Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The sticky truths of development

It's a great feeling when I read an article and find myself nodding "yes" emphatically with the author.  This week I came across two gems that captured so many important sentiments beautifully, which saves me a lot of hard work!

William G. Moseley had a piece framed as "graduation advice for aspiring humanitarians," but has much broader relevance.  His parting comment is a wonderful mantra:

"Do it because you enjoy it, develop deep knowledge of certain places, linger at the grassroots and be humble about the limits of your knowledge."

Too many people prioritize breadth over depth.  Many CVs these days boast "development professional with experience in over 25 countries," which in my mind translates to "I stayed in a 5-star hotel for a few days, traveled around the capital city by car, and sat in air-conditioned offices drinking tea the whole time."  Measuring your knowledge and experience in passport stamps is a bad idea.  My travel acuity scale, on the other hand, is way better.

The one piece of guidance that I thought Moseley missed was that experiences in a place where you already have deep knowledge--i.e. your home country--are invaluable for grounding your experience.   A few years ago, I sat in on a class of MBA students who had just returned from a few weeks working on health projects in East Africa.  One of them said, "I met someone with HIV for the first time, and I just started to cry." It dawned on me that for her, HIV was a foreign disease.  She didn't know what it looked like in Boston.

I meet many students who are eager to work for big development bureaucracies during their summer internships, where they will get to push papers around and make copies. I try to steer them towards local clinics and not-profit organizations, where they'll get a front row seat on the realities of trying to run a resource-limited operation while meeting the complex needs of the socially excluded and vulnerable. You'd be amazed how similar many of the challenges are regardless of whether you're in a "rich" or "poor" country-- in fact, there's some great examples of how health delivery models from Haiti and Peru have been imported to the United States, or from Iran to Mississippi! If you go abroad, you'll be able to better pinpoint the unique challenges and differences that shape development efforts elsewhere.

One "universal truth" that seems to cut across is the importance of power and politics.  Paul Farmer wrote a whole book (Pathologies of Power) about how these dynamics even shape our understanding of diseases like HIV.  Yet so often the development dialog seems reluctant to acknowledge these issues.  We like to think that it's an "information gap" more than a "lack of power" that drives behavior, because the first is easier to fix with a fun, new ICT4D initiative.  Sticky problems- like the garment factory in Bangladesh where the business owners are also the policy makers, who clearly have little interest in policing themselves- are rarely solved quickly or neatly, or without very strong internal champions.

Michael Bear Kleinman reflects on a decade of development, musing that perhaps our unwillingness to tackle Power and Politics has severely limited the scale of impact. He writes,

Yet we in the international development community often do our best to write the messy world of politics out of the equation. Instead, we take political issues over the allocation of power and, by rhetorical slight of hand, turn them into technical problems. We don't talk about politics; instead, we focus on democratization, or governance, or anti-corruption, or civil society capacity building. And then we present ourselves as the necessary technical experts to address these issues....If we accept that international development issues are fundamentally political, we must accept that we are not the experts. Politics are inherently local, based on context-specific histories and networks. Outsiders will almost always know less about the relevant power dynamics than people who live inside those systems. Therefore, while we can claim credibility as technical experts, however tenuously, we cannot claim credibility as political experts."

Even in my brief time in Bangladesh, I've learned so much about the rich tapestry of family dynasties, rivalries, allegiances, and other history that shape current events. And it's still a drop in the bucket compared to what anyone who grew up here has absorbed and takes as conventional wisdom.  It definitely puts me at a disadvantage when thinking about solving national problems (not that anyone is asking my advice).  But I take some comfort in knowing that I seem fairly familiar with the boundaries of my own knowledge, which Confucius describes as "true wisdom."

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