Development double-think: how to (not) get out of bed in the morning

I'm currently in a very conceptual phase of my dissertation, with phrases like 'cognitive legitimacy,' 'socially constructed' and 'discourse' flying around. I'm trying to make them stop whirring using coffee and marks on bits of paper without success. In light of that I thought I'd continue the self-torture on this blog, by taking an assorted selection of ideas, articles and videos on a topic that occupies me a lot and attempt to construct a narrative. Let's see if pixels on a screen work better than ink on paper. Not promising coherence.

The problem is the co-existence of the following two facts:

1) Day-to-day, NGO/donor agency staff show up at the office and work hard and in good faith, to fill in the logframes/answer the emails/run the 'community consultation' session etc.

2) There is a consciousness among those who work in development that what NGOs/donors do is often extremely problematic conceptually and is fundamentally not what poor countries need.

Binyavanga Wainaina in a recent interview with the Guardian notes the guilty 'eye-rolling' of the aid worker betraying the fact she 'doesn't buy the bullshit' of aid work, just as he doesn't. Aid workers 'admit the irony, but the situation persists'. Neil McCulloch talks of the increasing popularity of the “political economy” approach to development assistance, attempting "to apply a more political approach to understanding development problems and, importantly, development “solutions”. In particular, a central tenet of the approach is that many development problems are fundamentally political rather than technical and that therefore solutions to these problems are most likely to come from inside a country’s polity than from outside." He finishes by remarking "Sadly, the political economy of donor incentives means that it [this approach] will probably remain a marginal pursuit [in development cooperation]." Banks and Hulme note in their 2012 paper on the role of NGOs in development the "increasingly professional and depoliticised nature [of NGOs] and their subsequent limitations in promoting long-term structural change."

I'm going to resist the temptation to make a massive judgement on whether aid is good or evil, not least because as I've remarked before, it's not the right question to ask. What I'm interested and perturbed by is the double-think that allows an development worker to carry out their job in good faith at the same time as knowing that it's inadequate as a solution to the task of helping countries to provide a better life for their people. This is something I feel myself in the work I do.

The paradox is easily explained in one sense: as Banks and Hulme put it, “organisational imperatives" prevail over the "development vision”. Much of the work that NGOs carry out responds to their desire to help not to 'satisfy any existing constituency' in Wainaina's words. There's no logic of the market or of politics to force NGOs to do what people actually need, so the development industry is free to define the task and the appropriate solution as they wish providing they can justify the whole thing to themselves.

And that's the key: to get over the cognitive disjuncture, you create a set of intermediary concepts like 'NGO' or 'partnership' or 'empowerment' or 'development' that you can imbue themselves with positive meaning, to save you the mental anguish of actually tracing the logic of what you are doing to its results and power implications. Because the results often ain't pretty. It's circular: I want to help those who are worse off in the world so I go do 'development', and 'development' is good because it's 'development'. The only problem now is that if you recognise all that and still work in an ineffective organisation (which is a lot of them), then that is probably unacceptably cynical.

Anyway I'm sure I've mixed up concepts, and ultimately make a fairly trivial, well-recognised point. But let's finish with a kind-of-relevant section of the Wainaina interview because he's brilliant and illustrates my existential problem perfectly (yes before you ask, development IS about me - that's the premise of the blog). 

"The utter cynicism of it is the assumption that there is no politics in Africa, so you simply bypass it; so you find a really, really good boy who's the best in his class in an English institution, and has symmetrical features, and [an impeccable] past, and so you know that when you know that when you give them a budget line that they'll stay [within it]...as you have defined. And those are what I call applications of power with a capital-P"