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

 

Power - the elephant in the room

My field of endeavour over the past half century has been “development” – but not of the international sort. I started with “community development”, moved through different types of urban and regional development to a type of organizational development; then left Britain’s shores and found myself dealing more with what is now called “institutional development” and, latterly, “capacity development”……

I have to report that the development world is…..full of funding bodies, Think Tanks and prolific writers – and that you have to crawl through a lot of shit to find any pearls of wisdom.

Robert Chambers (as the link shows) is one of the few guys worth listening to on the subject. For 40 plus years he has worked with rural people in the world’s poorest areas and shamed the “powers that be” to let ordinary people speak and take their own initiatives.  

 What follows is a table from his great book - Ideas for Development (2005) which captures what professionals in the field feel they have learned in those 40-odd years (and, no, I do not think it is too cynical to think that perhaps the one they have learned is a bigger vocabulary!!)

                                                     

Four approaches to development

Approach	1. Benevolent	2. Participatory	3. Rights-based	4. Obligation-based
Core concept	Doing good	Effectiveness	Rights of “have-nots”	Obligations of “haves”
Dominant mode	Technical	Social	political	Ethical
Relationships of donors to recipients	Blueprinted	Consultative	transformative	Reflective
Stakeholders seen as	Beneficiaries	Implementers	Citizens	Guides, teachers
accountability	Upward to aid agency	Upward with some downward	multiple	Personal
Procedures	Bureaucratic conformity	More acceptance of diversity	Negotiated, evolutionary	Learning
Organizational drivers	Pressure to disburse	Balance between disbursement and results	Pressure for results	Expectations of responsible use of discretion

One of Chambers’ early books was titled, memorably, “Putting the Last First”. As you would expect from such a title, his approach is highly critical of external technical experts and of the way even “participatory” efforts are dominated by them.

The unease some of us have been increasingly feeling about administrative reform in transition countries is well explained in that table. The practice of technical assistance in reshaping state structures in transition countries is stuck at the first stage (eg the pressure to disburse in the EC Structural Funds programmes!!) – although the rhetoric of “local ownership” of the past decade or so has moved the thinking to the second column.

Mention of vocabulary prompts me to put a plug in for my Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power. Also well worth looking at is -

Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and Fuzzwords (Oxfam 2010)

Fast Reading - Ten Tricks

I’ve reached the last chapter of Easterly’s The Tyranny of Experts and have great sympathy with a review which starts -

I wanted to love "The Tyranny Of Experts", the new book by William Easterly. I’ve admired his work for years. I love the provocative title, and how could you not fall for the subtitle, “Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor”?

And the fundamental thesis of the book is such an important one: Authoritarian, technocratic, one-size-fits-all development is bad, and the individual rights of the ostensible beneficiaries of development should be paramount. People know what’s best for them, and even proven and effective development interventions will fail to have lasting effects in the context of oppressive governments.

 The best stuff bubbles up from below, when markets and technology are allowed to amplify the ideas of people who are given voices and choices.

The problem is that however pressing and true this message may be, there have been many cogent critiques of witless top-down policy, and there isn’t a lot that’s particularly fresh or contemporary in "The Tyranny Of Experts".

The bibliography I referred to in my last post had listed about 20 books I read 20 years ago most of which had strong critiques of the devastating effect which World Bank mega-dam projects had in displacing millions of people and destroying the environment. 
Why do we need another critique which doesn’t even refer to those earlier studies and books??????

Easterly’s book promises to rediscover a missing intellectual debate between people such as Hayek and Myrdal but, I noticed, missed so many other names which might have been brought in…..
It got me thinking,,,,and the fingers surfing……..
In that sense a good read……..

Some people ask how I’m able not only to get through so many (non-fiction) books but also to remember things about them. 

I will now reveal – exclusively for you – my ten tricks of fast reading and comprehension. 

They are very simply expressed -

General

- Read a lot (from an early age!)

- Read widely (outside your discipline)

- Read quickly (skim)

- If the author doesn’t write in clear and simple language, move on to another book asap. Life’s too short……Bad writing is a good indicator of a confused mind

For each book

- Mark extensively (with a pencil) – with question-marks, ticks, underlines, comments and expletives

- Read the reviews (surf)

- Identify questions from these to ensure you’re reading critically

- Write brief notes to remind you of the main themes and arguments

- Identify the main schools of thought about the subject

- Check the bibliography at the end – to see what obvious names are missing

 Let the review continue - 

The book opens strongly enough, with the story of Ohio farmers thrown off their land at gunpoint as the result of a project financed and promoted by the World Bank. The details are awful: kids trapped in fires set by soldiers, cows felled by machine guns, harvests doused with gasoline.

It’s upsetting, but it’s also implausible, and when Easterly reveals that it’s really an account of an incident that took place in Uganda in 2010, the effect is jolting. I thought to myself: Man, we are in for a ride. 

Next thing I know, we’re in the middle of an imaginary debate between two Nobel economists: Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. In Easterly’s telling, Hayek and Myrdal represent the advocates of bottom-up and top-down development, respectively, and an exploration of their diametrically opposed approaches is a central part of the book.  Hayek’s view, as Easterly paraphrases it, is that “individual rights were both an end in themselves and a means by which free individuals in a free society solved many of their own problems.”

Myrdal, by contrast, comes across as a pointy-headed jerk who believes in the wisdom of centralized authorities. Sometimes it may be necessary to impose, say, better agricultural policies from on high—even if (and here Easterly is quoting Myrdal directly) “it require[s] the killing of many half-starved cows.”

Whether Easterly’s rendition of these guys’ views is accurate, I’ll leave for others to decide. I’m more concerned with what’s happening in international development in 2014. I’d hoped that Easterly would proceed to deliver a full-on critique of the current state of affairs, replete with juicy material about nitwit technocrats and some great gossip about the stupidity of Big Aid organizations. Instead, I found myself mired in discussions of Sun Yat-sen, Adam Smith, and the technology of 15th-century Italy. Eventually, I got so desperate to read about something immediately relevant that I started fishing around in the index to see if I’d missed something. I hadn’t. Here’s an example: The blurb copy on the book jacket singles out the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a bad actor. The book’s concluding chapter refers to that foundation’s “disrespect for poor people.” In between, there’s very little to support that position.

I looked up every single reference to the Gates Foundation: The first mention is on page 123, where Easterly tells us that the foundation had the temerity to praise the (admittedly nasty) Mengistu government in Ethiopia for its efforts to reduce child mortality. That’s it! Pages 153, 156, 158, 165, and 197 simply offer brief variations on that same theme.

We could all gain from a thoughtful critique of Big Philanthropy and Big Aid. But there’s little in the way of specific criticism of current development efforts here: There’s the unfortunate complicity of aid donors in the depredations of the Ethiopian government, there’s a single unconscionable World Bank project in Uganda, and that’s all—two examples in the whole book. Where are these experts who are tyrannizing the poor now?

Now that’s what I call a real review!!! No pussy-footing about – straight for the jugular…unfortunately too many “reviewers” are camp-followers who daren’t tell it as it is since they are hoping for good reviews of the nonsense they are trying to perpetrate on us!!!

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........ 

The Different Faces of Power

I have been reading a provocative book about “development” which came out recently and whose very title gives a flavour of its thesis - The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (the link gives the full text!).

From its many reviews, it has already created quite a furore in the extensive community which has been earning its (considerable) living from advising poorer countries for the past 50-60 years.

I found myself engaged in a bit of a confessional when I tried to put down my initial thoughts about the book’s thesis. This post explains why - the next post will try to summarise the book’s content and the arguments it has produced.

“Development consultancy” is a term used for people funded by international agencies who fly into countries which have been designated as “underdeveloped” and write reports and implement programmes designed to increase their social and economic wellbeing….(that of the hosts that is (!) Sadly the reality has generally proved disappointing and had, by the 80s attracted a considerable backlash led by the likes of PD Bauer.

The collapse of communism in 1989 gave development (and other sorts of) economists the kiss-of-life…..not least in central and Eastern Europe where I found myself occasionally rubbing shoulders with some of them. By then I had morphed from a specialist in “urban and community development” (with both academic and political roles) in the West of Scotland (1970-1990) to a role as a technical consultant in “institutional development” – working on programmes in central Europe (and central Asia) designed to develop the capacity of state bodies to serve the interests of citizens in democratic societies…….if the reader will forgive me for the jargon……I offered some thoughts about this experience in a recent post (more fully developed in one of my E-books Crafting Effective Public Management)

Some 20 years ago I penned a small autobiographical book entitled “Puzzling Development” marking that change of role – a book whose cover carried the famous 1871 painting “The Geographer” by Henri de Braekeleer and whose subtitle was “Odyssey of a Modern Candide” – a theme which has run though quite a few of my scribbles since the 70s. 

The introduction promises to cover issues relating to bureaucratic, urban and policy change; public involvement; privatisation; and technical assistance and covered experience of four countries

In 1977 I had produced my first little book – “The Search for Democracy” whose cover showed community activists poring over a map and, I noticed yesterday for the first time in 25 or so years, a puzzled little boy cut out from the main group and standing alone at the side…….my alter ego and hero no less - Hans Christian Anderson’s creation who dared utter the magic words “but the Emperor has no clothes!!). Its sub-title had been “a guide to and polemic about Scottish local government” and it tried to answer 43 questions which people I worked with would ask me

Was it significant that the cover of my later and most rigorous book - In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) – written as a calling card for the younger generation I was by then working with in ex-communist countries - showed simply a rock on an Atlantic beach with the geological strata starkly revealed by the ocean’s pounding…..???? Had I even then become fatalistic about human endeavour???

But “revenons aux moutons” as the French say…..the author of The Tyranny of Experts is an American guy called William Easterly who published an earlier book in 2006 with the equally provocative title - The White Man’s Burden – why the west’s efforts to aid the rest of the world have done so much ill and so little good.

Easterly, clearly, is a sceptic – but scepticism is a feature I value – have a look at my Sceptic’s Glossary if you don’t believe me. It’s actually called “Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power” 

Sceptics challenge what JK Galbraith wonderfully called “the conventional wisdom” and, providing they actually embody the spirit of sceptical inquiry, are a necessary and critical element in any intellectual journey….I add the qualification simply because quite a few contrarians do have an agenda (generally a libertarian one). 

We have an ambivalent attitude to “experts” – even medical ones – conceding that engineers and surgeons deserve our respect but rightly questioning the “expertise” of many experts in the field of social sciences….particularly those employed by powerful international bureaucracies which certainly have agendas of their own…..

But it is the development economists that Easterly has it in for……who seduce the powerful with talk of the wealth and progress which will come if only they follow their advice….

I found the opening section of the book very worthwhile because –

- it gives a rare insight into the start of the discipline of development economics; some of its key figures and arguments; and its “divorce” from mainstream economics

- it questions the focus on the nation, reminding us that the infrastructure of economics is based (questionably for many of us) on the “rationality” of the individual consumer and (small) company

- it reminds us of how important to the development of capitalism was the challenge to power of the spirit of liberty

As it happens, my University course developed an interest for me in the space between the nation and the individual company – and how its operations might be improved ie regional, urban and, latterly, community development.

And one of the people whose writings made a big impression on me (some ten years later) was Ivan Illich whose challenge to the power of health and educational professionals was a breath of fresh air for me and profoundly influenced  the community power element of Strathclyde Region’s Social Strategy for the Eighties which I helped shape.

Illich was, of course, your quintessential anarchist – distrusting the sort of well-intentioned power held by those of us who managed a social strategy which went on to shape the strategies of the system of the Scottish governments which have held power in the past 15 years……But governments have to select priorities for both their attention and funding. With some hesitation we did designate what we called in the late 1970s “areas of priority treatment” - initially 45 of them whose inhabitants’ lives we tried to assist with the help of community structures led by community activists assisted by development workers….

I doubt whether we got the balance right between community, professional and political power – and subsequent events demonstrated how easily economic power caps everything……But at least we tried

The question for readers of Easterly’s book is how well he deals with those different faces of power……….

The cartoon is by a brilliant Romanian - Bogdan Petry - whose exhibition we saw this week in the Campulung gallery. His savage work is on a par with the great Ralph Steadman......

Organisational Health - time to change the medicine if not the doctor......

I’ve been “doing development” for so long that I’ve just begun to realise how odd if not questionable an activity it is……preying on people’s dissatisfactions and hopes…..and, yet, more and more consultants, academics and development workers get paid good money to churn out reports and books which identify organisational deficiencies….and then develop programmes which order people what they should be doing – rather than helping the organisation’s staff to flourish……

Such change programmes have been scything through the private and public sectors in similar fashion for the past couple of decades – they are all controlled by the same type of person in the Corporate Consultancy or national/international Funding Body…… they make the same sorts of assumptions….use the same sort of models…..and generally fail…  

The private sector has generally been in the van - with the public sector taking another few years to pick up the same fads....We noticed this more than 10 years ago - when there were several books indeed about the phenomenon of the "management guru" and the emptiness of what they preached....
But it ll seemed out of everyone's control.....

I’m at last beginning to pick up a deeper sense that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we have "parsed" management and development in the post-war period….although there are huge political and financial interests in keeping a state of amnesia; a sense of bafflement amongst so called experts about the health of our organisations….
- The Emperor has no clothes post referred to some recent critical assessments in both the field of public management and development to which I should add Toward a new world – some inconvenient truths for anglo-saxons 2014 lecture by Chris Pollitt (which, rather belatedly, recognises that a significant part of Europe - as well as the world) - has never bought the neo-liberal/Benthamite thinking of "New Public Management"); and A government that works better – and cost less?? By Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon .
-  And this book on Reinventing Organisations also seems to be making waves in the private sector – taking us back to management books of the 1980s and echoing the work of maverick Richard Semmler….

Is it too much to suggest that there is a link here with the “slow food” and the “limits to growth” movements? All signalling a wider revolt against the way advertising, marketing and the corporate media has so insidiously, in the post-war period, developed a collective sense of dissatisfaction??

For the first part of my working life I was an “insider” working to improve a very large (public) organisation - with a strategy and structures which tried to use the energies of a range of people which the organisation’s “logic” had trained it to ignore….These were its lower-level officials, its more junior politicians and, above all, citizen activists we brought into new structures we established in the early 80s. I’m glad to say that this sort of work was so strongly accepted and “embedded” (to use an important concept in the change literature) that it has continued to this day in the structures and strategies of the Scottish Government….

But my role fundamentally changed after 1990 to that of an “Outsider” – the European Commission (and the small private “consultancies” it sub-contracts) funded me to appear in capitals and to “effect change”… using increasingly detailed prescriptions and tools which I wrote about with increasing frustration……What I enjoyed was identifying and working flexibly with people who wanted to change their institutions for the better – but the rigidity with which EC programmes are designed made that increasingly impossible….

It was a decade ago I first came across the notion of “good enough governance” which challenged the push global bodies such as The World Bank were making (at the start of the new millennium) for “good governance” - including the development of indices to measure the extent of progress “developing countries” were making in reaching the standards of public management apparently possessed by “developed” countries.

We need to explore this “good enough” concept in all our thinking but, above all, we need to have an outright ban on externally-imposed organisational change…..and a requirement that anybody proposing change should have to justify it to a panel of self-professed sceptics….