Photo credit: Zoriah on Flickr
“There is no real development without governance” - EU development spokesperson Amadeu Altafaj Tardio
In this post, I'd like to be a little provocative and revisit a moment in last month's launch event. Everyone probably remembers Oliver Wates' exercise, where we were asked to rank ten development issues in order of importance. Not all of us agreed that issues could—or should—be ranked like this; development issues are all inter-related, some felt, and can't be neatly separated . This criticism is perhaps true in theory, but unhelpful in practice. Aid agencies have to make exactly these kind of decisions every day, and a euro spent on, say, education programmes often means a euro less to spend on water, sanitation, or any number of other issues. One of the reasons I found the activity helpful is precisely because it reminded me that aid often involves difficult decisions such as these.
Even more importantly, Oliver's activity brought home to me how little agreement there still is on how to best “do” development. Ask 100 bloggers how best to combat poverty and injustice, and you get 100 different answers. It's part of what makes thinking about development both so interesting and so frustrating—there is just so little we actually know.
At the event, I ranked the issues in the following order, from most to least important:
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Governance
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Globalisation
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Empowerment of women
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Education
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Agriculture
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Population
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Health
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Disease
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Sanitation
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Water
I was surprised at how few people agreed with this. For the group as a whole, the three most important issues were:
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Water
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Education
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Health
So the group's number one priority was lowest on my list! Now, it's not that I don't feel water, or sanitation or disease are important—it feels wrong to have to put any of the ten problems last. But I'd like to briefly explain why I chose as I did, and then hopefully hear from some of you regarding the reasoning behind your own decisions.
If there's a single principle behind my top choices, it can be summed up as systemic change. I believe that aid, if it is to be effective, needs to put itself out of a job eventually. It is good to provide things—medicine, roads, toilets—but it's even better to help bring about the kind of deep-seated, structural changes that address the root of the problem. Otherwise, we're creating a culture of dependence and a vicious circle that is difficult to break. The empowerment of women is one such issue; various bloggers have already written here of the impact that educating girls has on population issues, poverty, and the life chances of the entire community. Similarly, globalisation might not seem immediately relevant to development, but it is, in fact, crucial. The strategy a country takes in dealing with globalisation can make or break it: China would not have been able to pull 600 million people out of extreme poverty without globalisation, but nor would Argentina have had to deal with financial ruin in 2001. Globalisation is a double-edged sword, and everyone involved in development needs to know how to wield it.
Finally—governance. No single other factor is as important in determining whether aid reaches its recipients and fulfils its goals. Global governance is key—it determines whether donors are able to coordinate their efforts and stop squabbling long enough to act collectively. And local governance is even more vital: without accountable, legitimate, capable institutions in developing countries, all efforts to improve water supplies and eradicate disease will come to naught. Anything we do without governance, capacity-building and other long-term structural changes is at best only temporary and at worst actually harmful.
I really felt this while working in Indonesia on a health project. My organisation was tasked with rebuilding three clinics following an earthquake; it was my job to engage with and train the local communities to make sure they were included in the process and trained to avoid casualties in the event of future disasters. Community-engagement efforts such as these were an important improvement from merely coming in, building a clinic, and then leaving. Even better, however, would have been to empower locals to demand more from their governments. Natural disasters claim more lives in Indonesia than in almost any other country due not to poverty alone, but due to lack of governance. Sometimes I worried that a side-effect of our work in Indonesia was preventing people from asking the state for the protection they deserve as citizens—and that the Indonesian government actually does have the resources to provide.
I also know I'm not alone in thinking this. Everyone, from African leaders to World Bank officials to academics, is talking about governance these days. Of course, recognising its importance is not the same as solving the problem, and so we have a long road ahead of us.
In any case, that explains my choices that morning in Brussels. What were yours, and why? I'm hoping that debates such as these can get us thinking about some of the assumptions behind our choices, and really get to the heart of what it is we're trying to do when we “do” development.
Elsje,
I agree with the top most on the rank list. Governance is crucial. It spells everything. Thanks for this post! And the photo is piercing.
Hi Elsje. It is difficult to make such a list in relation to development. All depends of course on the specifics of the setting you deal with. We’re approaching 300 blogs on TH!NK3, and maybe we should not seek common denominators at this stage already. A story from Gaza is hard to compare with a story from the Philippines. Development in China is so much different from that in Zimbabwe. In my humble opinion when it gets to Africa, I feel that the absence of a significant middle layer in society is crippling progress. You have the government, and you have the poor masses. There isn’t that much in between. And it’s the in between that kick-starts economic activity, entrepreneurship etc. But ‘middle-class’ was not in the list of ten topics…
Convincing. A lot depends on time horizon: for the society infected with deadly disease, getting rid of it is most pressing and makes development, or al least a base for further development. And then, good governance plus education leads to sanitation and makes sure the disease would not come back later…
@Bart: I believe your view is right, with one reservation. We can actively fight against the absence of education or sanitation, but it is hard to make building middle class a goal of development. Middle class is more by-product of development: economy growth, globalization, empowerment of women and so on.
Thanks for your comments, guys, some interesting things have already come out.
@Iris - glad you like it. And yes, the photo is evocative, isn’t it?
@Bart - You’re right, I wouldn’t want to imply that my list would stay exactly the same regardless of local circumstances, as situations definitely vary. But just one can (rightly) argue about the need for a middle class in a variety of African countries, I think we can venture a few contingent and tentative conclusions about development around the world. One such conclusion is that we should not overlook structural issues, which was why I was particularly surprised at how low governance and globalisation ranked at the conference. Regarding an African middle class, I agree with you that it is certainly an important thing to aim for. But I think Robert makes a good point in saying it is more an outcome of economic growth, governance, etc. than a cause of it. Your point does make me think economic growth should perhaps have been on Oliver’s list, though.
@Robert - yes, that’s probably true. I think governance is the key to sustainable development, but can imagine situations where it is difficult to implement without having certain basics in place first. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma!
Neat post - I am actually surprised you still carry the memory of this exercise with you.
I have to disagree in principle. There’s almost no use in this “experiment” since the issues are not even clearly defined, so you get divergence at all levels: definitions, problems, causes of problems, all of the above have various context-specific contingencies, etc.
As far as I can remember, I ranked education first because without education, you have no governance, no sustainability, nothing. Okay, in the short-run are important maybe disease control, health, etc., , but in the long-run without education you have achieved nothing.
Thanks Ivaylo - well, my notes should get more credit than my memory
Your concern is valid, but a lot of these issues are divided this way in development programmes as well. Not globalization, perhaps, but many of the others - and I can’t imagine how we’d go about designing
programmes without this kind of organizational structure. All ten are development problems, but - as you say - some are also root causes, and its those that I therefore think are doubly important.
Education is one of the more important issues to me as well, but I’m not sure if a country needs mass education to start working on some of the other issues you mention. Before universal education is achieved, good leadership can, in the short term at least, be a useful way to get the ball rolling on water provision, economic growth, etc.
True, but why would education have to be universal education? Gandhi could not have done what he did without education.
For me it’s difficult to find the priority as all of those fields are crucial and really - as I assume (still not clear on the idea behind THINK3) that this platform is about - linking them all together and working out consistent approach? At least I think this should be the case;)