The "smartness" problem in development

Critique of technocracy has been a constant theme of several posts in this blog. I blogged here earlier about Anand Giridhardas's work and his excoriation of smart outsiders prescribing smart solutions to the natives. I also blogged here making the distinction between smart and wise and the importance of the latter in exercising judgment. 

In this context, it is useful to point to two studies. One by a sociologist Rachel Schurman (also here) uses a case study of the Agriculture Development program of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to shine light on its organisational culture and how it might conflict with its development work,

My analysis reveals an organizational culture that, particularly during the early years, reflects important continuities with the corporate culture for which its parent company, Microsoft, was so well known. From the start, the Foundation sought professional staff who possessed strong analytical skills, were very smart in a ‘‘logical-mathematical” way, had business experience, and were highly motivated. By hiring people who represented the ‘‘best and the brightest” by these criteria and charging them with solving the perceived problems of African agriculture, the Agricultural Development program became populated by individuals who applied their business thinking and analytical skills to ‘‘fixing” rural Africa and rural Africans. The foundation’s orientation toward strategic planning, which is a key aspect of this mindset, produced a decontextualized program that abstracted away from farmers’ real agricultural and sociocultural worlds and proffered a set of universal (and universalizing) solutions.

My analysis also highlights two other noteworthy features of the BMGF’s organizational culture. One is that by immersing bright, high-achieving professionals in an intense workplace run by a powerful and revered leader, the Gates Foundation taught staff to ‘‘manage up” (toward Bill Gates) rather than manage down (toward African farmers). This, together with the ‘‘culture of smartness” that pervades the Foundation, leads BMGF staff to privilege expert knowledge and professional credentials over other kinds of knowledge, including smallholder farmer knowledge, community familiarity, and experiential knowledge. Both of these phenomena serve to insulate and distance Gates staff from the field, making it difficult for them to listen and learn from those whose lives they seek to improve, even though many express a genuine desire to do so. As a result, the intended beneficiaries of the Foundation’s largesse are treated as passive objects of development rather than complex, knowledgeable social actors.

The other significant feature of the Gates Foundation’s organizational culture – and one that has important consequences for the way the BMGF ‘does development’ and influences other organizations – is the foundation’s obsession with having impact on a large scale. This manifests in two ways. First, it leads the foundation to privilege big, international organizations that can develop and manage megaprojects. Second, it manifests itself in the BMGF’s concern with making sure that its grants can be ‘‘scaled up,” that is, expanded into new social, biophysical and geographic domains. This often encourages grantees to expand their projects beyond their organizational capacities and into locales where they possess little knowledge and few local connections. At the same time, small, local organizations and individuals that are cognizant of community needs and could offer strong links at the local level, tend not to be supported.

This is a searing takedown of the world's standard setting non-profit organisation. Schurman raises very important issues, for which there are no easy answers. While agreeing with the concern she raises, it is also important to not to go the other extreme (which she does not, but could be interpreted by others with such inclinations) and abandon strategic planning, dismiss all expertise, embrace smallness, and focus only on communitarian engagements.  

Another paper raises concern at the rise of non government organisations (NGOs) with their "upward" accountable (to donors) and technocratic approaches to solving development problems and the associated shrinkage of space for various membership based organisations (MBOs) like social movements, political or religious institutions, trade unions, co-operatives, self-help groups etc which are "downward" accountable and exercise a civil society function. 

Ongoing representation of civil society as constituting a relatively narrow band of NGOs representing moderate points of view and lacking the membership base and politicized methods necessary for achieving change is irreconcilable with the need to reconfigure deeply rooted inequalities. Tackling issues of power, inequality, social, and political change requires a fundamental redress in how we conceptualize, distinguish between and support NGOs in relation to MBOs. It is only through mobilizing a strong membership base with internal accountability structures that participation in program design or political change can remain political, a process through which MBOs seek to take an independent or oppositional stance to the state or private interests and to leverage better terms of recognition, resource distribution, and political influence... How can NGOs continue to expand their successes in service delivery while returning to a stronger engagement with the root causes of poverty that are so deeply embedded in the systems and structures of power and politics that underlie poverty and inequality? How can they join forces with local MBOs as equal partners, jointly pursuing their mutual goals of transformation and social justice?... The gradual erosion of their civil society roots and their inability to secure ‘development alternatives’ at any scale means that NGOs remain unable to engage with transformative agendas that seek large-scale redistribution and the re-ordering of wealth and privilege... Development as a project-based and professional activity has yet to find a way to confront the dominance of established elites and corporate interests.

The authors point to some direction of work for NGOs in this regard, 

Government–NGO partnerships and the subsequent ‘transformation by stealth’ is one means through which NGOs strive for more transformative forms of service delivery, but other forms of institutional advocacy remain blocked by the limited civil society space afforded to them by states and donors. A shift toward a stronger, more inter-connected civil society in which NGOs play a key bridging role between MBOs, local and national governments and transnational may be the way forward.

But this path has to be a carefully tread. In particular, it's important to strongly confine such engagement to only local NGOs and ensure that foreign finance does not play any role in these efforts.