Culture shock: what is ‘development’ again?

Balloon Kenya encourages “entrepreneurial thinkers to imagine the solutions that will not only create new avenues for growth and prosperity, but also recast the course of human development”. After previous posts gushing about the freshness and coherence of the Balloon approach, the ‘d’-word appears and it all gets messy.
...

Balloon Kenya foregrounds the entrepreneur as a primary agent of social, economic and technological change, transforming the society around her. Here in Kericho, aid is dead, replaced by youthful exuberance and Business Model Canvasses. The talk is of empowerment, of young people undergoing transformative processes that give them the confidence to unleash the creative, innovative potential inside, and improve their own lives through doing so. Four weeks into the process, the stories of personal-level development are emerging, both from international participants, and from Kenyan entrepreneurs; hearing Everlyne remark “I have never thought about that” when working with us to come up with a tutoring business to operate alongside her small tea shop was quite momentous, even for a cynic. And the implicit point is that the benefits for the individual spill over to the surrounding environment (“...recast the course of human development...”).

This makes me jumpy. When we’re talking about the concrete case of the individual, the benefits are palpable, even if their sustainability is uncertain. Of course Balloon Kenya isn’t claiming to have all the answers; its approach to bringing about social good is inevitably partial. But the seductive slide, more or less present, into thinking that we have found a new model for societies to develop on a broad, macro scale is troubling.

Because “development, when you get down to it, is a political process”. As Guillermo Toro points out, whether you adopt the right-wing version of this (think Easterly) or the left-wing (i.e. From Poverty to Power) is less important than accepting the basic concept. Which means that encouraging enterprise carries ambiguous benefits, because the private sector emerges and evolves within the context determined by a number of groups, businesses, citizens, states and all. We’ve seen this at a macro-level recently in the criticism of the turn to the private sector of a number of development agencies.

Part of this unease is definitely about culture: coming from an NGO-, blogosphere-background, used to academic debates about power and institutions, an unapologetically pro-enterprise attitude grates, even if I often agree with the ideas. To be jolted out of your comfort zone is no bad thing: as the great Chris Blattman puts it “If you work in international politics or development and do not have an intellectual and existential crisis every year, then something is wrong”.

Kericho: causing me headaches

But, coming back to the micro-level, one of our entrepreneurs’ businesses is to act as a middle man between tea farmers and factories; tea farmers individually do not produce huge quantities of tea each day, meaning that factories often subcontract out the management of the plantations. So the middle man acquires a contract from a given tea factory to supply a certain weight of tea per month, earning significant profits working relatively few hours, once he has the all-important license. The process smells a lot like rent-seeking, and the benefits to society seem debatable. You don’t see many rich tea labourers around despite them putting in the hours, rain or shine. And this isn’t the only example: the difference between moneylender and loan shark is a thin one. These are, at least partly, questions of political economy, where the focus on entrepreneurship and innovation has to be complemented by a look at the social, political and economic context.

I guess I am asking too much. During the programme, the word politics is not even mentioned but that’s because we are not here to ‘do development’ (not that that exists), we are here to help individuals. The broader effects of that on society could be positive or negative. We shall see.

Thursday resolutions

Two sobering things have occurred to me this morning, both of which will hopefully improve this blog.

1. I am not Duncan Green. Perhaps obvious but important anyway. So given that I'm not an experienced Oxfam strategic advisor, author of the influential development book From Poverty to Power, I can stop trying to match him and other bloggers I follow for originality and analytical insight. I can be happy continuing to stab blindly in the dark at assorted issues vaguely relevant to development. More honesty and less coherence.

2. If I were to read my own writing but written by someone else, it would sometimes piss me off. There's nothing worse than a young person spewing out self-involved verbal diarrhoea. Just read a few articles on Thought Catalog and you'll get the point. So despite my best instincts (I love words) I'm going to try to unlearn the verbose rhetorical tendencies (witness the previous phrase) drilled into me at school.

Now that's over with, hopefully an actual post will appear sometime soon on food and the poor, the crappiness of (some) NGOs or why we need to rethink how we do education, depending on which semi-started draft I choose to finish.