Helping People Help Themselves

“Development” is a strange word. It’s been prefixed to so many other words – community, economic, rural, regional, social, urban – that we tend to overlook it. It generally has a positive connotation – although only when used within the boundaries of a particular country. Something seems to go seriously wrong when “development” is something encouraged by outsiders.

That, at any rate, is the general view now taken by “development theorists” – the people who write about and advise what used to be called “developing” countries. In the 1970s and 1980s these were predominantly economists but “good governance” specialists became active in the 1990s.

The development field has become a highly contested one – with writers from the political extremes sharing a highly critical approach to the conventional wisdom coming from centrist liberals. The right-wing (Bauer, Easterley) consider that Foreign Aid just builds up “dependence” whilst the left-wing accuse the centrist liberals of aiding and abetting imperialism. These are the essential currents at the heart of the current British debate about the cuts to the UK Foreign Aid budget.

Foreign Aid seems to be a very distinctive topic – almost sui generis. But scratch the other “development” types – social, rural, regional, urban, educational – and we find the same pattern of someone in authority trying to get others to behave in certain ways. Economists tend to be the dominant voices but the occasional sociologist, agronomist, pedagogue even anthropologist pops up.

But truly interdisciplinary works are very difficult to find – until now the most profound writer on the subject for me was Robert Chambers whose field is rural development. But I have just come across an article Helping People help themselves – toward a theory of autonomy, written 20 years ago by an adviser to ex-World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, which seems to me to get to the heart of the development conundrum. And the article led to a book Helping People help themselves – from the World Bank to an alternative philosophy of technical assistance ; David Ellerman (2006) 

If development is seen basically as autonomous self-development, then there is a subtle paradox or conundrum in the whole notion of development assistance: how can an outside party ("helper") assist those who are undertaking autonomous activities (the "doers") without overriding or undercutting their autonomy?

How can a development agency actually help people help themselves as opposed to giving various forms of unhelpful help? The topic is related to the presumption in favour of inclusion, popular participation, involvement, and ownership as well as the suspicion that externally applied "carrots and sticks" do not "buy" sustainable policy changes.

We cast a wide and vigorously multidisciplinary net to construct the intellectual background. Helping theory is approached by looking at the commonalties in quite different examples of relationships where one party, the "helper," is trying to help certain others, here called the "doers," to better help themselves. The target example of the helper-doer relationship is the relationship between a development agency and a client country but the theme is also explored in pedagogy, management theory, psychotherapy, community organization, and community education. The helper-doer relationships and prominent authors or "gurus" are (see Appendix for representative quotes):

* Albert Hirschman on the relationship of a development advisor and a government,

* E.F. Schumacher on the relationship between a development agency and a developing country,

* Saul Alinsky on the relation of a community organizer to the community,

* Paulo Freire on the relationship between an educator and a peasant (or urban poor) community,

* Soren Kierkegaard on the relation between a spiritual counselor and a student,

* John Dewey on the teacher-learner relationship,

* Carl Rogers on the therapist-client relationship, and 

* Douglas McGregor on the (Theory Y) relationship between a manager and workers. 

The argument is not that all these relationships are the same, but that there are commonalties when the party in the "helper" role acts so as to help the parties in the "doer" role to help themselves. The fact that such diverse thinkers in different fields arrive at interestingly similar conclusions increases our confidence in the common principles.

Some principles of a Broader Helping Theory:

·       I Starting from Where the Doers Are

·       2. Seeing Through the Doers' Eyes

·       3: Helper Cannot Impose Change on Doers

·       4: Help as Benevolence is Ineffective

·       5 Doers in the Driver's Seat Helping Theory Applied to Development Assistance