I blogged here highlighting the obsession in international development circles with new ideas and innovations and neglect of regular development interventions and examined the reasons; here questioning the belief that there are new ideas and innovations waiting to make a transformative impact; here that policies in most of the development matter very little and it's mostly about implementation; and here questioning the conventional wisdom on impact evaluations and arguing that evaluations should focus on the use of administrative data (and surveys) coupled with qualitative information to help improve the effectiveness of implementation.
In this post, and in continuation from here, I’ll argue that the combination of the grafting of externally generated ideas and innovations and the associated flow of easy money prevents developing countries from cultivating their ability to make good development decisions. Specifically, it avoids the hard collective struggles to diagnose their problems, figure out the most appropriate local solutions, and squeeze out the scarce resources from countless other competing needs.
In short, well-meaning aid money distorts the incentives and distracts from the real tasks of development. Instead of being helpful, it can end up harming.
Consider the example of education, an area of extensive engagement by the international development community with ideas and resources. The field has a vast spectrum of innovations in pedagogy, human resources management, incentives, financing structures, Edtech etc. Philanthropies and others fund academic researchers to conduct rigorous evaluations to establish the impact of these innovations. Politicians and bureaucrats in developing countries are then encouraged to adopt these evidence-based innovations.
The entire process is one-way and top-down - foreigners advising developing countries, outsiders advising practitioners, and experts advising governments - with large doses of we-know-it-best condescension thrown in. The solutions are presented as implants that can be made on the education system, at best with tinkering at the margins.
And the countries are promised development aid if they do so. The flow of easy money into systems struggling to find resources for basic requirements has irresistible political economy and bureaucratic attractions. It provides the misleading belief that something is being done to address the problem and that too with the support of those who are supposedly experts.
But it ends up displacing the hard struggles that these countries need to undergo to face up to the sobering realities of what ails their educational systems. It glosses over the political economy issues of community ownership, accountability to parents, prioritisation and sequencing of objectives and expenditures, figuring out what’s right and implementing it, finding scarce resources, and so on. It also avoids the collective struggles and sacrifices that result in conscious choices and decisions that are steeped in the local contexts and requirements. Most importantly, it prevents the development of the muscle memory of making decisions when faced with hard choices.
For example, it prevents the essential public discussions on the hard questions about teacher quality, their absenteeism, their recruitment processes, their benefits and service conditions, their capabilities development, the expectations from them, the curriculum and learning content, the best use of the limited resources available to the Education Department etc. Each of these involves the exercise of collective judgment. These struggles create norms, practices, and institutional forms that mediate such decision-making and gradually improve the quality of judgments that are exercised.
The same happens across development sectors.
None of this should be taken to mean that there should not be any aid money or technical assistance support. Instead, there should be a paradigm shift in the framing of such support. It must strongly abjure any thoughts, however well-meaning, of wanting to help developing countries with specific ideas and programs. It should avoid the impulse to offer well-meaning advice and best-practice solutions. It should eschew falling into the trap of the “reductive seduction of solving other people’s problems”.
Instead, it should help with the cultivation of the ability to make good development decisions. This, in turn, requires both financing and technical support, but for the implementation of the decisions made by developing countries themselves. The international development community must consciously and explicitly recognise and internalise this insight.
I can think of a few elements of this approach. One, support the creation of basic and critical physical infrastructure in areas like irrigation, transportation, electricity, urban utilities, schools and hospitals, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Two, assist with capacity development in public institutions, create stronger state capabilities for implementation management, research and development, higher education institutions etc. Three, encourage private investors and support the emergence of the private sector, especially in sectors and areas that serve the vast majority of the population.
In all these cases, the needs must emerge as conscious and internally driven decisions. In this framing, international aid will be supporting the cultivation of the ability to make good decisions and then supporting the implementation of those decisions. At the risk of repeating, such engagement should consciously stay away from displacing the internal struggles required to make decisions on development.
This approach will be long-drawn, unplannable, messy, and can appear inefficient and wasteful. So be it. The history of development shows that it’s never happened through any planned, logical, linear, and quick approach and that too guided or mediated from outside.
Ironically, there was a time, immediately after the War and in the post-colonial projects, when international aid focused on the essential requirements of economic growth - infrastructure and other material needs, higher education institutions etc. Irrigation projects, transportation and connectivity infrastructure, power generation and supply, water supply and sewerage, higher education and tertiary health care facilities were the primary focus of international aid. It largely left the countries to figure out their local programmatic solutions to their development problems.
Then, for a variety of reasons, it strayed into the funding of development programs/schemes (interventions to improve farm productivity, student learning, skilling, livelihood generation, social welfare etc.) and prescriptive technical assistance. And it’s here that things started to go wrong.
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