12 April 2011
Development's Rum Punch
For some people, aid and development endeavors seem as simple as serving up a spoonful of sugar that is brimming with kindness, energy, compassion and good intentions. Simply add sugar to the prescribed medicine and we can save the world!
Unfortunately, we know that it is not so simple. Communicating this is even harder. Telling a women that her favorite clothing distribution organization could be preventing growth and contributing to the poverty cycle is not received well. Speaking with a gentleman about orphanages being filled with children who have been orphaned not due to the death of parents, but voluntarily after an orphanage has been established, will make you seem cold-hearted and uncaring.
The aid skeptic is one which tries to seek the truth and is often accused of being a cynic at best and uncaring/disconnected at worse. When faced with the task of determining how billions of dollars should be used to alleviate poverty around the world and domestically, solutions should be found, tested and shared. What does not work should be openly admitted and quickly discarded.
Aid has not been a failure; Owen Barder speaks well to this point. In fact, everyone's favorite mis-interpreted skeptic Bill Easterly has said that it has not been an utter failure as well. However, after years of doing it we still do not know many solutions.
What is striking to me is the way that people react when faced with skepticism. Chris Blattman experienced this push-back when speaking at the DRI conference at the beginning of March. After presenting his ongoing research into the ties between poverty and violence, Blattman was met with strong criticism of his project. After spending 15 minutes saying that he was unsure about the causality in either direction, he was assailed for supposedly saying that poverty had nothing to do with violence.
The mere suggestion of a contrary viewpoint causes an immediate cognitive dissonance. For some in the audience, hearing Blattman's suggestion that poverty alone might not cause violence set off the defenses. The same was seen in Easterly's talk on the benevolent autocrat earlier that day.
We need healthy skepticism in aid and development just like we need innovators and cheerleaders. Just because someone is skeptical of the newest aid fad does not mean that the person does not care. The skepticism comes from a place of wanting better and more effective interventions.
We all want it to do it better, so why so much hate for the aid skeptics?
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2 comments:
I agree, of course, that healthy skepticism is needed. I just think that beyond good intentions and finding out what 'really' works people/outsiders often seem to underestimate the complexity of the 'industry', comprising professor with different research methodologies and approaches, departments that never got along well and need to raise research money, organisations that are competing for scarce resources or bloggers who are competing for a headline (excluding this blog and its commentators, of course ;!). What has changed significantly over the past 10-15 years is that the complexities of the 'demand side' ('let's help developing countries as best as we can') have been complemented by increasing complexities on the 'supply side'-from growth in development courses to DIY approaches, volunteering/voluntourism, jobs and careers, expat life as a lifestyle and so on. What you call 'hate for aid skeptics' is often an expression of the uncomfortable trade-offs and decisions every individual and organisation has to make-yes, just going 'there' and help would be so much easier...
Excellent points made, Tobias, as always. You are right that a lot of it is a discomfort that I believe exists with all. I want to work on something that also looks at us not bashing Good Intentions too much as they are all a part of why we do it. Not to say that it always gets a bad rap, but it is something which is chastised often (for very good reason), but can be discouraging at times.
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