Down and Out in Paris and London from Madrid

General thoughts as a piece of writing: Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell

A strange read: I’m not quite sure what genre it was, somewhere between travel writing (but instead of moving geographically, moving economic situation and social class), short story, autobiography, and anthropological study. Orwell dons the 'beggar's cloak' (there's something slightly uncomfortable ethically now I reflect - using people's lives as material before hopping back out of poverty) and spends some months living the life of someone at the bottom of the pile, economically and socially-speaking. It’s written in such a way, with a cast of characters that seem more literary than real that it’s hard to believe that it is (at least partly) non-fiction. There is ‘Charlie’, who discourses on his discovery of ‘love’ with a terrified prostitute, and ‘Bozo’ the astronomer-screever (street artist), among many, many others. Meanwhile the description of life as a plongeur (the bottom rung of employee in a Parisian hotel-restaurant), the colourful and slightly disorientating account of Saturday night at Orwell’s preferred Parisian tavern, and the Russian secret society operating out of a laundrette similarly test the suspension of disbelief. Which also made it incredibly readable and compelling; I gobbled it up in about 4 hours.

Poverty 'over here'

The cover of my own 1984 edition

Anyway, we’re all here to witness my journey of intellectual enlightenment on development matters. Or for The Thick of It lovers, in Phil’s words, “my quest to become the man I know I can be". And in that context, it’s a useful tonic as someone who spends a fair amount of their life reading about and acting on poverty located outside their own society. It’s a cliché but poverty is a massive problem in ‘developed’ countries too, perhaps even reaching levels of a 'humanitarian crisis', and though it was published in 1933 the number of homeless people I awkwardly avoid eye contact with on a daily basis in London or Madrid (especially) suggests it’s still unfortunately relevant. On top of that, not only does the whole story take place in my own geographical space, the language and style of the writing means that it’s coming from my own cultural and class world. It shouldn’t be this way, but inevitably as a card-carrying public schoolboy (sounds awful doesn’t it?), reading an account of extreme poverty as ‘discovered’ by an ‘Etonian’ about 90 years ago is even more potent for me in some ways than having lived among extremely poor people in a rural area of Uganda for two months. The fact that writing all that has made me feel uncomfortable is probably another credit to the book. Too many middle class white people with no idea what poverty is like in ‘development’. ANYWAY.

A simple representation of poverty

Leaving aside nights spent in a postcolonial-theory-induced cold sweat, Orwell is super eloquent at illustrating the daily hardships and impossible decisions that people without money have to go through. It’s kind of the literary counterpart to reading Poor Economics which similarly aims to get away from grand theories and down to the realities of poor people, whatever your opinion of RCTs. We see the reality of the people on the other side of the wall in the fancy restaurant, who are basically invisible in contemporary media or politics (though this is a good article if you read Spanish). Going without food for days at a time feels “as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted”. Life moving from one lodging house to another is “a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom.”

One especially relevant point for this blog is the indignity of poverty and the power relations charity hides: on more than one occasion Orwell and his homeless friend Paddy are forced to accept a religious service in exchange for food, which he describes as a humiliating experience. In development land, it kind of links into Hattori's idea on giving as a means of legitimating the ethical hegemony of capitalism if that isn't too pretentious to mention (if you can stomach it, gated paper is here). Money, and especially charity, gives power at a very basic level. Orwell notes,“[i]t is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level”. The parallels with international development here are obvious. Structural adjustment imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s would do nicely, or, playing devil’s advocate you might well draw parallels with some donors’ recent suspension of aid over Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. Don’t quote me on that.

Though Orwell also describes little acts of resistance which are kind of brilliant. At one point a religious group spontaneously enters a hostel to give a service to the lodgers, presumably to ‘save their souls’. “No more notice was taken of them than f they had been earwigs”. Taking up the structural adjustment parallel again, you can kind of see this in the way that some developing-country governments made a complete mockery of the imposed conditionality. Easterly's great for this: in The Elusive Quest for Growth, he states that Pakistan was given no less than 22 adjustment loans conditional on reducing its budget deficit... which was steady at 7% of GDP throughout. Van der Walle also depicts this amazingly.

Anyway before I end up summarising the entire book, the message in general is (if there is one) that the poor are people like you and me. Orwell says it better: “the rich and poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit”. There’s a really poignant illustration of this (can’t help myself) quite late in the book, when Orwell, clearly in low spirits, suggests to Bozo, a disabled homeless person that “[i]t seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment”. And Bozo replies with moving defiance, “You’ve just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ – he tapped his forehead – and you’re all right”.

The broader picture

Oh and Orwell is humble. Self-deprecating (British) and humble. And that’s the beauty: that there is no stylised, trite narrative or direct attempt at mobilisation, just a plain presentation of experiences. The political implications are left for the reader to decide. It starts without back-story – “The rue du Coq d’Or, Paris, seven in the morning.” – and ends just as simply -“My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story”. There’s definitely a moral to be drawn in the development world: the importance of decentring the role of ‘outsiders’ in defining the issues. Actually quite a nice illustration of this in this interview with Bill Easterly (about two-thirds of the way through I think).

Having said that, Orwell does venture some tentative opinions about the underlying dynamics of poverty and the injustice of the system. His explanation of the utter social uselessness of a plongeur and of fancy restaurants and hotels, for example, is persuasive (all that strife for a “cheap, shoddy imitiation [of luxury]”). In general the attack on the materialism and superficiality of society is probably even more relevant now than then, even if the politics then were different, as we now unfortunately don’t have any politics in the UK at least ("Q&A centred on people lamenting the state of the British Left or even whether such a thing still exists"). But the Marxist-inspired ‘keeping-the-mob-occupied-for-fear-of-revolution’ argument was probably more relevant in the 1930s, so I won’t dwell on the theorising too much, be cause neither does Orwell – just “a sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in a hotel”. Humble.

Much to think about, and development-related too, without there being a single line of argument. It’s a great read, and I’ll definitely be moving on to The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. I’ll leave you with the man himself for a modest conclusion:

“I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”

[note: I feel obliged to mention that Orwell is weirdly racist and anti-Semitic for someone I think of as progressive, but I choose not to dwell for the purposes of this blog]

Problems with local legitimacy for your development project? Invent yourself a Goddess!

Normally academic papers about organisational theory don't yield much comedy value. But Derick W. Brinkerhoff has spiced up my Friday night in ways he could never have imagined with his 'Organisational legitimacy, capacity and capacity development'.

Aside from the fact that he references the concept of 'isomorphic mimicry,' which is my favourite thing at the moment because in one fell swoop it manages to explain both those 'fake wasps' that freak me out while actually being totally harmless and why education in many developing countries is so rubbish (here's a nice podcast to explain), there is a little gem half way down the left-hand column on page 9. And it's delivered so a matter-of-fact-ly in an otherwise innocuous paragraph about manipulative legitimacy strategies that you almost miss it.

"An interesting example [of manipulative legitimacy strategies] comes from the local family planning association in the village of Koppa, India, where to increase legitimacy for the association's services, staff created a new goddess of family welfare, Kalyaneshwari, to inspire women to limit family size"

WTF?!

Now you often hear about local beliefs being an impediment to implementing development initiatives. In the Global Poverty MOOC I'm currently taking (see earlier post) Ban
erjee and Duflo mention that some people in Udaipur are reluctant to get their children vaccinated for fear of the 'evil eye' that might fall upon them. But the audacity to take that problem and turn it into a solution is stunning, surreal and disturbing in equal measure. Local religious beliefs undermining your project? Create new ones, duh!

God-creation: tried and tested method for achieving development outcomes

Anyway if we can harness the brain-washing power of religion for development, then that's something I guess. God of good governance and democratic accountability anyone? Maaaah! Kind of speechless.

The Rebirth of Education (part 2): best bits

In part 1 I gave a quick run-down of Lant Pritchett's 'The Rebirth of Education'. In six words, learning not schooling, starfish not spider. Now I thought I'd highlight some important and/or interesting take-home messages. They mostly buzz around the same theme but hopefully will crystallise things a little.

On the problem:

1) You can't solve the education problem if you don't understand it.

We need to grasp that schooling systems adopted in developing countries were not designed to enable children to meet learning goals, so more of the same (more inputs alone) doesn't cut it. As with an addiction to Twitter, so with education policy, the first step is admitting you have a problem. "You cannot search [for solutions] if you are convinced you have already found what you need" says Lant. This also means that arguments on the public-private axis (as fun as they are) are also tangential to the debate in the developing country context.

2) 'More inputs help a bit so we might as well carry on doing that for now' = not advisable 

 “Taking a placebo can be dangerous if it prevents you from seeking out the right diagnosis”. Probably enough said there.


3) Western education experts need to eat some humble pie

Usefully-named 70s band Humble Pie

"No living Western education expert has led, participated in, or lived through a truly major national improvement in measured student achievement". All currently high scoring educational systems in OECD countries already had high-scoring systems 40 years ago, so we 'over here' don't seem to know how to transform an education system either. More generally the problems for education in developing countries are (unsurprisingly) different to those in developed countries, so even with a system proven to be successful in the Netherlands, for example, we may not be any closer to our goal.





4) This isn't technical, it's incentives, it's political

The problem is in the dynamic of the system and the incentives it produces, not just a lack of a certain missing X. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague when working in a school in Uganda last summer, when it dawned on us that everyone was 'playing their role' more or less effectively (teachers mostly present, pupils sat behind desks, adequate classrooms, timetable, register etc) but a lot of the time, nothing was actually happening. There was no learning. Pritchett's cover shows a child walking through a doorway of a façade of a school with nothing behind and this captures the point perfectly. Translating this into practical advice for someone who works for a charity trying to improve schools in developing countries (like me), when you think you've found the perfect initiative for the school, you need to ask yourself two questions: why isn’t this being done already? And why will it be done that way in the future? Incentives. And panning back out to the level of the whole system, this means politics: switching to a starfish system means ceding power and giving up central control to some measure, and there lies the difficulty.

Towards a solution...

5) There is no blueprint and there is no silver bullet

If what we are trying to do is learn the principles of design rather than how to design a particular house (Lant's metaphor), and we take into account architecture degrees are like six years (me stretching Lant's metaphor), it's clear there is no quick blueprint for success. Even within his six key characteristics for a successful system, you need these all functioning together. If you look at point 2, 'locally-operated' and think that the panacea for poor education systems is decentralisation, then you are likely to end up with a decentralised poor education system. You need all of these characteristics together, with the details right. Then adding in the inevitable caveat that political, social and educational context will determine the precise formula, and the surreal, incomprehensible bit of Zen teaching Pritchett adds in "If you should meet Buddha on the road, kill him"(?!), it's clear that there is no one formula for success.

*searching for something positive...*

6) There's loads of innovation at the micro-level, so change is possible

Particularly for those working on individual schools rather than an entire education system, take inspiration from the fact that there are plenty of actors doing great, innovative work in difficult contexts. We know that some interventions (remedial classes, curriculum reform, and others) are really effective at improving learning. The problem is more that the spider system often prevents these innovations from scaling-up.

And the irritating, super-keen development student's choice...

7) Systems-thinking is the way forward

Complex adaptive systems did this

Trying to take heed of the development ideas hype cycle and not explode with wonk-y excitement, but systems-thinking, and particularly complex adaptive systems theory, is the future. Lant has a great passage on why we're crap at thinking in terms of systems rather than agents (which is also an example of his excellent prose style) but all the cool kids in policy are talking about systems-thinking and I'll soon be blogging about it (once I've read this and this and this and this and this). Getting back to the concrete example of education, thinking in terms of systems explains why absent teachers and obstructive teachers' unions don't mean that teachers are the baddies and all we need to do is make teachers be less rubbish. If the system is set up to treat teachers like workers not professionals, and fails to provide the right incentives, then the outcomes will be inevitably be disappointing.

In conclusion, read the book because it's great and will change the way you think.

The Rebirth of Education (part 1): Spider vs. Starfish

As the call comes in for more money for education in developing countries, so too, does the news that current performance on education is appalling . Shockingly appalling.  If you need any more convincing, an Educational Initiatives survey covering 74% of the Indian population found that schoolchildren’s performance on conceptual questions is often worse than random guessing. Meanwhile at the current rate of improvement, Indonesian schools will take more than 1000 years to reach current OECD-country levels of quality. Other countries, at the current rate, would never get there.

Lant Pritchett’s book ‘The Rebirth of Education’ (in which a whole chapter is dedicated to crushing our spirits about education in developing countries with statistics like the last two above) attempts to explain this dire situation and what to do about it, and in doing so he kind of blew my mind. I started reading the book in part to supplement the lit. review I am currently doing for Education Partnerships Africa in which we initially aimed to find a set of basic inputs (in terms of infrastructure and resources) which would add up to a ‘good school’, and thus produce a schematic ‘blueprint’ for our partner schools. It turns out it doesn’t work that way.

Governments across the world are great at getting children physically into school. The population of labour force age in the developing world has now completed three times more years of schooling than in 1950 when 60% had no schooling at all. And in Ghana, for example, the average 7.8 years of schooling in 2010 for each child was not attained by the UK until 1970. The problem is, that the type of system which is great at sorting the logistics of schooling isn’t good at ensuring children learn. The problem is the system, meaning that 'more of the same' (= more schools, more books, more desks, more computers) won't solve the problem. 

These centralised, top-down, bureaucratic, inflexible, unresponsive, closed, ‘spider’ systems which exist across the world arose out of a mixture of demand, driven by a modernising economy (education has good returns in terms of income), but more from a drive for the ideological control of socialisation (indoctrinate those kids) and isomorphic mimicry (if we acquire the outer trappings of a responsible, well-functioning state then we seem more legitimate).  So the whole dynamic of the system has nothing to do with effective learning, and more to do with political patronage and rent-seeking in many cases; even if you assume that intentions are benevolent (strong assumption) then the spider systems just aren’t set up to deliver good education*. Pritchett even finds that ‘spider’ education systems in developing countries are value-subtracting. That is to say, as well as being more expensive than alternatives, spider systems deliver absolutely worse education than if the same teachers were teaching the same kids outside the system.

Kill that spider!

So what beats a spider in rock-paper-scissors? A starfish, you got it. Whereas in a spider system, all information across the web filters up to the brain at the centre of the web, in a starfish there is no centralised nervous system; each part is constantly taking in and processing information, and the overall movement of the starfish comes about as an aggregate of tiny little movements of each part. Translated back into education, this means a system which is

• Open:  many different types of school and approaches allowed
• Locally-operated: local actors have the autonomy to operate, explore and discover innovative approaches
• Performance pressured: schools are accountable on the basis of actual, measurable learning outcomes not just schooling input
• Professionally networked: a professional ethos among educators and organisational learning across the system facilitated and promoted
• Technically supported: schools are equipped with the capabilities to succeed
• Flexibly financed: finance follows students and performance with local control

Happy cause he's learning

So there we have it: Pritchett comes up with the solution? Erm, kind of. He does give a few examples of starfish systems (the US/UK higher education system; the International Baccalaureate system; Brazil’s basic education system) but this is no concrete blueprint like I was hoping for. In one of his many analogies (Pritchett’s way of explaining things, both in the book and in podcasts I’ve heard, is brilliantly lucid and witty) he likens what he is doing as not showing how to build a specific house, but giving the principles of design. Having said this, he could definitely have expanded more on the positive, starfish-side of things (five of six chapters are dedicated to taking down the current spider system), and I’m sure research/policy discussions will push on in a more practical direction, particularly as we reach 2015 and the post-MDG apocalypse.

I was going to follow that up with my impressions/key take-home messages, but this has got really long. Still haven’t got the succinctness of a pro-blogger. So I’m going to call this ‘part 1’ and write an accompanying ‘part 2’ on the ambitious assumption that people would actually read two consecutive posts of mine. In the meantime, to consolidate, gorge yourself on review/blog/blurb/podcast about the book from people more intelligent than I.

*if you’re wondering why spider systems in developed countries do a good job, Pritchett’s explanation is that they took over pre-existing local starfish systems

Are the extreme poor hungry?

An obvious question maybe. The WFP reports that there are 842 million undernourished people in the world today. Policymakers, too, seem to think so: at Davos last month global leaders committed to the zero hunger challenge. MDG 1 refers to 'eradicating extreme poverty and hunger'. Ayuda en Acción also have a cool campaign on hunger right now which reminds me of Where the Wild Things Are. So the extreme poor are hungry, right?

But are the extreme poor hungry?

This question is the the central problem posed by Banerjee & Duflo (B&D) in Chapter 2 of Poor Economics, and of the second week of the 'The Challenges of Global Poverty' MOOC of theirs I'm currently taking. So, inspired by Development Intern's weekly report on Sachs' rival course on Sustainable Development, I'm going to do something similar, hopefully mashing up course material with ideas from their book and other sources sufficiently to sidestep anticipated legal issues (it's a free course available to anyone so not sure 'revealing course content' has any meaning but whatever I'm a coward).

Getting back to the question, B&D suggest that we could be looking at a food-based 'poverty trap'. I.e. poor people don't have enough food to be productive, meaning they earn less and have less money to buy food, and so the cycle continues. Meanwhile someone with more money can buy more food, be more productive, and thus escape from poverty. In the class B&D use concepts like the S-shape graph and capacity curves and elasticity so you feel like a real economist: it's fun.

But if we actually look at the actual behaviour of the poor in developing countries, we get a story different to the WFP and poverty trap narrative. B&D find that in Udaipur, the poor could spend up to 30% more on food than they actually do by cutting expense on festivals, alcohol and tobacco. Another study cited by B&D found that a 1% increase in income only translates into a 0.67% increase in food expenditure. Significance: there's room for the poor to be buying more food. A further study in China even found that when the price of rice declined, people ate less rice (that is to say, fuck you conventional economics). In general, Deaton and Dreze find that poor Indians have been eating less and less over the last few decades while the percentage of people complaining that they do not have enough food dropped from 17% in 1983 to 2% in 2004. Not what you would expect from hungry people stuck in a food-based poverty trap. So maybe poor people in general have enough food. As B&D put it, “most adults, even the very poor, are outside of the nutrition poverty trap zone”. We can offer some explanations - technological change means that people aren't doing as much physical labour and so require less food; people are healthier so lose fewer calories to hungry parasites or to fighting illness.

But the Freakonomics-style journey doesn't end there, because it's not just that the WFP is totally wrong and everyone is fine food-wise. Roughly half the children under five in India are stunted, a horrific stat which suggests something is going seriously wrong with their nutrition. So, skipping a few steps, we arrive at our 'solution': it's quality not quantity. When 40% of pregnant women are anaemic according to the WHO, it doesn't matter how much rice you give them, they need iron. And this is particularly bad in India because many people are vegetarian and the staple is rice (which actually inhibits iron absorption) creating a perfect, iron-free, storm. The results of addressing nutrient deficiencies are huge - B&D cite a study which found that deworming children for two years (equivalent of giving them the nutrients and calories taken by the worms - and yes it does work like that) led to a yearly increase in income of 20% and a lifetime gain of $3269, compared to a cost of $1.36 per deworming treatment. Bam.

Sweet potatoes: yummy and nutritious

So we need to get kids dewormed (already happening in Kenya), nutrients to pregnant women and to young children, because that's where the real 'hidden hunger' is, say B&D. Another nail in the coffin of USAID's food aid policy based on getting US-produced staples to supposedly needy countries (not that it needed another one). And bad news too for the Campaign for Boring Development with its focus on increasing incomes: money isn't the issue here, so having more of it won't make a big difference. Fortified fish-sauce is already cheap and within reach of the poor in Indonesia (relative to its benefits and average income). Instead we need to directly target mothers-to-be during pregnancy with fortified foods, perhaps sprinkle children's food at school with micronutrient-rich salts, and more sustainably, develop nutritious foods that people actually want to eat (see DFID bloggers' on exactly this topic.
Orange fleshed sweet potatoes and iron-rich beans are where we're heading apparently).

The most interesting part of this I've left until last. If the benefits are so great and the costs so small, why aren't poor people doing this anyway? And this is where B&D are at their best, taking us away from high-level, often introspective debates driven by Western academics (whatever its merits, I still find the fact that Nina Munks just wrote a book on Jeff Sachs kind of surreal) and towards the realities of the poor. As they drily put it, “the natural place to start to unravel the mystery is to assume that the poor must know what they are doing”. Unpacking all the reasons why the poor might not take to foreign experts' advice would, and probably will, take another blog post (think mistrust of the state and NGOs, difficulty of verifying supposed benefits, human psychology). But one aspect of the explanation becomes obvious when you think of the extreme poor as normal people. Because people aren't machines made to maximise their productivity or long-term income - I'm sure I'd be better off productivity-wise giving up coffee, sugar and alcohol but I'm not going to. Now imagine you work a lot harder than I do, and on top of that don't have the internet, books, podcasts and a load of leisure time to spend with friends, you might be justifiably tempted to spend your money buying tastier but less nutritious food, or even saving up for a TV, instead of investing in things that might, in the long-term, be objectively 'beneficial'. B&D quote George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:

“When you are unemployed, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little tasty”.

So a couple of conclusions from this week's class: 1) quality not quantity. And 2) the extreme poor in developing countries know what they're doing more than we give them credit.

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.

I'm not sure, and that's okay.

More of a reflective, slightly nebulous piece - apologies in advance. So I had the pleasure of listening to Mark O’Connell speak on ambivalence on a Four Thought podcast (the perfect accompaniment to a tipsy walk home in the early hours), and his strikes me as a valuable message for all, even in policy debates about development (yeah I can shoehorn anything into ‘being relevant to development’).

So in a nutshell, ambivalence is simultaneously holding two incompatible beliefs, the uncertainty of having mixed feelings about an issue. Ours is not the age of ambivalence, O’Connell points out: we inhabit a world of 'omniscient' politicians, of Ted Talks with a single take-home message, and of eight clear MDGs.

Academically I’ve had some experience of this. I’m currently doing some research into managerialism in NGOs. This is the theory and practice of managers in development, an ideology which relies on assumptions of development as a linear, mechanistic process of change in a technical, scientific sense. In its most exaggerated forms, local context is abstracted away to produce a replicable ‘recipe for action’ which can fit neatly into a logical framework analysis. The managerialist logic is what motivates you to write up that nice report of your development project in which you iron out all the inconsistencies and present a clear problem-solution-implementation-success narrative, recounted by a coherent, objective self. Managerialism in this context is the antithesis of ambivalence.

But while certainty’s clearly useful when attempting to make and justify decisions, it can also be extremely problematic for thinking about development. Suppressing ambivalence and constructing a single narrative (of a project for instance) can reduce reality to a single set of ‘truths,’ preventing political engagement and contestation, and favouring the opinions of some as more legitimate than others. But not only is this approach dangerous in its implications, it is misguided in itself, as it fundamentally misrepresents human experience, of which ambivalence is a inherent feature, as O’Connell points out. In fact one thing I am certain of is that people are hopeless psychological bundles of mutually contradictory and illogical thoughts and opinions. This misrepresentation in turn means that the given development project is unlikely to produce successful outcomes, addressing as it does only part of reality.

And in my own personal case, too, I’ve felt the conflict between ambivalence and certainty quite strongly. Up to the last couple of years, I have unintentionally but systematically avoided firm opinions on issues short of the most obvious, especially in domestic politics. My strategy, which my friends/siblings/ex-girlfriends may recognise, has been either to say ‘I don’t know’ when pushed on something, or, if I know something about it, argue fervently against whatever my interlocutor is proposing. Often I’ve literally produced a counter-argument and immediately realised that I don’t actually believe what I’m saying. Some of the time I even have the good humour to admit it. Anyway more recently I’ve decided that facetiously sitting on the fence is not all that productive politics-wise so I’ve been doing things like reading and thinking and writing a blog to try to trace some lines in the sand. But I do get the sense sometimes I’m just arming myself with facts and arguments to shield myself with dogma (even progressive, internationalist, statistics-based dogma) and hide my own ambivalence.

So fittingly I’m not going to come to a conclusion, even one simply arguing for ambivalence. Perhaps proposing ambivalence as a guide when thinking about politics is just a dressed-up defence of ignorance and lack of reflection. But certainly in the narrow context of development policymakers and particularly NGOs constantly searching for results, legitimacy and funding, to recognise the inevitable plurality of potential opinions on even the apparently most certain of facts, will allow them to be more flexible in their offering and to de-centre themselves in the development process.

As O’Connell neatly ends his talk, “Have the courage of your own ambivalence”.