The Tribalism of the intellect

Normal people get hooked on detective novels….eccentrics like me get their fixes from books about things like development.. The habit started 20 years ago when I found myself (as we performance artists put it) “resting” between projects and, as a result, haunting the book-stacks of the (then well-endowed) British Council library in Bucharest. The books I read then are still listed in my annotated bibliography for change agents (section 7) – all 24 of them! And there have been more since.

I’m not a development economist – although my mother (then heading for her 100^th birthday) had difficulty understanding exactly what sort of craft I was plying in exotic places such as Tashkent, Baku and Bishkek. That reflects better on her time and values than ours – which have invented such crazy and questionable occupations……it was Robert Reich, I think, who talked about “symbolic analysts”…….. 

So what draws me to books with titles like The World’s Banker (2005); Ideas for Development (2005); “Aid on the Edge of Chaos” (2013); The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development (2014) and Easterly’s “Tyranny of Experts”??

One reason may be that such books are remarkably like detective novels – there is a mystery (why do countries fail/not grow?); a plot; victims, suspects; goodies and baddies. What, however, they generally lack are character studies and, often, even a feel for place
 I may not be a development economist but, as several posts this past year have emphasised, I have been in the development business all my life. Except that (a) the approach I have been drawn to has been political and institutional rather than economic; and (b) the focus has more often been local than national.

But I feel strongly that there is an underlying commonality to “development endeavours” which virtually all writers on the subject (tragically) miss – since almost everyone is corralled inside the barbed-wire fences which mark off the territories of intellectual disciplines and sub-disciplines (such as rural development, urban development, institutional development, economic development……)

I remember first being aware of this in the late 70s – working then as I was in the field of community development and urban politics - and seeing planners, social workers and educationalists all trying to adopt a more inclusive approach to the newly-discovered problems of the marginalised urban poor but using slightly different terms….."community planning"; "community work"; "community education"

I had a curious position then on the edge of a variety of well-patrolled borders – Secretary of the majority party’s Cabinet on Europe’s largest local authority (SRC) but also a Lecturer at a nearby Polytechnic which was developing a new Degree structure. I had been appointed an economist but was more of a policy planner with an obvious interest in the political and organisational side of public administration – a subject rapidly going out of fashion. After 4 years of freedom heading up a Local Government Centre, I was needed for academic work; forced to choose; opted for the Politics department; despaired of the narrowness of the curriculum I was expected to teach and hankered after the wider, inter-disciplinary focus I had been accustomed to……

Little wonder, therefore, that I was soon pushed out. It’s not easy to reinvent oneself at age 45 but I was lucky in having what was then the modest income of a full-time Regional politician and experience which proved thoroughly marketable as a consultant when the Wall fell down in 1989. I have always been my own man – able to follow my passion – and am now so grateful that I was rescued from a miserable academic existence and able to continue to prowl forbidden borders…..      

Yesterday we visited the superb Campulung-Muscel yet again - Romania's first capital with an amazing location and replete with old houses, some of which we visited.... the photograph is one of the externally-painted murals on an unknown church in what seemed the town's nicest area........