Some thoughts on modern development discourse

Consider this parable. Smartman comes to the NewWorld. NewWorld too is populated by human beings who perform basically the same kinds of tasks in their daily lives. But it is far less developed and its people are poor. Smartman tries to make sense of how things work in NewWorld. He is in possession of two instruments - theory and tools for generating evidence (of what works). Smartman completely ignores the reality that the people of NewWorld have deep knowledge about their world.

There is an underlying premise. It goes something like this, "We've been through all this and have reached our present advanced stage of development. So we know what to do. Also you guys have been screwing up so badly for so long. Besides, we bring the tools of scientific empiricism. You better listen to us."

And if the NewWorldman suggests something to improve traffic congestion, pat comes the reply, "How do you know it works? Where is the evidence?". If he suggests that Edtech solutions can do little to improve student learning outcomes in resource constrained and difficult circumstances of public schools, he’s summarily dismissed by the Smartman who argues that the “logical rigour of sophisticated AI-based adaptive learning algorithms can help leapfrog all problems”.

Modernist high-development completely ignores the reality of priors. People in developing country contexts have priors. In any reasonable world, these priors, appropriately validated, should form the starting point for enquiry on important development issues.

Take this defence of the use of RCTs in development. It makes the point that RCTs grounded on theory are easier to generalise since they also contain information about the mechanisms of impact. Point taken. But how many of the big issues in development are amenable to such validation?

Just start with the HIV prevention measure

A randomized controlled trial (RCT) found that showing eighth-grade girls and boys a 10-minute video and statistics on the higher rates of HIV among older men dramatically changed behavior: The number of teen girls who became pregnant with an older man within the following 12 months fell by more than 60 percent.

How does this compare with, for example, enabling access to contraceptives and ensuring its use. Not to speak of development in general and economic growth itself. If someone were to do a regression of various explanatory variables and HIV incidence, one can be certain that just plain development, or increase in median incomes, would be the overwhelmingly largest factor in HIV prevention.

The big questions in ensuring universal immunisation is not about lentils and nudges. It is about availability of vaccines and state's capacity to enable access. Similarly, the primary focus on HIV control is hardly about awareness creation on one particular channel of impact - priming adolescent girls and boys short videos on the higher rates of HIV among older men (sugar daddies). It is about more general awareness creation, strengthening public systems to screen and facilitate rehabilitation and treatment of patients, enabling access to medicines etc. The high-profile RCTs and their nifty results have the result of almost confining the debate on these issues to these RCT-able good-to-have but peripheral concerns. No meaningful dent can be made on the problem with what are at best palliatives. 

There is an interesting psychology behind such articles that seek to examine development. The entire article relies on only two channels of information - theory and evidence from evaluations. What about priors? 

Consider the development landscape in India. The country has had flagship integrated employment guarantee schemes since 1960s, self-employment schemes since 1980s, livelihood programs since 1990s, rural roads programs since 1990s, and nutrition and maternal and child health program for several decades. All these programs have a rich and varied history, with vast troves of implementation data. One would imagine that any meaningful attempt to explore solutions to these problems has to start with a detailed analysis of these historical programs.

Given that the careers of many reputed foreign development economics researchers of today have been made studying the same development issues in India, it should therefore come as a surprise that there is not one paper of note by any of them about the history of India’s numerous flagship welfare programs. Apart from these eminent people coming with a disdain for priors and feeling their theoretical concepts and experimental toolkits are superior, analysis of historical programs would hardly get a place in any decent economics publication or get them tenure in a reputed foreign university.

Not only is history over-looked, it is often sought to be re-written. This paper evaluating the "innovative program" of providing bicycles to girls in Bihar does not find it fit to even mention about the pioneering and very famous bicycle distribution program of Tamil Nadu from the eighties. Or this paper about the use of third party audits in monitoring pollution presents the initiative as an innovation, without any mention of the fact that such audits have become commonplace in engineering works across India for more than a decade. Or this paper's discovery of telephone-based monitoring of the implementation of government programs which conveniently overlooks the reality of the 'innovation' being commonplace across the same contexts. It is as though, in each of these cases, the particular innovation and its assessment started with their papers! Talk about re-writing of history.

Also, in development, the big challenges are more often than not, not about radical paradigm shifts or spectacular innovations, but plain simple good governance and straight-forward implementation of plain vanilla programs and public services.

Doing an RCT to figure out whether third party audits are useful, or telephone call centres are effective in monitoring effective program implementation, or to question the value of hotspot policing betrays arrogance. Who's waiting to be convinced so?

Being outsiders (and thinking that we are more objective, and perhaps even superior beings), we completely ignore the reality that there are real people living in that world and they have sufficient knowledge about their world. About what works, how and why they do. There is a name for observing and studying the world and its people as it exists. But ethnography has long since gone out of fashion.

And as Anand Giridharadas has written, this trend is not just confined to academia, but also in consulting, where observing and listening was once supposed to be the most important traits.

In fact, the irony of the recent interest in system thinking and system transformation cannot be lost. The wheel has turned the full-circle. The only difference being that this fad is just a more impoverished version of rigorous ethnography.