it is technical (how to land issues arise in different contexts), some procedural (what are the requirements for preparing various programs at USAID) and others are conceptual (what is international development, when and how does it work, why, why doesn’t it work . . .).
If you’re looking for a fun story piece blog post, you might want to wait for the next one or two. This is a thinking piece. A critical look at development without any answers; simply an effort to put down some of thoughts I’ve been having lately. I offer no guarantees that there won’t be contradictions or that any of it will make sense.
The international donor community has spent over $3 trillion on the continent of Africa over the past few decades. One can rightly ask - What have we to show for that? Under almost any objective or subjective measure, it’s hard to see how Africa as a continent today is $3 trillion better off than 20-40 years ago. Indeed, I’ll go back to another story Joe (the teller of the joke - and an Africa hand having lived and worked in Ethiopia, Uganda, Congo and now Liberia [and who has a golden retriever they bought while traveling through Kenya]) once told me. He described a time where he was having some beers with a group of African friends (I forget where), bemoaning the state of governance and living conditions of the country they were in. Then a middle-aged person said, “You know, when I was a child growing up, things were so much better here. It was the post-colonial period and things worked. We had electricity, food and decent schools.” Then an elderly person said, “Yeah, that time was ok, but really, times were much better when we were still a colony. Everything worked, we had that and telephones and access to health care and anything you really needed to live well. Life was easy then!” And, in telling the story, Joe said that he was shocked to hear these Africans speak so fondly of colonialism. Then he said he’s heard similar statements in other countries as well.
While I was home on vacation I gave a talk to my International Law professor’s human rights law class. I spoke to them about USAID and different types of international development organizations and about the issues I was working on. Fortunately they wanted to hear more than just about human rights and the hour and a half went by very, very quickly. As we were leaving the lecture I asked Ib (Ibrahim Gassama, my professor) a question that I thought had a short answer. It led to a walk to get coffee and a two-hour discussion about international development. Ib is from Sierra Leone, a neighboring country, a Harvard Law school grad and well known in the international/human rights law academic community. We spoke of the challenges and failures of international development (failures being measured by failing to meet our expectations of what would be accomplished), as well as the failure of many developing countries - which includes pretty much all of Africa - to take advantage of the opportunities that had been given to them over the past few decades. Ib told me that his academic writings have become much more critical of host countries in recent years and that many of his friends have asked him why he is betraying their beliefs (that all “problems” arise from the West). He then said, “Dan, when you were a student, I was still blaming colonial structures for our problems . . .” “Yes Ib, I remember one day you specifically did, especially when discussing the genocide in Rwanda.” “Well, we can’t blame colonialism any more. It’s been 15 years since then. We’ve led our own people. Our leaders have western educations, they know how to do this, how to run governments and make systems work. Many of them have done it in the US, at the UN or in Europe. So they have no excuse. We can’t blame colonialism for our own prejudices and wars. These are things of our own making!”
He then told me that a few years back the UN asked him if he would take over a program to help rebuild Sierra Leone. He asked to be allowed to see what the UN was wanting to do in the country and to visit Freetown (the capital city) to assess the situation before he decided. Well, he went to Freetown without telling any of his contacts there in country that he would be evaluating the position. He arrived and went to work the next day. At the end of the day he left the building and three of his relatives were standing outside. Somehow they had found out he was there and they were asking for support. The next day there were 18 different family members. The next 53. On the next day Ib informed the UN that he would not be able to be effective in doing what they wanted because of the nature of family and clan ties in the country would not permit him to function in a proper manner. He had forgotten the power of those expectations during his years in the US. He left the country that day. As he put it, we have our own problems that make it difficult for modern societies to work, and we have to face up to it and we have to be the ones to make these hard changes.
I give the international community a lot of credit. Especially USAID. There are a lot of very intelligent people trying their best to do transformational work. We try to be aware of the local cultures and contexts. We try to understand a situation before proposing projects (interventions in development speak), and we do assessments to evaluate what worked, what didn’t and why. A lot of money is spent trying to make sure we learn from our mistakes. In some respects, I compare it to being in law school - no one I work lacks in intelligence. Most of my USAID colleagues have higher-level degrees; even the foreign service nationals (the local staff we have working with us) have college degrees (my colleague Finley is a lawyer). We think hard and critically within the mission and throughout the agency about the what, why and how of what we do. Yet the results are all too often less than we anticipate.
Like many fields, international development (and USAID) goes through phases of what approach is “in” with previous approaches deemed as “wrong.” I saw it in private practice - the different approaches of land use planning (“pedestrian streets”; “dynamic urban centers [with cars]”; “mixed use urban cores”] - and I see it here. I can’t tell you the number of times that, in conversations with higher level (and therefore older) Liberian government partners who, early in their careers benefitted from USAID projects, have told me - yeah, USAID used to do that in the 1970’s, then they moved away from it, now they’re wanting to do it again. “Why is that Dan?” All I can say is that we’re just trying to get it right.
There has been a lot of criticism from many directions about the value of international development. I won’t even address the isolationists who don’t think we should be involved in anything overseas - in the modern world that just doesn’t cut it. And I think one doesn’t even need to justify the fact that we get much more bang for our buck when development (and diplomacy) keeps a situation from blowing up instead of having to spend the money it takes for military intervention. But there are many who argue that development aid is not part of the problem, it is the problem.
That reasoning posits that aid creates cycles of dependency and/or modes of behavior that prevent the proper growth of a dynamic functioning economy and democracy. Aid programs (because of the money involved) remove the educated elite from local economies to support aid programs, distort salaries and the cost of living, and motivate entrepreneurs to go after aid funding instead of engaging in an open market. These criticisms are often true - but we’re aware of them and part of the evaluation process is to figure out how to address those issues. Just as important to that argument though, is the alternatives proposed. Generally the argument is focus on free market trade. If you read the literature they’re able to point to “great successes” for countries that have abandoned aid and focused on trade as the path to growth and real development.
The problem with the “trade is the solution” approach is that their arguments are cherry picked. They tell the trade successes, without noting or trying to explain trade’s failures. They note development’s failures, without noting or trying to explain development’s successes. And they never discuss issues of societal equity. So it’s not as easy as saying trade is the solution - though it sounds good and I suspect it sells books. A colleague mentioned yesterday that 6 of the 10 fastest growing economies are in Africa. Are those growing economies (largely through trade) reflective of the creation of dynamic economies, or the result of extractive industries that benefit a few corporations, feed money into poor government systems, and creates more jobs overseas (where the resources are processed) than in the country where the extraction occurs?
Yet another thing came up at a meeting this week with one of the UN “sister” (their term, not mine) agencies. (I’ve had a very busy several weeks of many complex deep-thinking meetings about development - I’m mentally exhausted and can’t believe I’m writing something this complex this morning - I’m supposed to be taking a forced day off of thinking). At one point the UN representative mentioned the potential for real GDP (gross domestic product) growth that seems to be related under certain contexts and that we should promote the development of those contexts. A USAID colleague raised the point that those contexts have certain externalities (in plain english - bad consequences that result from that type of activity or situation). The UN person then said, “Well, yes, of course certain types of people fall by the wayside, but the measurable GDP increases and the society as a whole is better off.” Which begs the question - does it matter whether issues of equity, fairness, and responsible distribution of resources/benefits factors into development programs? Or is it simply a matter of raising gross, macro-economic numbers - who cares if a small elite captures all the profits recognized in that indicator? A strong argument can be made that if the percentage of malnourished children doesn’t change, who cares what the GDP (gross domestic product) or Per Capita Income (how much the “average person” makes per year) numbers say?
So back to the development community. We have, what I believe, is our own language problem. Since I’m job hunting I’m getting a lot of e-mail feeds related to the community discussions and job opportunities, and I’ve been frustrated at the conflation of a couple of terms in discussions on a range of topics. One of the big distinctions within development is between “humanitarian emergency assistance” or aid and development work. The one is basically disaster relief - go in following a major natural disaster or conflict to provide basic human services to keep folks alive. Much like triage/first aid on a battlefield - keep the person alive, we’ll fix things later. Development work looks to create the human and institutional capacities of countries to function on their own. The goal really is to work ourselves out of a job (though many say we do what we do with the intention that it not work, so that we’ll always have a job - I have not seen that with the people I work with). Yet within our community we continuously intermix the terms aid and development assistance. It may not sound like a big deal, but to me words have meaning. They bury certain mindsets in our brain whether we intend them to do so or not. A program that educates young women - at $15.00 per woman - on how to avoid sexually transmitted disease and to understand the life consequences of early pregnancy has potentially life-long benefits and is very different than walking through a community and handing each young woman $15 cash or $15 worth of food. One is development, the other is aid. I sometimes wish folks would not conflate the two - they have very different purposes, ultimate goals, and contexts when they are appropriate.
Like I said at the beginning. I don’t have any answers. At one level, I can take comfort that smart, well-intentioned people are doing their best to understand why things have gone/are going the way they are. That perhaps things can’t happen as quickly as we would like them to, in large part because the situations are always complex with a mix of social, political economic factors at play that is not within any one’s total control (there is even a development theory that the best “government” is a benevolent dictator who can impose positive change on the people and who will eventually allow the transition to democracy once everything is in place and functioning well [the latest example being cited is Rwanda] - yet history has shown time and time again that when that time comes, the dictator decides it’s good to be king). And let’s not forget how destructive wars are. It takes a long time to build a complex society; it’s much easier to destroy than to build and decades of progress can be lost in a matter of years or even months.
So where am I at? Well, I think daily about how we do our job. I think how to help Liberians lift their country up. And I think about how, all around the world, development work is trying to do different things in different places to create environments that improve the human condition. As Ib put it, “Despite all of our failures, what else can we do but try?” What I’m left with is something that my first boss in Iraq, Wilson, said to me during my first day on the job, “Development work is hard.” That it is.