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Rethinking Development Assistance

A lecture at the:Institute of Development Policy and Management

University of AntwerpMarch 3, 2008

David EllermanUniversity of California at Riverside

www.ellerman.org

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Development Debate: Cook’s Tour

Help to development or just poverty alleviation?• Bill Easterly’s book (White Man’s Burden) argues

development aid not working so just try to alleviate the condition of the poor.

• Agencies moving in this direction for a long time, e.g. World Bank.

What is development?• Increase in people’s capabilities (transformation), or• Increase in people’s incomes (e.g., discovering oil)• Examples: remittances from labor migration or Indian

casinos in US.

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“Development” as a physical effect

Delivering infrastructure, social systems, and institutions.

Some things ‘can’ be delivered: stroke of the pen reforms.

‘Vaccinating the children’ as the older paradigm example (now it’s mosquito nets).

Performance-based aid: international service-providers ‘delivering’ development goods and services.

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Development Assistanceas Autonomy-Respecting Help

Autonomy-respecting form of assistance = “Helping people help themselves” (old cliché)

Fundamental Conundrum of "assisted self-help":• How can external influence by the helper make the doer more

autonomous or independent of external influence?• Same Fund. Conundrum occurs across fields of human

endeavor: education, psychology, economics, politics… “How can one person teach another person to think things out for

himself, since if he gives him, say, the new arithmetical thoughts, then they are not the pupil's own thoughts; or if they are his own thoughts, then he did not get them from his teacher?” (Ryle, Gilbert 1967. Teaching and Training. In The Concept of Education. Ed. R.S. Peters. London: Routl. & Kegan Paul, 112)

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Same Conundrum in Education

“Here we actually come up against the basic problem of education, which in its general form points to the question: How is education at all possible? If the end of education is rational self-determination, i.e., a condition in which the individual does not allow his behavior to be determined by outside influences but judges and acts according to his own insight, the question arises: How can we affect a person by outside influences so that he will not permit himself to be affected by outside influences? We must resolve this paradox or abandon the task of education.” (Nelson, Leonard 1949. Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy. New York: Dover, 18-9)

“If we ask how the teacher-learner roles differ from those of master and slave, the answer is that the proper aim of teaching is precisely to affect those inner processes that…cannot in principle be made subject to external control, for they are just, in essence, the processes germane to independence, to autonomy, to self-control.” (Hawkins, David 2000. The Roots of Literacy. Boulder: Univ. Press of Colorado, 44)

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History of educational theoriesabout active learning and autonomy

Socrates: Socratic ignorance and teacher as midwife not the father of learning;

Neoplatonists including Augustine; Rousseau's Copernican revolution in

pedagogy; Kantian themes about autonomy and

constructivist theory of the mind; John Dewey: main modern active learning

and contructivist educational theorist.

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Bad and Good Metaphors for Learning

Bad Metaphors Good MetaphorsMind as passive mirror of knowledge

Mind as active lamp of knowledge

Mind as wax tablet on which knowledge is stamped

Mind as a fountain out of which knowledge comes

Knowledge poured into mind like water into a bucket

Knowledge grows in mind like a seed properly nurtured

Knowledge transmitted from teacher to student

Knowledge awakened in learner by teacher as midwife

Abrams, M.H. 1953. The Mirror and The Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London: Oxford University Press.

Chomsky, Noam 1966. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row.

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Stop Teaching; Foster Self-Learning

"If you teach a man anything he will never learn it” (George Bernard Shaw)

"Fundamentally the staff manmust create a situation in which members of [line] management can learn, rather than one in which they are taught” (Douglas McGregor)

"He who wants to teach a truth should place us in the position to discover it ourselves” (José Ortega y Gasset)

"You don't just tell people something; you find a way to use situations to educate them so that they can learn to figure things out themselves” (Myles Horton)

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Helping Relations: Helper-Doer

Thinkers who faced the conundrum in diff. fields: Education: Teacher-Learner (Dewey, Freire) Management: Manager-Worker (McGregor) Psychology: Therapist-Patient (Carl Rogers) Community: Organizer-Community Group (Alinsky) Counseling: Counselor-Client (Kierkegaard) Development: Agency-Government (Hirschman,

Schumacher) Much help is unhelpful: overrides or undercuts

capacity for self-help or autonomy.

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Unhelpful Help #1: Social Engineering

“Overriding” form of unhelpful help. Mental model of Helper helicoptering over

maze supplying motivation and directions to doers in maze.

Helper as social engineer (usually an economist) supplies plan, and

Helper supplies “motivation” to follow plan. Doers’ own plans & motivation overridden. Alternative to social engineering is more

indirect approach.

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Engineered motivation is false motivation

Action = behavior + motivation. Genuine reform project = project + own

motivation Aid-seeking project = “project” + external

motivation (to get aid). Aid with Conditionalities (“carrots & sticks”)

supplies only external motivation. No outside-in motivation for inside-out change:

like trying to shine a light on darkness. Therefore, genuine projects must be found &

cannot be created by aid.

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Don’t Try to Give “Motivation” to Doers--Help Doers Who Have Own-Motivation

“In these situations, the donor would set himself the task of rewarding virtue ... where virtue appears of its own accord.” (Albert Hirschman)

“Find out what the people are trying to do and help them to do it better.” (E.F. Schumacher)

“[Management’s] task is to provide an appropriate environment–one that will permit and encourage employees to seek intrinsic rewards at work.” (Douglas McGregor)

“When we confuse a physical with an educative result, we always lose the chance of enlisting the person's own participating disposition in getting the result desired, and thereby of developing within him an intrinsic and persisting direction in the right way.” (John Dewey)

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Alternative Indirect Approach to $-Aid

"The best kind of help to others, whenever possible, is indirect, and consists in such modifications of the conditions of life, of the general level of subsistence, as enables them independently to help themselves." John Dewey

Helpers cannot supply own-motivation but must "find virtue afoot"--and then supply some $-aid.

But need judgment since money-moving pressures push toward accepting camouflaged aid-seeking projects.

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Unhelpful Help #2: Benevolent Relief

“Undercutting” form of unhelpful help. Aid Addiction. Charity corrupts; long-term charity corrupts long term. Self-help undertaken to avoid negative or get positive

outcomes is undercut by benevolent aid which allows doers to directly avoid negative or get positive results without developing self-help capacity.

A problem in today’s “development industry” is humanitarian relief repackaged as “development assistance”—which often undercuts capacity development.

Relief should be designed to be developmental.

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Development Aid as Moral Hazard

Insurance: moral hazard softens the incentives to take normal precautions.• Partial Cure: co-pay & deductibles help to

motivate investment to take precautions. Development: Aid softens the incentives for

self-help.• Partial Cure: substantial matching or first stage

funding requirement (so help is only 2nd stage) show own-motivation.

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Scylla & Charybdis of Dev. Assist.

Scylla = Enlightened impulse to do social engineering (mostly economists)

Charybdis = Benevolent impulse to do charitable relief.

Pons Asinorum is the recognition that:• Not the “What” of reform that counts but the

“How” if reform is to actually work. Trying to "engineer" the "what" gets the "how" wrong.

• “Doing good” that undercuts self-help capacity isn’t doing good.

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Albert Hirschman on Alternative Indirect Approach

1940s-50s: Big Push Balanced Growth Plans Alternative: Unbalanced growth driven by endogenous

linkages and pressures. Rage to Conclude vs. Social Learning process Helper as Reformmonger:

• Find where virtue is afoot on its own.

• Supply advice & aid to modestly help without overriding or undercutting endogenous connections, linkages, and forces. i.e., catalyze endogenous linkages to spread changes.

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Alternative Approach to Aid

Global networks of smaller agencies in contrast to today's large powerful agencies. Good example: Global Development Network: http://www.gdnet.org/ or Global Urban Observatory Network (GUONet).

Basic idea is to assist development-as-social-learning. Money not the focus of development assistance so it

will not drive agendas of developing countries. Smaller agencies cannot dominate but can be very selective.

Promote experiments, find where "virtue is afoot" and help it indirectly whether or not it goes through central government. Indeed, municipal governments are often better targets of aid.

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Finding and Scaling Up Learning

Center-Periphery or Hub-Spokes model• Center does learning & decides policies

• Disseminates answers to periphery

• Evaluation checks implementation & impact of central policy.

Decentralized Social Learning Model• Foster local experiments & self-learning

• Identify local successes and broker peer-to-peer cross-learning & local reinvention of successes.

• Benchmarking between actual projects rather than impact evaluation comparing project to counterfactual of doing nothing.

• See work by Donald Schön, Everett Rogers, or Charles Sabel.

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Parallel Experimentation

Series vs. parallel experiments:• If you “know what you’re doing” then experiment to move

along that branch in search tree—series experiments.• If you “don’t know what you’re doing” then try several

experiments at once—parallel experiments.

Wright Stuff (biological version)• Different parallel experiments.• Semi-isolation between experiments.• Benchmarking between experiments.• Migration or cross-learning to ratchet up whole

group.

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Sewall Wright’s Shifting Balance Theory

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Decentralized Social Learning (DSL) Projects

Center sponsors contest to “solve problem.” Local entities voluntarily enter contest to give “best practice” Entries must publicly state “theory” so others can see & learn. Entries must agree to be judged by benchmarks. Winners get “block grant” in addition to their required local

matching resources. Center sponsors horizontal learning between laggards &

leaders. Benchmarks ratchet up performance stds as learning goes on. Repeat as needed.

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Attributes of DSL Projects

Center has problem; not “solution.” Center’s solution-implementation capacity not assumed. Decentralized or bottom up innovation. Competitive contest; no entitlement to aid. Center gives block grant to winners (who have already

shown motivation & local resource commitment). Instead of conditionalities on “One Big Bet” at Center;

diversified portfolio of small bets w/o conditionalities. Horizontal learning between all entrants (whether original

“winners” or not). Ratcheting standards up.

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Resistance to DSL model

Implies some restraint on part of Center not to decide “the one best way” and then impose it.

How can Center justify itself if it “doesn’t know the answer”

Parallel experimentation involves direct comparison (benchmarking) between actual experiments.

Center prefers “impact evaluations”: “Is our project better than nothing? Yes! Therefore continue the project.”

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Impact of Internet

New possibilities as never before for strengthening horizontal network connections, not just spokes connected to hub.

Comparable effect of printing revolution on science taking off in Renaissance:• Wider dissemination of ideas and knowledge of experiments.• Could compare (or benchmark) different ideas and

experimental results by putting them side by side. Internet enables similar revolution today—a network of

local development agencies involved in decentralized social learning.

Alternative to today’s dysfunctional development aid system.

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For More "Left-Brain" Stuff:

WWW.Ellerman.org