Cornwall and Eade Deconstructing Development Discourse
Cornwall and Eade Deconstructing Development Discourse
Cornwall and Eade Deconstructing Development Discourse
Edited by
Contents
Preface
Deborah Eade
1.
vii
2.
Development as a buzzword
Gilbert Rist
19
3.
29
4.
Poverty reduction
John Toye
45
5.
Social protection
Guy Standing
53
6.
Globalisation
Shalmali Guttal
69
7.
The F-word and the S-word too much of one and not enough
of the other
Cassandra Balchin
8.
9.
81
89
101
111
123
135
143
vi
14. Sustainability
Ian Scoones
15. From the right to development to the rights-based approach:
how human rights entered development
Peter Uvin
16. Civil society
Neera Chandhoke
17. Public advocacy and people-centred advocacy: mobilising for
social change
John Samuel
153
163
175
185
193
203
215
223
231
235
245
25. Corruption
Elizabeth Harrison
257
265
269
281
293
Coda
Deborah Eade
305
Index
307
Preface
Deborah Eade
When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it
means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.
The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so
many different things.
The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master thats all.
(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There,
1871)
Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between
his paws, and began to think. First of all he said to himself: That buzzing
noise means something. You dont get a buzzing noise like that, just
buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something.
(A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926)
The genesis of the special issue of Development in Practice on which this book is
based was the 2004 UNRISD conference Social Knowledge and International
Policy Making, which addressed the role of ideas in shaping policy (Utting
2006). In writing up the official conference report (UNRISD 2004), I was powerfully reminded how deeply the concepts and language of international development are defined by the cultural mindsets of donor agencies, be they
bilateral or multilateral (and hence nominally pluri-cultural). The intellectual contribution and cultures of aid-receiving countries, even those where
English is the medium of higher education, are, as Adebayo Olukoshi points
out, consigned at best to the textboxes of influential reports published by
the World Bank and other UN specialised agencies; on average only two per
cent of the citations in such reports even include any reference to African
research. In this way, scholars in the South are enlisted to provide case studies
to suit the theoretical frameworks and analysis [for the formulation of policy
proposals by] institutions in the North (UNRISD 2004:11). Where English is
not the prime language of scholarship, let alone the language in which most
people communicate, the exclusion is greater still. For instance, Mike Powell
reports finding bilingual, regionally oriented development practitioners in
West Africa struggling to interpret and reconcile the very different development discourses coming out of Anglo-Nordic and Francophone intellectual
traditions (Powell 2006:523).1
If Southern researchers and development practitioners break into the international market, it is increasingly as consultants, whose conceptual frameworks and the language they are expected to use are by definition determined
by the commissioning body. The whole process neatly illustrates Gramscis
notion of cultural hegemony, whereby the values of the ruling culture in
this case, the captains of the Development Industry capture the ideology,
self-understanding, and organisations of the working class in this case, those
whose lives are most significantly affected by international development policies and by the ministrations of development assistance.
It was in the context of these conference discussions that Andrea Cornwall
presented a paper co-authored with Karen Brock, Taking on Board New
Concepts and Buzzwords, in which she dissected the benign-sounding terms
that pepper mainstream development policy and whose use is de rigueur for
anyone working in this field.2 It is acceptable, sometimes expected, to show
a certain critical and even disdainful distance from established shibboleths
such as community or empowerment. But there is no pretending they dont
exist; the rhetorical trick is to demonstrate ones awareness that the meaning
of such words is woolly and imprecise, and then go ahead and employ them,
safely quarantined within inverted commas. Sometimes such terms have been
captured or co-opted by powerful agencies and in the process have lost any
radical or critical edge that they might once have had rather as a bees life is
doomed once it has lost its sting. The aim then is to decide whether the term
has anything left worth saving, or to leave it to its fate. More often, a buzzword
will have a multitude of meanings and nuances, depending on who is using it
and in what context what might be called the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome.3
Or these words appear to convey one thing, but are in practice used to mean
something quite different, or indeed have no real meaning at all. The use of
tough-sounding language does not provide any immunity to the effects of
a deeper ideology. The process by which non-negotiable policies lose their
mandatory power is described by Sarah Hlupekile Longwe in her pithy analysis of the evaporation of gender policies somewhere between SNOWDIDA,
the international co-operation agency of Snowdia, a very isolated nation in
the North, and their application in SNOWDIDAs programme in the Peoples
Republic of Sundia, one of the least-developed countries of Southern Africa
(Hlupekile Longwe 1997: 149).
Remarkably, it has taken only 60 years or so for Developmentspeak, a
peculiar dialect of English, to become the lingua franca of the International
Development Industry. Its pundits inhabit all the major institutions of global
governance, the World Bank as befits its role as the worlds Knowledge Bank
(see the chapter by Robin Broad; also Cohen and Laporte 2004) taking the
lead in shaping the lexicon: burying outmoded jargon, authorising new terminology and permissible slippage, and indeed generating a constant supply of
must-use terms and catchphrases. Its speakers are found in all corners of the
world, giving local inflections to the core concepts, thus making the adoption
of Developmentspeak an essential qualification for entry into the Industry.
PREFACE
ix
Notes
1. Mike Powells introductory overview to his guest issue of Development in
Practice in November 2006 (Volume 16, Number 6) spells out the myriad
ways in which the increasing domination of the development sector by the
English language both excludes those who are not fully fluent in English,
and just as importantly [disempowers] itself by ensuring its ignorance
of vitally (and in the case of China increasingly) important intellectual
traditions. By failing to engage systematically with local languages, the
sector limits its understanding of and its ability to communicate with
most of its intended beneficiaries. Addressing the issue of language fully
would have large financial and organisational implications, but failure to
do so carries the high costs of ignorance and inefficient communication.
If development is to be about life, it has to be able to connect with the
languages in which its beneficiaries live (Powell 2006:523).
2. This paper forms the basis of Cornwall and Brock (2006).
3. The opening quotations clearly betray my middle-class English upbringing
of the early 1960s; I make no apology for this, for it would be sad indeed
if our childhood left us without cultural roots and reference points. Of
course, the fictional works of Lewis Carroll, an Oxford don who was also an
Anglican priest, a logician, and a photographer, and A. A. Milne, an obscure
playwright, assistant editor of the satirical magazine Punch, and author of
References
Cohen, Don and Bruno Laporte (2004) The evolution of the Knowledge
Bank, available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/KFDLP/Resources/
461197-114859 4717965/EvolutionoftheKnowledgeBank.pdf (retrieved 20
March 2007).
Cornwall, Andrea and Karen Brock (2006) The new buzzwords, in Peter
Utting (ed.), pp. 4372.
Hlupekile Longwe, Sarah (1997) The evaporation of gender policies in the
patriarchal cooking pot, Development in Practice 7(2): 14856.
Powell, Mike (2006) Which knowledge? Whose reality? An overview of
knowledge used in the development sector, Development in Practice 16(6):
51832.
UNRISD (2004) Social Knowledge and International Policy Making: Exploring
the Linkages, Report of the UNRISD Conference, Geneva, 2122 April.
Utting, Peter (ed.) (2006) Reclaiming Development Agendas: Knowledge, Power and
International Policy Making, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and UNRISD.
CHAPTER 1
on websites and promotional material, then surely there are more important
things to be done than sit around mulling over questions of semantics?
But language does matter for development. Developments buzzwords are
not only passwords to funding and influence; and they are more than the mere
specialist jargon that is characteristic of any profession. The word development
itself, Gilbert Rist observes, has become a modern shibboleth, an unavoidable
password, which comes to be used to convey the idea that tomorrow things
will be better, or that more is necessarily better. But, as he goes on to note, the
very taken-for-granted quality of development and the same might be said
of many of the words that are used in development discourse leaves much of
what is actually done in its name unquestioned.
Many of the words that have gained the status of buzzwords in development are (or once were) what the philosopher W.B. Gallie (1956) termed
essentially contested concepts: terms that combine general agreement on
the abstract notion that they represent with endless disagreement about what
they might mean in practice. Yet the very contestability of many of the words
in the lexicon of development has been flattened, as Neera Chandhoke suggests for civil society; terms about which there was once vibrant disagreement
have become consensual hurrah-words (Chapter 16). They gain their purchase and power through their vague and euphemistic qualities, their capacity
to embrace a multitude of possible meanings, and their normative resonance.
The work that these words do for development is to place the sanctity of its
goals beyond reproach.
Poverty is, of all the buzzwords analysed in this collection, perhaps the
most compelling in its normative appeal; as John Toye notes, the idea of
poverty reduction itself has a luminous obviousness to it, defying mere mortals
to challenge its status as a moral imperative. The moral unassailability of the
development enterprise is secured by copious references to that nebulous, but
emotive, category the poor and marginalised (Cornwall and Brock 2005).
Similarly, Elizabeth Harrison draws attention to the righteous virtue of anticorruption talk, which she argues makes it virtually immoral to question what
is being labelled corrupt, and by whom. Many of the words that describe the
worlds-in-the-making that development would create have all the warmly
persuasive qualities that Raymond Williams described for community in his
memorable 1976 book Keywords. Among them can be found words that admit
no negatives, words that evoke Good Things that no-one could possibly disagree with. Some evoke futures possible, like rights-based and poverty eradication
(Uvin, Toye). Others carry with them traces of worlds past: participation and
good governance (Leal, Mkwandawire), with their echoes of colonial reformers
like Lord Lugard, the architect of indirect rule; poverty, whose power to stir
the do-gooding Western middle-classes is at least in part due to its distinctly
nineteenth-century feel; and development itself, for all that it has become a
word that Gilbert Rist suggests might be as readily abandoned as recast to do
the work that it was never able to do to make a better world.
Buzzwords as fuzzwords
When ideas fail, words come in very handy. (Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe)
The language of development is, as Fiona Wilson suggests, a hybrid, not quite
the language of social science nor of living English; its vocabulary is restricted, banal and depersonalised. Its underlying purpose, she notes, is not
to lay bare or be unequivocal but to mediate in the interests of political consensus while at the same time allowing for the existence of several internal
agendas (1992: 10). Policies depend on a measure of ambiguity to secure the
endorsement of diverse potential actors and audiences. Buzzwords aid this
process, by providing concepts that can float free of concrete referents, to be
filled with meaning by their users. In the struggles for interpretive power that
characterise the negotiation of the language of policy, buzzwords shelter multiple agendas, providing room for manoeuvre and space for contestation.
Scoones tale of the rise and reinvention of the buzzword sustainability
draws attention to the boundary work (Gieryn 1999) performed by this concept in bridging discursive worlds and the actors who animate them. Scoones
notes that to be effective in this boundary work, remaining contested, ambiguous, and vague is often essential. Yet, as Pablo Leal, Evelina Dagnino,
and Srilatha Batliwala make clear in this volume, it is the very ambiguity of
participation, citizenship, and empowerment that have made them vulnerable
to appropriation for political agendas that are far from those that the social
movements that popularised their use had in mind. Their accounts provide
powerful examples of the politics of meaning, as differently positioned users
put very different versions of these concepts to use.
Leal explores the trajectories of participation, showing how amenable the
term was to pursuit of a neo-liberal policy agenda, and how divorced its mainstream appropriations are from its more radical roots. Dagnino highlights the
perverse confluence that marks the flowing together of neo-liberal and radical democratic meanings of citizenship. Batliwala traces the depoliticisation of
empowerment as it has been converted from an approach that sought to fundamentally alter power relations to a status that constitutes developments latest
magic bullet. She asks (p. 112):
Should we be troubled by what many may consider the inevitable subversion of an attractive term that can successfully traverse such diverse
and even ideologically opposed terrain? I believe we should, because
it represents not some innocent linguistic fad, but a more serious and
subterranean process of challenging and subverting the politics that the
term was created to symbolise.
Ines Smyth explores the morass of competing meanings that have come to
surround the use of another word that has traversed different domains and
ended up depoliticised in the process: gender. Noting the resounding silence
around words such as feminism and feminist, her analysis gives a compelling sense of the lack of fit between organisational imperatives and the
original goals with which gender was associated by feminist scholars and activists. She writes (p. 144):
Real women and men, power and conflict all disappear behind bland
talk of gender, while the language of mainstreaming creates the possibility of orderly tools... and systems through which profoundly internalised beliefs and solidly entrenched structures are miraculously supposed
to dissolve and be transformed.
There are parallels here with Scoones account of how sustainability became subject to the default bureaucratic mode of managerialism [...] and its
focus on action plans, indicators, and the rest (Chapter 14). For all the loss
of momentum and fragmentation that was a casualty of its institutionalisation, however, Scoones argues that sustainability has retained a more overarching, symbolic role of aspiration, vision, and normative commitment. It
is that combination of aspiration, vision, and commitment that, for Smyth,
makes abandoning the term gender altogether less attractive than reanimating
it by harnessing it to terms that might restore some of its original focus on
power relations: rights-based and empowerment.
Rights-based gains much of its allure from the legitimacy that it promises,
grounding development in a more powerful set of normative instruments
than Enlightenment ideals. But, as Peter Uvin contends, what exactly development actors mean when they invoke the language of rights needs to be
closely examined. As he shows, rights-talk may amount to a thin veneer over
development business as usual. Until, as Uvin argues, donors begin to apply
some of their high-moral-ground talk about rights to themselves, rights-talk
risks remaining fluffy and meaningless: akin to what Mick Moore, in his analysis of the World Banks new-found enthusiasm for empowerment, calls cheap
talk: something that one can happily say in the knowledge that it will have
no significant consequences (2001:323).
Reforming relationships
Many of the words that have enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity over the
past decade are those which speak to an agenda for transforming developments relationships. Today, civil society, social capital, and partnership are as
ubiquitous as community, evoking much the same warm mutuality. As Guy
Standing puts it, these kinds of word are intended to invite automatic
approval (Chapter 5); and their rising fortunes have been as much to do with
their feel-good factor as with what they promised to deliver.
Neera Chandhokes account of the rise and rise of civil society shows us what
is lost when buzzwords are domesticated by development agencies. From the
intense differences in perspective that the term once provoked, it has become
like many of the other expressions analysed in this collection emblematic
of something that no-one could reasonably argue against: close, convivial relations of solidarity and self-help, and an essential bulwark against the excesses of the state and the isolation of the individual. The problem, Chandhoke
argues (Chapter 16), is not that these are not part of what can happen in civil
society. It is that projecting normative desires on to actually existing societies
simply serves to obscure the empirical and analytical question of what civil
society actually does and does not do for people. After all, as Chandhoke reminds us, civil society is only as civil as the society that gives rise to it.
Another facet of buzzwords emerges in Ben Fines account of social capital:
their use as substitutes for terms that are far less easily assimilated into a consensual narrative. Of the buzzwords examined in this collection, social capital
is one of the most accommodating: its uses span just about any and every kind
of human relationship, lending it considerable discursive power as a feel-good
catch-all Good Thing. Charting its rise within mainstream development, Fine
shows how it came to be linked to a broader set of personal, institutional,
and professional projects, including that of what he terms economics imperialism. Like civil society, the normative appeal of social capital sits uneasily
with its darker sides; the wrong kind of social capital is, after all, corruption
(Chapter 25).
Miguel Pickards account of partnership captures some of the ambivalence
that accompanies Northern development agencies projection of their own desired self-image onto complex power relations in the South. Pickard also highlights the contradictions of donors demands for an ever-increasing volume of
reporting and planning, with the emphasis on measurable outcomes, and the
realities of working to bring about social change. As Islah Jad contends in her
account of the NGOisation of Palestinian womens movements, the professionalisation and projectisation that have come about in response to these
demands may not only weaken the transformative potential of aid-receiving
organisations, but can also have more far-reaching political consequences. Jad
reminds us that to attribute to NGOs the almost magical democratising properties ascribed to civil society is to overlook the extent to which donor intervention has sapped the energies of once-vibrant movements, as they come to
conform to the strictures of NGOisation (Alvarez 1988).
Riding the wave as the self-proclaimed champions of global civil society,
international non-government agencies have increasingly turned to advocacy
as their new metier. John Samuel shows quite what a mire of meanings now
surrounds the term public advocacy as it has become the latest fad in the NGO
world. Drawing on experiences from India that affirm that advocacy without
mobilisation is likely to be in vain, he argues passionately for a return to a
more people-centred approach (p. 192):
We need to become equal participants in social communication, rather
than playing the role of highly paid experts travelling around with our
ready-made toolkits and frameworks for prescribing the best communication medicine.
Samuel argues that such an approach is grounded in close links with social
movements. Yet, echoing themes emerging in the contributions by Leal, Eade,
Jad, and Batliwala, these links are being lost as advocacy becomes professionalised and the voices of marginalised people are appropriated by urban and
international elites.
Deborah Eades account of capacity building, another buzzword that has
come to be closely associated with international NGOs, poses pithy questions
about exactly what and whose capacities are seen as worth building. Like Leal,
she highlights the left-leaning traditions that originally informed the notion;
and, equally, she notes its usage today in the service of neo-liberalism. By
troubling an idea that seems at first glance so evidently morally commendable, she identifies the paradoxes and hypocrisies that lie at the heart of the
development enterprise. In doing so, she pricks the bubble that surrounds
representations of NGOs in development.
Developments remedies
The disconnects described by Leal, Batliwala, Eade, and Samuel are evident on
a grander scale in the world of official development agencies bilateral and
multilateral donors and development banks. Among the remedies prescribed
by the institutions that populate this world for addressing its manifest failure to achieve its bold and ambitious promises are measures for tackling the
structure of the development industry itself. Some have a direct origin in New
Public Management, such as donors current preoccupation with results.
Others have echoes of projects of governance of earlier times, whether 1960s
budget support or, further back still, the carving up of colonial dominions
between the world powers of the age.
Rosalind Eybens account of harmonisation exposes the quixotic nature of
the aid world. As she points out, there is a certain attractiveness in the logic
of donor co-ordination. Yet in practice, the harmony in harmonisation is an
illusion: instead, she suggests, donors gang up on recipients to drive through
their agendas, becoming cartels with whom it may be imprudent to argue.
Premised on achieving a noiseless consensus on poverty policy that would be
scarcely imaginable in the signatories home countries, the Paris Agenda contributes to neutralising those who might contest it by draining funding from
civil society to channel through direct budget support. Eyben observes some
of the contractions. One is the fate of another prevalent piece of donor rhetoric, country ownership (see Chapter 21); evident in the perverse contradictions
of country-owned but identikit Poverty Reduction Strategies (see Rowden
and Irama 2004). Another is the strange irony that the economists-turnedmanagers who govern Aidland advocate co-operation among themselves on
efficiency grounds, while on exactly the same grounds impose polices based
on principles of competition on their recipients (Severino and Charnoz 2003)
(Chapter 20).
10
the sense of being partial to, as well as consisting of a partial picture of the
representations of the problems of (and, implicitly, the solutions for) development that emerge from this mighty information machine.
11
view of state capacity and fragility. Highlighting the extent to which the term
connotes deviance and aberration from the dominant and supposedly universal (but Western) paradigm of the state, which played a key role in the
development of capitalism, he argues (p. 291):
ultimately, the responsibility for determining when states are no longer
fragile is that of citizens of the countries concerned and not that of benevolent donors and the international development community whose
motivation for supposed state-strengthening interventions is to ensure
that fragile states take their rightful places in the hegemonic global
order.
It is all the more ironic, then, to observe the extent to which another term
that the World Bank launched into circulation country ownership has become
a decorative epithet that promises something quite different from that delivered
by the monoculture of reform. Country ownership would, after all, seem to
posit quite the converse to the institutional recipes of good governance, resonating with the ideals of self-determination that spurred anti-colonial struggles and
shaped post-independence nationalist governments. Such are its evident contradictions, Willem Buiter argues, that it needs to be seen as a term whose time
has gone. As he points out, to conflate the deployment of the term country
ownership by todays development powers with any meaningful opportunity
by developing countries to shape their own development would be a grave mistake. Rather, he comments, country ownership boils down to decisions made
by the few who own the country and, by extension, the compacts that they
make with the international financial institutions.
Among the panaceas that found their way into mainstream development
in the late 1990s, propelled by the good governance agenda, transparency and
accountability are two that achieved instant popularity across the spectrum. In
Foxs analysis of these terms, and the none-too-straightforward relationship
between them, he illuminates another quality of development buzzwords:
their trans-ideological character, which allows them to be appropriated by a
variety of political and policy actors. As such, he observes, these terms become
as amenable to the proponents of New Public Management as to human-rights
activists. Fox draws attention to another property of buzzwords that their apparent universality conceals (p. 245):
One persons transparency is anothers surveillance. One persons accountability is anothers persecution. Where one stands on these issues
depends on where on sits.
Much the same could be said for corruption; quite what and who is judged
to be corrupt is, as Harrison points out, just as much a matter of positionality. Commenting on the growth of a veritable anti-corruption industry geared
at cleaning up the state, she notes the extent to which this has come to deflect attention from the probity of other actors, including development agencies themselves. The ironies of the confluence of anti-corruption efforts with
12
Language matters
If terms that were once calls to mobilisation in pursuit of social justice, or concepts that were good to think and debate with, have been reduced to vague
and euphemistic buzzwords by their incorporation by the development establishment, what is to be done? As Scoones puts it, can an old buzzword be reinvigorated and reinvented for new challenges, or does it need discarding with
something else put its place? Some contributors to this volume would argue
that there are words that are beyond redemption; others would contend that
it is necessary to reclaim some of the associations once conveyed by terms that
are too precious to lose and use them to give mainstreamed buzzwords new
vigour and purpose. Their analyses suggest a variety of strategies and tactics.
13
Another approach is to propel into popularity words whose very dissonance with mainstream development lends them their potential as alternative frames for thought and action. A number of the missing words identified
by Alfini and Chambers like love, peace, respect would seem to fit the bill.
But they share the warm, persuasive qualities of other buzzwords; and they
are no less vague in what they might come to mean. Better, perhaps, to seek
out words that are less ambiguous and which might provoke development
actors out of the complacency of othering the poor. What would it take,
for example, to make pleasure the buzzword of today? As a former bilateral
donor commented, the very idea of talking about pleasure in the context of
development makes me very uncomfortable. This is precisely what is needed,
it might be argued: words that provoke discomfort, that shake people up. Talk
of pleasure takes us beyond monochromatic representations of abjection,
reminding us of the humanity of those whose lives development agencies
would wish to improve.
Pleasure-based approaches suggest more prospect of enhancing well-being
and saving lives than current development models (Jolly 2006). But there is
equally no guarantee that as a result of its incorporation, pleasure would not
become tomorrows freedom.
14
Constructive deconstruction
Tackling what Guy Standing (2001) calls developments linguistic crisis, some
might argue, calls for more than tactical resistance and for making the most
of the room for manoeuvre offered by the appropriation of the language of
social movements by the development establishment. What would it take to
rehabilitate words that have been reduced to feel-good fuzzwords, to turn the
uneasy silence of consensus into vigorous debate, and to revive denatured and
depoliticised buzzwords?
Constructive deconstruction the taking apart of the different meanings
that these words have acquired as they have come to be used in development discourse provides an opportunity for reflection, which is a vital first
step towards their rehabilitation. By making evident the variant meanings
that popular development buzzwords carry, this process can bring into view
dissonance between these meanings. If the use of buzzwords as fuzzwords
conceals ideological differences, the process of constructive deconstruction
reveals them: and, with this, opens up the possibility of reviving the debates
that once accompanied the use of bland catch-all terms like civil society and social capital. And if this is accompanied, as in the genealogical accounts in this
and Sachs collections, with tracing their more radical meanings, it can also
help to wrest back more radical usages of even some of the most corrupted of
terms in the current development lexicon, such as empowerment.
What this requires is not only close attention to meaning. It also calls for a
disentanglement of the normative and the empirical, a focus on actual social
practices rather than wishful thinking (Chapter 2). This can clear the ground
for the more politicised and indeed explicitly normative discussion that Leal
proposes in this volume for participation when he asks (p. 97):
What exactly do we wish to participate in? Can we continue to accept a
form of participation that is simply added on to any social project, i.e.
15
neo-liberal modernisation and development, creating an alibi for development by transferring ownership to the poor in the name of empowerment? Or should participation be re-located in the radical politics of
social transformation by reaffirming its counter-hegemonic roots?
Such a process, as Rist argues for development, would enable us to be aware
of its inclusion in a corpus of beliefs that are difficult to shatter, expose its
mischievous uses, and denounce its consequences. Dislocating naturalised
meanings, dislodging embedded associations, and de-familiarising the language that surrounds us becomes, then, a means of defusing the hegemonic
grip in Gramscis (1971) sense of the word hegemony, as unquestioned acceptance that certain ideas have come to exert in development policy and
practice.
16
Conclusion
Different words, different contexts, different actors, and different struggles call
for different strategies: some combination of any or all of those outlined here
may be required at some times and for some purposes. As the contributions to
this volume make clear, engagement with developments language is far more
than a matter of playing games with words. These reflections on the language
of development evoke bigger questions about the world-making projects that
they define and describe. Pablo Leal contends: our primary task is, as it should
always have been, not to reform institutional development practice but to
transform society. Whether development has a place in that process of transformation may come to depend on our willingness to resignify it.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Deborah Eade, Ian Scoones, Fiona Wilson, and Karen
Brock for their contributions to the arguments developed here, and Robert
Chambers for all the conversations we have had about our shared interest in
development language over the years.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
For further information about England, see www.victorianweb.org antipoverty policies in Elizabethan /history/poorlaw/elizpl.html.
Although Internet searches failed to track down a site dedicated to
developments buzzwords, there are numerous others devoted to the
management-speak that is becoming pervasive in development
institutions. See, for example, the Official Bullshit Generator at www.
erikandanna.com/Humor/bullshit_generator.htm and the Systematic Buzz Phrase Projector at www.acronymfinder.com/buzzgen.
asp?Num=111&DoIt=Again. My personal favourite is the Elizabethan
Buzzword Generator at www.red-bean.com/kfogel/hypespeare.html And
you can send your most reviled buzzword to www.buzzwordhell.com.
La langue du bois, the language of evasion, has its own generator: www.
presidentielle-2007.net/generateur-de-langue-de-bois.php.
To take an example, in a major 2003 report on inequality in Latin America
and the Caribbean, senior bank staff including the Vice-President and
Chief Economist for the region conclude that breaking with the long
history of inequality in Latin America depends on strong leadership and
broad coalitions ... to mobilise the political agency of progressive governments and the poor. See http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/LAC/LAC.
nsf/PrintView/4112F1114F594B4B85256DB3005DB262?Open document.
17
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Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Alvarez, Sonia (1998) The NGOization of Latin American feminisms in S.
Alvarez, E. Dagnino and A. Escobar (eds.) Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, Boulder, CO: Westview.
Aug, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
London: Verso.
Cornwall, A. (2000) Beneficiary, Consumer, Citizen: Perspectives on Participation
for Poverty Reduction, Stockholm: Sida Studies 2.
Cornwall, A. and K. Brock (2005) What do buzzwords do for development
policy? A critical look at participation, empowerment and poverty reduction, Third World Quarterly, 26 (7): 104360.
Foucault, M. (1991) Governmentality, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller
(eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press.
Gallie, W.B. (1956) Essentially contested concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56: 1679.
Gieryn, T. (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line, Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press.
Goodman, Nelson (1978) Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selec tions from the Prison Notebooks, London:
Lawrence & Wishart.
Hajer, Maarten (1993) Discourse coalitions and the institutionalisation of
practice, in F. Fischer and J. Forester (eds.) The Argumentative Turn in Policy
Analysis and Planning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jolly, Susie (2006) Sexuality and Development, IDS Policy Briefing, Issue 29.
Laclau, Ernesto (1997) The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology,
MLN 112.3: 297321.
Moore, Mick (2001) Empowerment at last?, Journal of International Development 13 (3): 3219.
Presley, Cora Ann (1988) The Mau Mau rebellion, Kikuyu women, and social
change, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des tudes
Africaines 22(3:) 502-27.
Rowden, R. and J. Irama (2004) Rethinking Participation: Questions for
Civil Society about the Limits of Participation in PRSPs, Washington, DC:
ActionAid International.
Sen, Gita (2004) The Relationship of Research to Activism in the Making of
Policy: Lessons from Gender and Development, paper prepared for the
UNRISD conference on Social Knowledge and International Development
Policy: Exploring the Linkages, Geneva, 2122 April.
Severino, J.-M. and O. Charnoz (2003) A paradox of development, Revue
dconomie du Dveloppement 17(4): 7797.
Sachs, Wolfgang (1992) The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as
Power, London: Zed Books.
Standing, Guy (2001) Globalization: The Eight Crises of Social Protection,
Geneva: ILO.
18
Standing, Hilary (2004) Gender, myth and fable: the perils of mainstreaming
in sector bureaucracies, IDS Bulletin, 35(4): 828.
Williams, Raymond (1976) Keywords, London: Picador.
Wilson, Fiona (1992) Faust: The Developer, CDR Working Paper 92.5.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig von ([1953] 2001) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford:
Blackwell.
CHAPTER 2
Development as a buzzword
Gilbert Rist
Despite its widespread usage, the meaning of the term development remains
vague, tending to refer to a set of beliefs and assumptions about the nature of
social progress rather than to anything more precise. After presenting a brief history of the term, the author argues that not only will development fail to address
poverty or to narrow the gap between rich and poor, but in fact it both widens
and deepens this division and ultimately creates poverty, as natural resources
and human beings alike are increasingly harnessed to the pursuit of consumption and profit. The survival of the planet will depend upon abandoning the
deep-rooted belief that economic growth can deliver social justice, the rational
use of environment, or human well-being, and embracing the notion that there
would be a better life for all if we moved beyond development.
20
of genius turned the two antagonists colonisers vs. colonised into seemingly equal members of the same family, henceforth considered either more
or less developed. The dominant view was that time but also money and
political will would suffice to fill the gap between the two sides.
This global promise of generalised happiness had immediate appeal, not
only for those who expected an improvement of their living conditions, but
also for those who were committed to international social justice. In other
words, development with all the hopes and expectations that it conveyed
was at first taken very seriously, even by those who were later to count among
its critics. As Teresa Hayter recalls, in the 1960s there was little attempt [...]
to define development. Instead, there was an unquestioned assumption []
that development, whatever it was, could lead to improvement in the situation of poor people (Hayter 2005: 89). This comment gives a clue to the
reasons why the word development started buzzing in dominant parlance:
it rested on a mere albeit unquestioned assumption, and no one cared to
define it properly. Both elements characterise a buzzword: an absence of real
definition, and a strong belief in what the notion is supposed to bring about.4
Development therefore became a sort of performative word: saying by doing.
Any measure (foreign investment, lowering or raising of trade barriers,
well-digging, literacy campaigns, and the like) was from now on justified in
the name of development, making even the most contradictory policies look
as if they were geared to improving the lives of poor people. This extensive
use of the term development to delineate policies that were assumed to be
necessarily good also helped to build up new schemas for perceptions of reality. In other words, development was no longer considered a social construct
or the result of political will, but rather the consequence of a natural world
order5 that was deemed just and desirable. This trick which is at the root of
what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence6 has been highly instrumental in
preventing any possible critique of development, since it was equated almost
with life itself.
Development also did sterling service during the Cold War period. At that
time, the Great Powers disagreed on almost all issues except one: development, the magic word that reconciled opposite sides. Its necessity and desirability were not debatable, and the two ideological adversaries vied with each
other in promoting it across what was then known as the Third World. To be
sure, there was some shared and genuine intention to improve the lot of the
poor, viewed as potentially interesting future customers of the industrialised
countries, but beyond the routine discourse on the challenge of our times,
development was mainly used as an excuse for enticing developing countries to side with one camp or the other. No wonder, therefore, that this political game turned to the advantage of the ruling elites who were influential in
international arenas, rather than grassroots populations. But this lasted only
for a time, since it was easy to see through. Progressively, white elephants
and gargantuan projects came under criticism and, after two development
decades promulgated under the auspices of the United Nations had failed
DEVELOPMENT AS A BUZZWORD
21
to deliver the goods, a generalised development fatigue overcame both developed and developing countries.
The buzz seemed to fade away, but the catchword had proved so helpful in sanctifying so many different ventures and in giving them an aura of
legitimacy that every effort had to be made to restore its former lustre. This
was indeed no easy task, but the solution was found by adding to the word
development a series of adjectives that were supposed to dignify it. Thanks to
the experts imagination, development was successively qualified as endogenous, human, social, and, eventually, sustainable as if, when standing
alone, development had become a dirty word. Why was it suddenly necessary to specify that development had to be human? Was it a form of tacit
avowal that, left to its plain meaning, it could also be inhuman? This might
have been the case, but no one seriously raised the question.
The height of absurdity was reached when the Brundtland Commission
(WCED 1987) tried to reconcile the contradictory requirements to be met in
order to protect the environment from pollution, deforestation, the greenhouse effect, and climatic change and, at the same time, to ensure the pursuit
of economic growth that was still considered a condition for general happiness. This impossible task resulted in the coining of the catchy phrase sustainable development, which immediately achieved star status.7 Unfortunately it
only meant exchanging one buzzword for another. Sustainable development
became a global slogan that all could readily endorse, and one that was sufficiently vague to allow different, often incompatible interpretations (South
Centre 2002:15). Again, it is impossible to bring together a real concern for
environment and the promotion of development. Sustainable development
is nothing but an oxymoron, a rhetorical figure that joins together two opposites such as capitalism with a human face or humanitarian intervention.8
The defenders of the environment and of economic growth respectively were
both eager to claim that they drew their inspiration from the same notion,
which could be used for different purposes. Hence the battle to define what
sustainable development is really about. But Brundtlands plea for a new
era of economic growth was certainly not in favour of those who considered environmental sustainability a top priority. It is true that concern for
protecting the environment has grown recently, but this can hardly be attributed to the popularity enjoyed by the idea of sustainable development. If
an increasing number of people everywhere and at all levels of society feel
that something has to be done to lessen the impact of human activity on the
biosphere, this is rather due to the mounting environmental crises that we
are witnessing, from recurrent hurricanes to the melting icecap, or from progressive desertification of large inhabited areas to urban pollution. And yet,
development be it sustainable or not remains high on the agenda, and no
one seems about to forsake it.
So far, I have concentrated on the reasons why development has survived
despite (or because of) its ambiguities. But its persistence as a vogue word
in economic and political discourse also rests on an even more important
22
foundation, namely that development corresponds to a generalised and firmly rooted modern belief. Without entering into too much theoretical detail,
it should be remembered that, according to Durkheim, no society can exist
without religion, since religion is an eminently social thing and religious representations express collective realities (Durkheim 1995:9). Religion, in this
sense, has therefore nothing to do with the commonsense view that associates it with the idea of the supernatural or with intimate personal convictions
regarding the existence of God and with attendance at church or mosque. It
relates to the belief of a given social group in certain indisputable truths, a
belief that determines compulsory behaviour in such a way as to strengthen
social cohesion (Rist 1997: 20). In any (democratic) society, various ideologies, whether or not they are related to political parties, are tolerated; but, in
Durkheims sense, religious beliefs are, as it were, above ideologies; they are
shared by all, as everyone believes that any person belonging to the social
group also shares these beliefs (despite possible private disagreement). They
are beyond dispute and entail various practices on the part of believers who
cannot evade them without endangering the cohesion of the group or risking
being considered social outcasts.
This summary account of the concept of religion should help to explain
why development can be considered one of the indisputable truths that
pervade our modern world.9 Whatever their ideological creed, no politician
would dare to run on an election platform that ignores economic growth or
development, which is supposed to reduce unemployment and create new
jobs and well-being for all. Small investors and ordinary people expect an
increase in profits or wages that is supposed to follow a secular trend. Development has become a modern shibboleth, an essential password for anyone
who wishes to improve their standard of living.
A down-to-earth definition
The undeniable success of development, linked to its undeniable failures in
improving the condition of the poor, therefore needs to be called into question.10 The time has come to get rid of this buzzword and demystify the beliefs
associated with it. To neutralise the damaging power of a buzzword amounts
to producing a down-to-earth definition that plainly states what it is all about
and what it actually promotes. In this particular case, the difficulty lies in
the a priori positive meaning of the word development, which derives both
from its supposedly natural existence and from its inclusion in a cluster of
unquestionable shared beliefs. This is why those who are ready to recognise
that development has not really kept its promises are also loath to discard the
notion altogether. Failures, they would say, do not result from development
itself, but rather from erroneous interpretation or ill-considered implementation. Even in the most dramatic situations it is always possible to appeal to the
presumed existence of a good development. After all, God himself may not
DEVELOPMENT AS A BUZZWORD
23
answer all our prayers or grant all our requests, but his righteousness remains
beyond doubt...
So, to formulate a proper, sociological, definition of development, one
has to put aside its emotional and normative connotations and also to incorporate all the external characteristics which anyone can observe that are
related to the subject matter. In other words, the definition of development
should not be based on what one thinks it is or what one wishes it to be, but
on actual social practices and their consequences, i.e. things that anyone can
identify. What needs to be highlighted is an historical process that concerns
not only the countries of the South, or only operations conducted under the
umbrella of development co-operation, which started some two centuries
ago and continuously transforms our world.11
On this basis and to put it in a nutshell, my definition reads as follows:
the essence of development is the general transformation and destruction of the
natural environment and of social relations in order to increase the production of
commodities (goods and services) geared, by means of market exchange, to effective
demand. This formulation may appear scandalous compared with the wishful
thinking that usually characterises definitions of development. But I contend
that it truly reflects the actual process observable when a country or a region is
developing. (For a more detailed formulation, see Rist 1997: 1218.)
First, as far as the natural environment is concerned, it is well documented
that the industrialisation process in England took place alongside the enclosure movement. In other words, open fields or commons that anyone could
use became private property, to be bought or sold. Development starts when
land is transformed into what Polyani (1957) calls a fictitious commodity,
and when the natural environment is turned into a resource. The progress
of the Industrial Revolution, along with increased demand for energy, led to
the exploitation of new mineral and non-renewable resources. Ore was transformed into steel to be used in the production of new objects, and oil was
transformed into exhaust gas: in both cases, destruction is the reverse side of
production a fact that goes unnoticed by the economist since recycling is
either problematic (requiring new energy costs) or impossible. And, of course,
the whole process ends up in increased pollution. But the exploitation of the
natural environment does not stop there. Anything can be converted into a
commodity and, therefore, into an opportunity for profit. Hence the tremendous efforts made by transnational corporations in favour of licensing procedures to appropriate all kinds of living organisms and biodiversity generally.
The best-known example is that of farmers who are no longer able to use part
of the previous harvest to sow their crops and are forced to buy new seed every
year. A country is the more developed the more limited the number of free
things that are available: to spend an afternoon on the beach, to go fishing,
or enjoy cross-country skiing is nowadays impossible unless one is prepared
to pay for it.
With regard to social relations, the picture is no different, since these are
also subject to the rule of commodity and exploitation. The major change
24
DEVELOPMENT AS A BUZZWORD
25
confers on a tiny minority are not enough to justify its continuing acceptance, in view of the lethal dangers that it entails. This is being progressively,
if reluctantly, admitted. The question therefore remains: given the amount of
information that scientists have gathered on the manifold natural (actually
human-made) hazards that may impinge on our daily lives, why is it that we
do not believe in what we know to be certain? The answer, probably, lies in
the fact that our belief in development is still too strong to be undermined by
scientific certainty. Our collective behaviour is strangely determined by what
Levy-Bruhl, almost a century ago, described as the pre-logical mentality held
to be characteristic of primitive peoples! A radical change of mind is therefore required in order to anticipate possible or likely catastrophes. The idea
is not to revive the figure of the prophet of doom, nor to wring ones hands,
but to take the impending catastrophe so seriously that it will eventually not
happen (Dupuy 2002): just as the Japanese anticipate earthquakes or tsunamis, take catastrophes for granted, adapt their behaviour to this conviction
and enforce anti-seismic construction standards so that, when earthquakes
actually occur, casualties are minimal in comparison with what would happen in other countries. From then on, we must resort to the heuristic of fear,
to anticipate what we might experience when the worst happens, in order to
prevent it from happening, instead of deluding ourselves with the unverified
idea, implicit in the notion of development, that tomorrow things will be
better.
A change could be conceivable if we recall the Amerindian wisdom that
teaches us that we hold the Earth in trust for our children. But it also entails
changes in our daily life, particularly in the Northern hemisphere. These are
often presented, in a moralistic tone, as a way of vindicating austerity or as a
rationing process. But these measures should be considered not as entailing
a loss, but rather a gain: there is a positive side to restoring a sense of limits.
Instead of viewing development as the history of progress, we could also look
upon it as eine Verlustsgeschichte, a history of successive losses which, again,
mainly concerns not only the natural environment, but also social bonds and
conviviality.12
The time has come and it is indeed high time to debunk the development buzzword. To do so means that we must define it properly relying
on actual social practices, rather than wishful thinking. We must be aware
of its inclusion in a corpus of beliefs that are difficult to shatter, expose its
mischievous uses, and denounce its consequences. The most important thing,
however, is to make it plain that there is life after development certainly a
different one from what we in the privileged regions are used to, but there is
no evidence to suggest that we would lose on such a deal.
Notes
1.
26
DEVELOPMENT AS A BUZZWORD
27
References
Bourdieu, Pierre (1980) Le sens pratique, Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre (2002) Pour un catastrophisme clair. Quand limpossible est
certain, Paris: Le Seuil.
Durkheim, Emile (1995) [1912] The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New
York, NY: The Free Press.
Hayter, Teresa (2005) Secret diplomacy uncovered: research on the World
Bank in the 1960s and 1980s, in Uma Kothari (ed.) Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies, London: Zed Books.
Perrot, Marie-Dominique, Fabrizio Sabelli, and Gilbert Rist (1992) La mythologie programme. Lconomie des croyances dans la socit moderne, Paris: PUF.
Polanyi, Karl (1957) [1944] The Great Transformation, The Political and Economic
Origins of Our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Prksen, Uwe (1995) Plastic Words: The Tyranny of Modular Language, Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press [trans. Die Plastikwrter. Die
Diktatur einer internationalen Sprache, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1989].
Rist, Gilbert (1997) The History of Development, From Western Origins to Global
Faith, London: Zed Books.
Rist, Gilbert (ed.) (2002) Les mots du pouvoir, Sens et non-sens de la rhtorique
internationale, Nouveaux Cahiers de lIUED, no 13, Paris and Geneva: PUF/
IUED.
Rist, Gilbert (2006) Before thinking about What Next: prerequisites for alternatives, Development Dialogue (special issue What Next) 1(47): 6596.
Seabrook, Jeremy (1988) The Race for Riches: The Human Cost of Wealth,
Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering.
South Centre (2002) The South and Sustainable Development Conundrum, Geneva:
South Centre.
World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) Our Common
Future, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, with an introduction by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
CHAPTER 3
Introduction
In language we coordinate our behaviour, and together in language we
bring forth our world. (Fritjof Capra 1996: 282)
The prevailing words and expressions in development discourse keep changing. Some become perennials, long-term survivors year after year, like poverty,
gender, sustainable, and livelihood. Others have their day and then fade, like
scheme and integrated rural development. Yet others mark major shifts in ideology, policy, and reality, as have liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation.
There is, too, a vocabulary to mock these fashions in the lexicon of development; we talk of the alphabet soup of acronyms and the PC (politically correct)
buzzwords that are flavours of the month in development-speak. During lectures,
development students play Development Bingo,1 ticking off combinations of
the latest vogue words and weasel words as a speaker uses them: capacity building, harmonisation, good governance, transparency, accountability and the like,
startling speakers and waking up colleagues with cries of Development! when
a column is complete.
An Internet search provides several definitions of buzzword: a word or
phrase that takes on added significance through repetition or special usage;
a word or phrase connected with a specialised field or group that usually
sounds important and is used primarily to impress lay persons; and a stylish
or trendy word or phrase. In recent decades, the English forms of buzzwords
30
WORDS COUNT
31
1997 Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century, White
Paper on International Development, Cmnd. 3789, Department for International Development, London: HMSO, November.
This paper re-orients overseas aid towards the target for aid contributions
of 0.7 per cent of GNP. It links development to human rights and stresses
the need for public understanding about global mutual dependence and
the benefits that poverty elimination would bring to the world.
2000 Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor,
White Paper on International Development, Cmnd. 5006, Department for
International Development, London: HMSO, December.
This paper stands alongside the 1997 White Paper by setting out an
agenda for managing the processes of globalisation to achieve poverty reduction. It raises many issues related to globalisation, portrayed as having
the potential to make or break development. It advocates good globalisation policies, building efficient governments and effective markets, and
raising the UKs rate of aid contributions to 0.7 per cent of GNP.
2006 Eliminating World Poverty: Making Governance Work for the Poor,
White Paper on International Development, Cm 6876, Department for
International Development, London: HMSO, July.
This paper presents a four-pronged approach to poverty reduction:
strengthening good governance in poor countries; increasing aid funds
(doubling aid to Africa); mitigating and preventing impacts of climate
change; and reforming international development systems, such as
the United Nations. Along with reducing poverty, it stresses developments role in building security and reducing violent conflict, including terrorism.4
32
Findings
We were struck by the fact that the top 20s include nouns like country, world,
aid, and poverty and general adjectives like public and international, but very
few of what would typically be considered buzzwords. Exceptions could be
community in 1975, sustainable and partnership in 1997, and global in 2000.
There are notable shifts in these top 20s over time. First, descriptions of the
political and international context changed. Countries receiving assistance,
mainly Colonial, Commonwealth, and newly independent in 1960, became overseas (1967), and then developing (19752006). In 2006 developing lost some
ground, but Africa appeared for the first time, in twelfth place. People first
entered the top 20 in 1975 and then continued to score, ranking fifth in 2006.
Astonishingly, the poor were entirely absent from the 1960 text and barely
mentioned in 1967. The United Kingdom (1960) became Britain (1967), disappeared in 1975 and 1997, and resurfaced in 2000 and 2006 as the UK. World
33
WORDS COUNT
Table 1. Assistance from the United Kingdom for Overseas Development (1960) (Total words
in document = 4973)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rank
Word
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18*
18*
United Kingdom
assist/s/ance
country/ies
Kingdom
loan/s
Colonial
Commonwealth
development
overseas
technical
Government/s
international
provide/s/ed/ing
fund/s
invest/ed/ment
bank/s
territory/ies
private
economic
independent
Number
78
72
66
63
37
36
33
28
26
26
25
24
23
21
20
19
18
16
15
15
1.57
1.45
1.33
1.27
0.74
0.72
0.66
0.56
0.52
0.52
0.50
0.48
0.46
0.42
0.40
0.38
0.36
0.32
0.30
0.30
* subscription/s and training/ed also occur 15 times, and so are jointly ranked 18 with the
last two words in the list.
Characteristic sentence:
The assistance provided by the United Kingdom for overseas development is
mainly to Colonial territories and newly independent countries of the Commonwealth, and while primarily economic as loans to governments, funds
subscribed to international banks, and private investment also includes
technical assistance and training.
became a regular member of the top 20 from 1975, and international scored
among the top four from 1997 onwards, reflecting perhaps an expanded consciousness of international co-operation and the increased importance of multilateral organisations like the World Bank.
Second, there are shifts in the terminology of aid. The highest-scoring word
and its cognates began as assistance (1960) and then became aid (1967 and
1975), support (1997 and 2000), and finally help (2006). The most mentioned
means of aid also changed. In 1960, discussion began in terms of loans and
investment plans. Thereafter, these terms all but disappeared from the top 20s
34
Table 2. Overseas Development: The Work in Hand (1967) (Total words in document = 46,
237)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rank
Word
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
country/ies
British
overseas
aid/s/ed/ing
development
ministry/s
government/s
assist/s/ed/ing/ance
technical
provid/es/ed/ing
developing
programme/s
train/s/ed/ing
university/ies
service/s
economic/s/ally/ist/ists/; economy/ies
Britain/s
help/s/ed/ing
staff
research
Number
422
343
289
280
279
263
236
204
177
166
164
156
156
151
146
144
142
123
120
117
0.91
0.71
0.64
0.61
0.60
0.57
0.51
0.44
0.38
0.36
0.35
0.33
0.33
0.33
0.32
0.31
0.31
0.27
0.27
0.25
Characteristic sentence:
Britains overseas aid to developing countries provides help through programmes and schemes for economic development, technical assistance, training services for staff of government ministries, courses in British universities,
and research.
(investment resurfaced once, in 2000). The 1975 emphasis on schemes and programmes indicates support for activities that were geographically or sectorally
bounded. Policy appeared first in 1975, rose in 1997 and 2000, but dropped
out in 2006, perhaps in part replaced by public services. In addition to economic inputs, aid provided technical assistance and training (including education)
in 1960 and 1967, indicating a focus of the decolonisation process early on.
In 1975 the principal term used was education. Training and education did not
score later, perhaps subsumed in the 2000s under the term capacity building.
Rural, poorest, and food are all one-hit wonders in the 1975 top 20s, reflecting
the short-term nature of the response to the food crisis of the time.
35
WORDS COUNT
Table 3. Overseas Development: The Changing Emphasis in British Aid Policies. More Help for
the Poorest (1975) (Total words in document = 24, 104)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rank
Word
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
14
15
16
17
17
17
country/ies
aid
development
developing
poorest
rural
food
programme/s
need/s
community
government/s
world/s
scheme/s
income/s
provide/d
assistance
help
fund/s
policy/ies
produc/tive/tivity/tion/ing
Number
392
230
190
178
134
117
96
94
74
69
66
65
63
60
60
58
56
55
55
55
1.63
0.95
0.79
0.74
0.56
0.49
0.40
0.39
0.31
0.29
0.27
0.27
0.26
0.25
0.25
0.24
0.23
0.23
0.23
0.23
Characteristic sentence:
Government assistance will provide funds and other resources to help meet
short and long term needs of the poorest developing countries and low income communities, with support to rural development schemes, education
projects and international aid including the World Food Programme.
Counts also shed light on the changes that aid was intended to achieve. In
1975 poorest burst into the top 20 at fifth place, despite the fact that even poor
had been scarcely mentioned earlier. From 1997 onwards, concern focused on
poor people and poverty. Poverty elimination was the overarching goal in 1997,
which in the text, though not the title, shifted to poverty reduction in 2000.
(Elimination is used 10 times, whereas reduction is used 99 times in 2000. In
2006 elimination is used only once, in the title, and reduction is used 23 times.)
Need first appeared in 1975 and reappeared in 1997 and 2006. Right(s) featured
only in 1997. Until 1997 the environment did not score (it barely enters into
previous White Papers at all). It remained in 2000 and then was supplanted
by climate in 2006.
36
Table 4. Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century (DFID) (1997) (Total
words in document = 26, 375)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rank
Word
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
16
17
18
development
country/ies
international
developing
support/s/ed/ing
poor
government/s
people/s
poverty
world/s
policy/ies
environment/s/al/ally
sustainable/ability
economic
right/s
resource/s
partner/s/ship/ships
need/s
help/s/ed/ing
assistance
Number
334
330
146
139
131
123
118
117
112
100
100
95
91
80
78
77
77
72
70
69
1.27
1.25
0.55
0.53
0.50
0.47
0.45
0.44
0.42
0.38
0.38
0.36
0.35
0.30
0.30
0.29
0.29
0.27
0.27
0.26
Characteristic sentence:
Sustainable development to eliminate poverty requires support for human
rights, and international help with more resources of development assistance in
partnership with developing countries, ensuring that government and world
economic policies address the needs of poor people and the environment.
gender
economic
agriculture/al
urban
37
WORDS COUNT
Table 5. Eliminating World Poverty: Making Globalisation Work for the Poor (2000) (Total
words in document = 39, 222)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rank
Word
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
17
18
19
country/s/ies
development
developing
international
government/s
poor
UK/s
poverty
world/s
policy/ies
people/s
trade
invest/ed/ing/ment/ments
environment/s/al/ally
DFID
global
support/s/ed/ing
finance/ial/ed/ially/ing
effective/ly/ness
globalization
Number
631
363
264
237
219
197
190
171
169
160
158
149
141
131
129
124
108
108
106
99
1.61
0.93
0.67
0.60
0.56
0.50
0.48
0.44
0.43
0.41
0.40
0.38
0.36
0.33
0.33
0.32
0.28
0.28
0.27
0.25
Characteristic sentence:
Since globalisation leads to international development with potential for
poverty reduction, the UK Government will support global policies that
assist developing countries to benefit from world trade, investment and
finance and build effective governments which support poor people and
the environment.
Discussion
The words women and gender follow similar patterns. Until 1997 women was
low and gender non-existent. Both peaked in 1997, and then dropped by more
than half in 2000 (when the focus was globalisation). Interestingly, women has
been used consistently almost three times as often as gender, despite concerns
by some that the Gender and Development (GAD) agenda had shifted attention away from women in development (Cornwall et al. 2004).
Industry showed the expected decline over the whole period, as industrialisation became a less favoured strategy, while agriculture rose to a plateau
in 1967 and 1975, dropped in 1997, and declined to another plateau in 2000
38
Table 6. Eliminating World Poverty: Making Governance Work for the Poor (2006) (Total words
in document = 39, 822)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Rank
Word
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
country/ies/s
help/ing/ed/s
international
development
people/s
world/s
UK
developing
government/s
support/s/ed/ing
aid
Africa/n
work
poverty
poor
service/s
public
need/s
bank/s
climate
Number
452
307
293
273
248
218
204
195
184
183
158
154
151
151
133
131
124
124
123
120
1.14
0.77
0.74
0.69
0.62
0.55
0.51
0.49
0.46
0.46
0.40
0.39
0.38
0.38
0.33
0.33
0.31
0.31
0.31
0.30
Characteristic sentence:
Poverty reduction requires international development efforts to help
strengthen governments in developing countries (supporting poor peoples
access to public services), increase international aid (doubling G8 countries
aid to Africa), tackle climate change, and reform international development
systems such as the World Bank to better fit the needs of todays world.
woman/en/s
gender
social
economic
agricultur/al
industry/ial
urban
rural
1960
1967
1975
1997
2000
2006
0.02
0.00
0.14
0.30
0.10
0.20
0.00
0.00
0.03
0.00
0.06
0.22
0.21
0.11
0.00
0.01
0.02
0.00
0.08
0.15
0.19
0.07
0.12
0.49
0.17
0.06
0.15
0.30
0.09
0.05
0.04
0.04
0.07
0.02
0.14
0.21
0.05
0.03
0.01
0.02
0.08
0.01
0.14
0.21
0.07
0.02
0.01
0.03
WORDS COUNT
39
and 2006. Rural was low in 1960 and 1967, but then rose to a dramatic peak
in 1975, immediately after the oil-price shock and concurrent drop in world
food stocks. It was then on a much lower plateau through 1997, 2000, and
2006. Apart from a notable rise in 1997, urban features little throughout the
White Papers.
Economic was about twice as commonly used as social until 2000, when it
dropped by a third. It is still more used than social, which rose in 1997 and
subsequently maintained its position (similar to where it started in 1960).
Analysis
This simple analysis cannot pretend to give detailed insights into British aid
policy. But it does confirm and illuminate changes over time. The increasing
length of White Papers can be interpreted as in part reflecting the growth
in knowledge and specialisation as development has evolved into its own
industry over the years. Word frequency indicates and illustrates the trend
of British aid towards the international, with a steady shift away from the
narrow 1960 emphasis on the BritainCommonwealth relationship to the
attention given in 2006 to reorganising international development systems
like the UN. Or again, 1997 was a time of prominence for social issues in development, as indicated by the new words that appeared or rose in its top 20,
for example rights, partnership, poor, people, sustainability, environment, and
gender. The paired words women/gender and social/economic all also peaked in
1997. This was the first White Paper to use all words on the word-pair list,
and it used them all proportionately more than the 2000 and 2006 papers. In
part this is explained by the 2000 and 2006 focus on themes globalisation
and governance respectively and in part by the social orientation of the
new Labour government in 1997 and the radical influence of then Secretary
of State for International Development, Clare Short. Then, after the socially
oriented rhetoric of 1997, the 2000 White Paper assumes a more practicalsounding tone, using words like reduction and effectiveness.
This word analysis raises other intriguing questions and conjectures. Why,
for example, do some words disappear or not appear at all? What is not noted
or said may be as significant as what is. Why is Iraq never mentioned in the
2006 White Paper? A strength of the word-search technology is being able to
confirm guesses about what is not there.
There remains the issue of the use of buzzwords. Although the top-20 analysis does not adequately pick this up, a reading of the White Papers gives the
impression that their use has increased over this period (19602006). One can
speculate whether word-counts of policy documents can reveal more now, in
the early twenty-first century, than in the past. If, as findings of this study suggest, the international dimension is becoming more central to development
policy, then there could perhaps be more value attributed to the use of the
same standard lexicon. There have been many calls, such as the Rome Declaration (RomeHLF 2003), for harmonisation of lender and donor policies. As
40
0.50%
0.40%
woman/en/s
gender
social
economic
agricultur/al
industry/ial
urban
rural
0.30%
0.20%
0.10%
0.00%
1960
1967
1975
1997
2000
2006
donors engage in this, do they also harmonise their vocabulary and syntax so
that they are not only singing from the same hymn sheet, but also singing
the same tune? The question is whether harmonisation drives standardisation
and a narrowing of vocabulary, with more use of the same fewer words. If so,
this is likely to reduce diversity, choice, and subtlety of expression. Too much
standardisation may also lead to new hegemonies.
An example is provided by the OECD Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (DAC 2005). In this, the density of keywords is striking.8 An appropriate
characteristic sentence to describe it reads as follows:
To monitor indicators of effective performance from aid, donors and partners
need the capacity to manage the mutual harmonisation of programmes and
to assess, measure and report on results.
Paradigmatically, this presents a mechanistic world without people, where
aid effectiveness is achieved through topdown, standardised bureaucratic
norms, with measurements and upwards reporting. A shadow sentence of
words never used in the Declaration might read:
To negotiate and evolve agreements that optimise outcomes for poor, vulnerable, and marginalised people requires compromises and trade-offs based
on personal conviction, interactions, and relationships that nurture trust,
together with reflective appreciation of power and conflicts.9
Paradigmatically, this is for a world that names and recognises the realities
and significance of power, trust, negotiation, and relationships in aid (see, for
example, Eyben 2006).
WORDS COUNT
41
Acknowledgements
We thank Andrea Cornwall for many helpful corrections and suggestions at
the draft stage, and also David Wendt, who spent many hours on the technical side of data analysis. We are grateful to Henry Rowsell of the British Library
of Development Studies for help and advice in tracing these and other documents. The usual disclaimers apply.
Notes
1.
Reportedly invented and originally played as Buzzword Bingo by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during a commencement speech by Vice President Al Gore in 2001, (http://everything2.
com/index.pl?n ode_id=431890).
42
2.
Although the organisation responsible for aid has been known variously as
Ministry of Overseas Development (19641979), Overseas Development
Administration (ODA) (19791997), Department for International Development (DFID) (1997present), there was much continuity of staff and
location during this period (from correspondence with staff from DFIDs
Stationery Office www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/ in August 2006, and from http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_for_International_Development, on
12 February 2007).
The search for comparable policy statements on British overseas aid was
challenged by the fact that DFIDs Stationery Office does not have a list of
their titles, nor are copies of them available on-line. This is in part due to
the fact that overseas aid was handled by various bodies until 1997, when
DFID was formed (see Note 2). Thus, our initial search consisted of finding
out which bodies these were (through contacting communications staff
at DFID, on-line searches, and paper searches through the archives at the
British Library for Development Studies, at the Institute of Development
Studies in Brighton, England). Of the eight papers that we were able to
locate, we used six. The papers in 1963 (Aid to Developing Countries) and
1965 (Overseas Development: The Work of the New Ministry) have not been
included, since they were published so close to 1960 and 1967 that we
deemed them unlikely to contribute much more insight. Unable to trace
any White Paper or comparable policy statement between 1975 and 1997,
we analysed Common Crisis the British Governments response to the
Brandt Commission, but found it too specific for useful comparability.
Before 1997, conflict, violence, and violent were not mentioned in the selected White Papers. In 2006 these words were used proportionately more
than in the previous papers (for example, although the 2000 and 2006
have similar total word counts, conflict is used 95 times in 2006 and 53
times in 2000). Further, a full chapter of the 2006 paper is devoted to Promoting Peace and Security, which makes frequent reference to conflict.
Word-counts were conducted using software called Automap, which provides a total count of every word in a simple text (.txt) document (www.
casos.cs.cmu.edu/projects/au tomap/software.html). Thus, we converted
the electronic versions of White Papers produced from 1997 onwards
(available on-line at www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs) from pdf to .txt format, using
MS Word. Since White Papers that pre-date 1997 are not available electronically, we scanned paper versions into MS Word documents and then
converted these to .txt format. All papers were imported into Automap for
analysis. Resulting word-counts were cleaned. This involved removing
any software commands that were picked up (which are unrelated to the
text), as well as a list of commonly occurring but irrelevant words, such
as the, of and and although these were included in the total word-count
used to calculate percentages. We then read through lists and removed
other words that we thought had no significance to the study (such as million and work). Next, we searched out the different forms of high-scoring
words by stem searches (for example, econ for economy, economic, economically), and by tense searches (help, helps, helping, helped). Words were
added together with the others in their stem and tense groups, and then
lists were re-ordered according to the new figures.
3.
4.
5.
WORDS COUNT
6.
7.
8.
9.
43
For the word-pair analysis, we drew up a list of words that we thought fitted into pairs that indicated contrasts in development. These words were:
economic, social, rural, urban, women, gender, agricultural, and industrial.
The words that we selected undoubtedly also reflect our own interests
and priorities in development. Therefore, we encourage other people to
create and investigate their own lists.
We tried to fill the 22-year gap between 1975 and 1997 with The Common
Crisis (1983), the governments official response to the Brandt Commission report, but found it was too different and specific to be included.
A simple manual method of counting for chosen words was used for the
Paris Declaration. This was repetitive use of CTRL + H in MS Word.
Conflict does, however, show up once in potentially conflicting targets. Poor
and trust appear once each, but in the titles of organisations: The Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest and the Tanzania Social and Economic
Trust. None of the other words in italics is to be found in the document.
References
Capra, Fritjof (1996) The Web of Being: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter,
London: HarperCollins.
Cornwall, Andrea, Elizabeth Harrison, and Ann Whitehead (eds.) (2004)
Repositioning feminisms in development, special issue of IDS Bulletin
35(4): October.
Development Advisory Committee (DAC) (2005) Paris Declaration on Aid
Effectiveness: ownership, harmonisation, alignment, results and mutual
accountability, endorsed 2 March, Paris: DAC/OECD, available at www.
aidharmonization.org/ahoverview/secondary-pages/editable?key=205.
Eyben, Rosalind (ed.) (2006) Relationships for Aid, London and Sterling, VA:
Earthscan.
Eyben, R., A. Hughes and J. Wheeler (2005) Rights and power: the challenge
for international development agencies, IDS Bulletin 36(1): 6372.
Rome High-Level Forum on Harmonisation (2003) Rome Declaration on Aid
Harmonisation, endorsed 25 February, Rome:
High-Level Forum on Harmonization, available at www.aidharmonization.
org/ahoverview/secondary-pages/why-RomeDeclaration.
CHAPTER 4
Poverty reduction
John Toye
The idea of poverty reduction naturally attracts all kinds of angels in NGOs,
government departments and international financial institutions but their ministrations are frustrated by many obstacles. These include the narrow and static
way in which economists define the poor; the remoteness of the poor, their social
invisibility and elusiveness to most forms of targeting; and the absence of political
will to engage in poverty-reduction policies. The angelic response to these obstacles
has been to trumpet a global campaign of poverty reduction with millennial goals,
international aid targets, and poverty-reduction strategy papers. It would be better
to re-discover the language of risk, vulnerability, and social insurance. The message of the association between risk and reward, and the collective need for social
mechanisms that will allow individuals to bear increased risk without exposure to
irreversible damage, is the one that really needs to be delivered.
Mediaeval theologians debated how many angels could dance on the head of
a pin. Sometimes one wonders if the equivalent modern question should not
be: How many angels can dance on the head of the poor? The answer to both
questions may be the same: an infinite number. Once those angels get into their
high-tech tap shoes, there is no stopping them.
The idea of poverty reduction itself has a luminous obviousness to it, defying
mere mortals to challenge its status as a moral imperative. Poverty reduction
thus has a natural attraction for angels of all kinds: the angels of non-governmental mercy, the great and good angels of the government aid bureaucracies
and international financial institutions not forgetting the cohorts of angelic
academics. To be a moral imperative, however, an action must be capable of
being performed. The determined angel will therefore need to be armed with
a definition of poverty, a method of reducing poverty, and the political will to
implement the method.
46
household survey, and discovering what percentage of them fall below some
pre-set threshold that is meant to represent the minimum standard of a normal life. This percentage is called the headcount ratio of the poor.
There are various ways to define the cut-off point between the poor and
the non-poor. The scientifically minded go straight to the science of nutrition
and call on the calorie as the bedrock of need: allegedly 2300 calories a day per
person is required. Then they price the minimum survival calorie intake and
allow a percentage above that for non-food expenditure. The fact that there
is no uniform standard of this kind, and that in general calorie requirements
vary with climate and the amount of physical work performed is often quietly
ignored.
Attention is usually paid, however, to one special case of this variation:
the difference in food needs between adults and children. Much ingenuity is
devoted to deciding the adult-equivalence scale in order to convert childrens
minimum consumption needs into that of an adult. Is a childs basic need one
half or one third of an adults? Does the proportion vary with the age of the
child? Does it vary with the number of children in the household, for example, because of economies of scale in the production of household services?
The household itself, which is taken as the unit for accounting for consumption, is also a somewhat dubious concept, when stretched over heterogeneous continents and cultures. Different patterns of family formation, of
migrant employment, of the adoption and fostering of children sometimes
make it difficult to decide on which groups of people are eating out of a common pot and thus forming a household for statistical enumeration purposes.
The use of a pre-set threshold implies that need is absolute. Once basic
needs are met, poverty is no more. Others, however, have argued that poverty
is relative, and that when economic growth raises living standards altogether
beyond some minimum threshold, the poor do not vanish, but are still there,
trapped in the bottom deciles of the income distribution. Others again have
argued that poverty is both absolute and relative at the same time. It is absolute in that, in any given society, minimum essential goods can be listed and
priced. It is relative because in different societies or indeed the same society
at different points in time the lists of basic needs and their costs might be
different.
This definition of poverty is manifestly far too narrow. Its focus is on
consumption (or income), and it ignores both the productive assets of the
poor and a range of communal and social resources that the poor use to
supplement their consumption. Such resources are vital to well-being. Lack
of access to public health and education services and public utilities, such
as clean water and public security, may be as damaging to a persons life
chances as inadequate nutrition and the absence of some household effects.
Yet these aspects of welfare are usually missing when the poor are being
counted.
POVERTY REDUCTION
47
48
Helping the poorest of the poor raises other kinds of problem. The poorest
of the poor tend to be the most remote of people, most subject to the vagaries
of geography, weather, and disease, and the most subject to the sorts of social discrimination that renders them all but invisible. They are the least connected to each other and the rest of society, the least organised for self-help or
social action, and the least prepared for political engagement. In short, they
are the most recalcitrant to all forms of angelic ministration.
POVERTY REDUCTION
49
basic consumption for its poor person than will the local-currency equivalent
of one dollar in country B. Although neither poor consumer in A or in B can in
any sense be called rich, the degree and urgency of their poverty may be quite
different. Nevertheless, they are lumped together as the dollar-a-day poor for
the purpose of achieving global poverty reduction.
The global-transfer technology for poverty reduction is foreign aid, a.k.a.
international development co-operation assistance, a.k.a. international partnership agreements. In recent years, bilateral aid agencies and international financial institutions have proclaimed that their paramount mission is nothing
but poverty reduction. This came after a decade (the 1980s) during which conservative governments in the West had instructed them to focus their efforts
exclusively on increasing economic growth by adopting a range of neo-liberal
policies. The disappointing results from these policies created the public mood
to resume the drive for poverty reduction. Increasingly, aid transfers have become conditional on the aid-recipient country adopting a Poverty Reduction
Strategy Paper, a plan outlining national poverty-reduction policies.
International poverty-reduction targets are disembodied poverty targets, in
that they are not integrated into particular transfer schemes of bilateral and
multilateral foreign aid. Such targets (for example, those included within the
Millennium Development Goals for 2015) do not represent the degree of poverty reduction that such aid schemes can be expected to achieve. They are
chosen primarily for their political impact, and hence they have an element
of arbitrariness about them. If they seem bold and dramatic (but not absurdly
so), they will help to summon Political Will in the developed countries to foot
the bill for the aid transfers.
The problem of linkage between targets and transfers re-surfaces in another
form, however: the question of poverty-efficient aid allocation. If the target is to
reduce dollar-a-day poverty by half by 2015, the question is how shall aid be
allocated across countries between now and 2015 to get as close to the target
as possible? The resolution of this question requires one not only to establish
the number of poor in each country today (which is supposedly given by the
dollar-a-day calculation), but also to estimate the rate at which aid will be
able to reduce poverty in each country in the future. Suffice it to say that the
margins of error in doing so are extremely wide.
The Advocate of the One We Dont Speak Of has long argued that the only
reliable way to reduce poverty is by means of economic development, and
that aid will not reduce poverty in a sustainable way unless it first stimulates
economic development. The empirical evidence is not wholly inconsistent
with his claim. It does show that poverty tends to fall when economic growth
takes place. Yet it also shows that the rate of poverty reduction during periods of economic growth varies widely between countries. Growth evidently
brings more benefits to the poor in some places than in others. Perhaps not
surprisingly, where the initial income distribution is more unequal, there is
less poverty reduction per unit of growth than in countries with a more equal
distribution. One of the secrets of achieving pro-poor growth (now re-labelled
50
POVERTY REDUCTION
51
the division of labour is a high-risk process, in the course of which the daring
and the innovators in the community may come terminally unstuck.
Yet this vulnerability need not claim many victims, if it provokes the search
for effective ways of limiting individual liability. Some social-insurance mechanisms already exist in subsistence societies, and care must be taken not to
destroy them gratuitously in the search for something better. However, they
are rarely robust enough to take the full strain of insuring against the greater
risks that will arise as the division of labour deepens and reliance on distant
markets becomes more pervasive. In a time of increasing globalisation, something new will be required. In building more robust institutions of insurance,
the demons of moral hazard and adverse selection must be confronted. Economists will give more practical help to the poor by designing the incentives of
insurance schemes correctly, than by further refining the buzz-buzz of poverty
reduction.
CHAPTER 5
Social protection
Guy Standing
The term social protection has been widely used around the world and is often
treated as synonymous with social security, which is misleading. This chapter
considers the numerous terms that have become part of the language of social
protection, indicating that the image conveyed by the term is rather different from
what is meant by it.
Introduction
In their first year at university, all students should have a mandatory course
in linguistic manipulation. There is nothing new about the use and misuse of
words, images, similes, and metaphors in shaping the way we think, act, formulate hypotheses, and assess evidence. But the intensity with which modern
communications bombard our senses has reached such a pitch that we need
to develop skills of resistance.
The notion of social protection is peculiarly susceptible to the seductiveness of buzzwords and euphemisms. Elsewhere, I have argued that the linguistic distortion of debates on the direction of certain policies constitutes one of
the eight crises of social protection (Standing 2002a, 2002b). This chapter
now reviews the main terms that have been used by analysts, politicians, their
well-paid advisers, think tanks, and commentators. The underlying theme
is that the mainstream terminology has evolved as part of a strategy to adapt
systems of social protection to the perceived pressures of globalisation and
the process of labour re-commodification. One could make a case for arguing
that those using the key buzzwords have been contributing to a particular
orientation, which inter alia envisages a shrinking role for the state, moving
away from provision of a comprehensive relatively universalistic system of
social support and from a wide range of enterprise benefits unrelated to the
performance of labour.
Before we start: an incidental observation. We should be serious. This means
we should be prepared to treat the perpetrators of buzzwords with more wit.
We should require social scientists to define those colourful phrases and to
justify their use. More mockery would not go amiss.
Several other contextual points are worth bearing in mind. It is surely true
that ordinary language is idealised, giving the impression that words and
phrases mean the same thing to all of us. In an age dominated by techne and
54
SOCIAL PROTECTION
55
56
Neither rights nor needs exist as objective facts that are determined scientifically, outside society. They are social constructs, determined by a process of
consciousness. They are always relative and subject to refinements of definition. In practice, social-protection systems evolve, and in doing so modify
what is covered by the notion of need.
3. Social insurance
This term has been used to justify social security and social protection for
more than a century. Often one hears Eurocrats (a buzzword in itself) extol
the European social model, and state with disarming candour that it will
be defended. The image that those who use the term are trying to project is
social insurance, implying a model by which contributions are matched by
entitlements, and by which the more fortunate not only cover their risks in
case of need but also express social solidarity by contributing to the transfers
to less fortunate neighbours, who have also contributed in their time. It is a
comforting model, easily understood.
Unfortunately, it is a model of privilege, one at best suited to an economy
in which almost everybody is in full-time, well-paid, stable jobs and in which
contributions can be levied equitably and efficiently. It apparently thrived in
a golden age that never existed, even though that age is located in the minds
of some social scientists in the late 1960s.
In the twenty-first century, this is even more a fiction than when the proselytisers of social insurance succeeded in selling the labourist model in the
middle decades of the twentieth century. Now, if a person has casual labour,
or is unemployed, he or she is unlikely to have contributions paid or be able
to make them. If a person is working hard in caring for his or her children or
elderly frail relatives, ditto. Enormous numbers of European workers and
even more of the migrants in their midst do not qualify for the range of
social-insurance benefits that define the European social model that is being
defended so stoutly. And the number is growing.
Recognising such realities, astute policy makers keen to increase coverage
(see [6] below) introduced fictitious contribution periods to bolster the edifice of social insurance. For example, during a period designated as legitimate
unemployment, or maternity leave, or sick leave, a person may be classified
as having made social-insurance contributions, even though they have not
done so, or the fictitious contribution may be deducted from the amount
of transfer, as it were. This opens up a pseudo-world of unreality: fictitious
contributions from fictitious work, and contributions without contributing.
Policy makers could preach the virtues of social insurance, when in fact a
rising proportion of beneficiaries were fictitious contributors, leaving governments having to top up social-insurance funds from general taxation. This has
led to pressure to cut benefits and to make them harder to obtain or to retain,
so as to balance the funds.
SOCIAL PROTECTION
57
58
The implied reasoning is surely fallacious. Those most in need of income support are likely to lack the energy to reach the queue, let alone be able to work
well in the mid-day sun and dust.
Targeting and selectivity have been the rationale behind the global trend
towards means testing. Here the image is that people should receive support
from the state only if they have insufficient means to support themselves.
The means usually means income. But what counts as income? Some policies
have counted only earned income, others have included savings, rent, dividends, etc. Some have included the imputed value of property. Some have
included the income of others on whom the person might (or might not!)
depend for support.
Whatever the design, means testing produces poverty traps (see [10] below), and may induce relationship traps as well, in that it might pay a couple
to separate, at least during the day time. A modern variant is what might
be called the old-age care trap, whereby frail elderly people have to sell their
last-remaining assets in order to qualify for means-tested care. This growing
practice is unedifying, demeaning, and stigmatising. But it goes with the drift
to means testing.4
Above all, means testing and other schemes based on selectivity criteria
fail to satisfy any principle of social justice worthy of the name, because they
tend not to reach those most in need of income support, a fact which research
around the world has consistently demonstrated. This is most dramatically
the case in developing countries. It recalls the aphorism (attributed to Richard
Titmuss) that benefits that are only for the poor are invariably poor benefits.
6. Coverage
A common assertion is that a primary objective should be to increase the
coverage of social protection, the implicit suggestion being that more people
should be covered by schemes protecting them from contingency risks. The
ILO has launched what it calls a campaign to increase social-security coverage. It is spending a lot of money on the campaign, holding lots of costly meetings in exotic places. But it is unclear what extending coverage means. For
example, suppose a country is operating a social-insurance system to which
only 10 per cent of the population are making contributions. If the government abolished it and replaced it with a wholly means-tested social-assistance
scheme, by definition the whole population would be covered. Would that
be a great achievement?
Coverage conveys another comforting image, that of a blanket. But it
should be attached to a specific type of scheme. There are many forms of
social-protection scheme that one might wish to cut, thereby reducing coverage. For example, it is far from clear that one would wish to see a growth of
coverage in the form of workfare schemes.
SOCIAL PROTECTION
59
7. Social inclusion
Over the past three decades, social protection has gradually become a euphemism for altering the behaviour and attitudes and capabilities of those
perceived to be marginalised and socially excluded. None of the words in
inverted commas in the previous sentence was part of the lexicon of mainstream social-security discourse in the 1960s and 1970s.
The imagery has mirrored the reorientation of policy. Increasingly, those
in need are characterised as socially and emotionally defective, in need not of
financial resources but of moral fibre, confidence, and emotional intelligence
(sic). The perception that societys losers are in need of help because of their
attitudinal and behavioural failings has led to more emphasis on protection
by case work, by processing clients, if necessary by compulsion, which is
good for them, even if they do not appreciate it. Overall, social protection
has been shifting from the domain of economics and sociology to one of
psychology. The paternalistic triumph is a frightening spectre of increasingly
sophisticated social engineering, in the guise of protection. The tragedy is not
that some people do need help, but that there are few safeguards against therapising people into being helpless victims (Furedi 2004). A new occupation
has emerged in the lexicon of social protection: people changers. What do
you want to be when you grow up? A human case worker.
60
active now means corrective, enabling the poor and unemployed to be more
competitive and employable.
In the new idiom, active policy means inducing those at the margin of the
labour market to be socially integrated. Advocates go further. If the marginals
do not take up the opportunity, they must be compelled to do so, because
in the longer term they will be happier, even if they do not appreciate that
now.5
The imagery of the dichotomy leads the observer down a familiar path.
What if someone does not believe that she needs to be made more employable and socially integrated? Clearly, she is undeserving of public support.
Are we sure?
SOCIAL PROTECTION
61
the dominant welfare reforms since the 1980s and 1990s was that they have
spread such traps, because there was a strong shift to means-tested social assistance around the world. If you can receive a state benefit only if you are
poor, why try to move out of poverty if you would lose more in withdrawn
benefits than you would gain from doing a low-paid job? The international
drift to means testing led to many more people facing effective marginal tax
rates in excess of 100 per cent, and many others facing rates not much below
100 per cent.
Once policy makers realised this, they tried to combine incentives with
coercion to push people through the poverty-trap zone, making it harder to
continue to receive out-of-job benefits, and often providing so-called in-work
benefits, i.e. earned-income tax credits or marginal employment subsidies designed to top up the incomes of those entering low-wage jobs.
These words suffer from awkward drawbacks. But they convey a picture of
millions of people trapped in moral hazards, manipulating the system while
lying in bed and becoming obese, living a life of idleness and debauchery.
Remarkably, moral hazards breed immoral hazards. Some people actually
cheat. Instead of taking low-paid jobs legally or staying idle, they take jobs
without declaring them. It should not be surprising if systems that are intentionally manipulative lead to manipulative responses. But of course it takes
only a few newspaper stories to fan middle-class indignation to the point of
demands for benefit cuts and acceptance of more policing of recipients of such
benefits, intensifying the stigma, leading to lower take-up of benefits by those
desperate for help, and encouraging identification of welfare cheats, who
are criminalised. The final irony here is that this leads not only to a further
erosion of public support for universal social protection but also to a process
whereby a growing number of people are disqualified from receiving any
state benefits. Dear reader, you will murmur that I exaggerate. Really?
62
citizens. Such questions soon expose the reciprocity principle for what it is:
a bogus argument for inequality.
12. Dependency
This word came to exert a powerful hold on the minds of policy makers in the
1990s. The claim was that vast numbers of people receiving income transfers
were guilty of relying on them, becoming demotivated and indolent. Dependency goes with addiction. The pejorative word was used to justify cuts in
benefits and make them more conditional (as in active), tightening eligibility, restricting the length of time that a person could receive them, and so on.
Dependency may be juxtaposed with independence. Again, who could
possibly favour the former, a supine condition? Well, this simplistic imagery
could be challenged by the claim that most of us are dependent on others
in many ways. Biologically, the human species has survived through mutual
dependency and collaboration. Recognition of our dependencies is a healthy
response to our humanity. The assurance of some state transfer may provide
just the degree of economic security to enable us to gain the confidence to
make rational, socially responsible decisions. Taking it away in the guise of
reducing dependency may be just what is required to lead to anomic, irresponsible, and ultimately self-destructive behaviour.
13. Workfare
Social protection was supposed to be about welfare. But as means-testing
and social-assistance schemes were failing, a new word came into fashion:
workfare. What politicians and supporters have tried to convey when
using the word is simply that they are in favour of easing the unemployed
into jobs instead of passive unemployment benefits. But in reality workfare
means making the taking of a job or training place the formal condition for
obtaining a state transfer. It goes with the reciprocity principle and active
labour-market policy.
As argued elsewhere, workfare schemes have many disadvantages (Standing
2002b: 173-95). Unfortunately, many Ministers of Labour or Social Affairs, in
developing countries as well as in industrialised countries, have been drawn
into using the language of workfare, without appreciating all the failings of
what is actually involved. Among the latest to be converted is the government
of India, where elderly women who were entitled to a widows pension have
been told that they cannot have it any more, and must take a job as a childcarer, thereby enabling younger women to take a job in a public-works scheme
launched as part of the so-called Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The
disruptive consequences and the distributive effects of this set of workfare rules
will eventually be the subject of a host of PhD dissertations.
SOCIAL PROTECTION
63
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SOCIAL PROTECTION
65
Concluding reflections
Social protection has been misused. Poverty and economic insecurity are reflections of inequality, of income, wealth, power, and status. A society in which
everybody had a right to basic security would address inequality directly. But in
the globalisation era, so far, there has been a drift to a charity perspective, not
a rights-based one. We are all urged to contribute, altruistically, to charities, to
adopt a goat, fund an African childs schooling, and so on. Pity, as Bernard Shaw
so memorably put it, is akin to contempt.
Alongside charity, there is a slide into coercion and a slide into discretion
as a principle of social benefits. Local bureaucrats are given the quiet nod to
decide on who should receive benefits, who should not, and what conditions
on which those chosen should be given the benefit. It is all very paternalistic,
leaving the inequalities unchallenged.
Linguistically, we must never forget that language can be used as a means
of resistance, even though we have focused on how policy makers and ideological proponents of particular changes manipulate language. Claimants of
public assistance in the UK and elsewhere use the language of the elites to
turn against them, as when they refer to using enterprise and responsibility
by doing undeclared work for cash. We have not assessed the buzzwords of
resistance in this chapter. They merit a separate treatment.
One extraordinary feature of the topic of social protection and it is by
no means unique in this respect is the proliferation of acronyms. These are
rarely innocent. But what they tend to do is to give insiders an advantage, a
capacity to blind outsiders with science. The PRSP must help to deliver the
MDGs, and the IFAs will support that.
More generally, social protection is not a fixed concept; it is an elastic notion
that every user of the term can define differently. A statement such as we must
devote more resources to social protection might elicit consensus support and
nods of agreement. But few might agree if what the speaker meant was that
more resources should be devoted to workfare schemes, or conversely to give
every citizen a basic income without obligations. Now, that is a good idea.
Notes
1.
66
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
9.
between idiosyncratic and systemic risk, and between risks, shocks, and
hazards. It all becomes a little confusing. But the key point is that different systems of social protection cover different types of situation needing
some form of social protection.
This writers views about the vagueness of the original effort were given
in a review of the book at the time in the Journal of European Social Policy
(Standing 1991).
On the former, see Gilbert 2002; on the latter, see Giddens 2000.
As this chapter was being finished, the Bush Administration in the USA
was announcing that it was extending means testing to its old-age Medicaid programme, ostensibly to prevent the non-poor receiving subsidised
health care. A predictable result will be that many more of the near-poor
will slip into impoverishment.
This is the explicitly stated view of Blair-adviser Richard Layard (2005),
ennobled by New Labour for his policy contributions.
For a defence of this view, drawing on the idea of republican, or claim,
rights, see Standing 2005.
Not surprisingly, the ILO took up the subject several years later, by when
the proposition had descended into confusion.
For useful reviews, see Mehrotra and Delamonica 2005; Webster and
Sansom 1999.
References
Esping-Andersen, Gsta (1990) Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fraser, Nancy (1989) Talking about needs: interpretive contests as political
conflicts in welfare-state societies, Ethics 99(X): 291313.
Furedi, Frank (2004) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain
Age, London: Routledge.
Giddens, Anthony (2000) The Third Way and Its Critics, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Giddens, Anthony (2006) Europe in the Global Age, Bristol: Polity.
Gilbert, N. (2002) Transformation of the Welfare State: The Silent Surrender of
Public Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Layard, Richard (2005) Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, London: Penguin.
Mehrotra, S. and E. Delamonica (2005) The private sector and privatisation in
social services: is the Washington Consensus dead?, Global Social Policy
5(2):14174.
Sen, Amartya K. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Standing, Guy (1991) The three worlds of welfare capitalism, Journal of
European Social Policy 1(1): 715.
Standing, Guy (2002a) Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality,
London: Verso.
Standing, Guy (2002b) Globalisation: the eight crises of social protection,
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics 45(1): 1746.
SOCIAL PROTECTION
67
CHAPTER 6
Globalisation
Shalmali Guttal
The term globalisation is widely used to describe a variety of economic, cultural,
social, and political changes that have shaped the world over the past 50-odd
years. Because it is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, globalisation has
been credited with a wide range of powers and effects. Its proponents claim that it
is both natural and an inevitable outcome of technological progress, and creates
positive economic and political convergences. Critics argue that globalisation is
hegemonic and antagonistic to local and national economies. This chapter argues
that globalisation is a form of capitalist expansion that entails the integration
of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy. Although economic in its structure, globalisation is equally a political phenomenon,
shaped by negotiations and interactions between institutions of transnational
capital, nation states, and international institutions. Its main driving forces are
institutions of global capitalism especially transnational corporations but it
also needs the firm hand of states to create enabling environments for it to take
root. Globalisation is always accompanied by liberal democracy, which facilitates
the establishment of a neo-liberal state and policies that permit globalisation to
flourish. The chapter discusses the relationship between globalisation and development and points out that some of the most common assumptions promoted by
its proponents are contradictory to the reality of globalisation; and that globalisation is resisted by more than half of the globes population because it is not
capable of delivering on its promises of economic well being and progress for all.
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GLOBALISATION
71
have been nailed down over the past three decades by the Washington Consensus, the unprecedented rise of corporate power, the formation of the World
Trade Organisation (WTO), and burgeoning bilateral and regional free-trade
and investment agreements.
The proponents of globalisation claim that it will create convergences of
income, access to knowledge and technology, consumption power, living
standards, and political ideals. By integrating local and national economies
into a global economy that is unfettered by protectionism, economic growth
will increase, wealth will be created, and more people in the world will be able
to enjoy the advantages and fruits of modernisation, technological progress,
and civilisation. Its critics, on the other hand, argue that globalisation is hegemonic, antagonistic to the poor and vulnerable, and is debilitating local and
national economies, communities, and the environment.
Globalisation is also a deeply political phenomenon. It is shaped by complex negotiations and interactions between institutions of transnational capital (such as corporations), nation states, and international institutions charged
with bringing coherence and order in an increasingly interdependent world.
The economy does not exist outside the actions and choices of individual and
collective actors, be they private corporations, sovereign governments, United
Nations (UN) agencies, the WTO, or international financial institutions (IFIs)
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Globalisation is enabled through the facility of neo-liberal policies. An integral companion to globalisation is liberal democracy, which cloaks neo-liberal policy
prescriptions in the language of individualised rights, liberties, and choice.
Neo-liberal, so-called democratic states are both convenient and necessary
for capitalism to expand its frontiers and reach.
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GLOBALISATION
73
that mobilise their countrys economic and political power, authority, and
diplomacy to operate transnationally and expand their profits. At the same
time, TNCs give global endeavours national roots. For example, Nestl, Proctor & Gamble, Walls, Monsanto, HSBC, and Citibank have bought up local
companies, tied local/national employment to the success of their products
and services, and completely dominated local/national consumer markets in
a large number of countries.
But corporations do not drive globalisation entirely by themselves. Governments are crucial actors in securing domestic and external markets for their pet
corporations through subsidies, preferential bidding and contract awards, export credits, development aid, trade and investment agreements, and military
aggression. The World Bank and the IMF, the WTO and specialised UN agencies provide the economic and financial architecture for globalisation, while
international groupings such as the Organisation of Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) and the World Economic Forum serve as forums to
determine the rules of capitalist global governance. Most of the worlds largest
TNCs have their home bases in France, Germany, the UK, and Japan, with the
largest concentration in the USA. This, coupled with the widespread use of the
US dollar as an international currency, has allowed the USA to maintain its
dominance over the global economy as well as over the institutions of global
governance. The globalisation arena, however, is hardly static: capitalist expansion creates conditions for new actors to enter the fray, challenge existing
actors, and compete for economic and strategic dominance.
Possibly the greatest current challenge to US domination of the global
economy is from China, which two decades ago decided to use capitalism
as an engine of growth. China is using globalisation to establish itself as a
modern economic superpower as possibly no other country has done before.
It has several attributes upon which globalisation thrives: a rapidly growing
economy with the capacity to absorb raw materials, and capital- and technology-intensive goods; an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour for industrial
production; and a growing internal market of newly prosperous consumers.
China has built up an impressive manufacturing, production, and services
base for labour-intensive, skilled, and hi-tech industries by forcing TNCs investing in the country to locate their entire production processes there, rather
than outsourcing selected processes. Since 2003, China has become the main
destination of Asian exports and served as the principal stimulus of growth
in the world economy over the past decade. And finally, China has started to
build strategic partnerships with countries rich in natural resources in Asia
and Africa, through the provision of foreign aid, preferential loans, and cancellation of interest-free loans owed to China.
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75
regulations) were drastically reduced in order to make local producers, industries, and workers more efficient by exposing them to foreign competition.
The economies of developing countries become ever more closely tied to international markets controlled by corporate powers from the traditional North.
And, as states shed their functions of upholding social and economic justice
and equity, the provision of physical, social, and financial infrastructure and
services started to be farmed out to a variety of civil society and market actors.
SAPs laid the foundations of neo-liberal economies ruled by neo-liberal states
in developing countries.
SAPs did not, however, deliver the promised economic growth, export revenues, and freedom from debt and poverty. Instead, they led to economic stagnation and increased unemployment, income poverty, economic vulnerability,
and environmental destruction. They increased the economic vulnerability of
national economies by exposing them to externally triggered economic and
financial shocks, and making them dependent on export markets over which
they had no control. Borrowing countries became more indebted than before
and fell into debt traps whereby they used new loans to repay existing debts.
Numerous studies of SAPs reveal that they both created policy-induced poverty and entrenched pre-existing structures of social, economic, and political
inequality. (For a sample of critiques, see Bello 2006a, 2006b; Brooks 2006;
Roberts 2005; Singh 2005.)
The dangers of neo-liberal economics and globalisation were resurrected
in July 1997, when a financial crisis exploded in Indonesia, South Korea, and
Thailand and rapidly spread across the region, forcing the collapse of many of
the economies of East Asia. The crisis was triggered by currency speculation
and sudden massive capital flight, but its foundations had been laid several
years earlier, when countries bowed to pressures from the IMF to free speculative capital from the constraints of national regulation. Thanks to the IMFs
policy advice, the economies of Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand had
become virtual casinos; capital flowed in and out with few restrictions, but
also with little substance in the real economy to back it up. The financial collapse was soon transformed into a full-blown economic and structural crisis
of enormous magnitude by IFI rescue packages, which were essentially SAPs
with a few social programmes thrown in. In less than a year, tens of millions
of people were plunged into sudden, abject poverty.
Although IMF, World Bank, and Washington Consensus pundits tried to
blame the crisis on Asian crony capitalism, the eruption of similar crises in
Turkey, Russia, and Argentina clearly showed that not only were BankFund
economic reform packages to blame, but also that their so-called rescue packages were intended to save foreign banks, investors, and corporations, and
not the crisis-hit countries. By contrast, strict capital controls in Malaysia and
China during the crisis protected their economies from unravelling.
In the face of growing international criticism following the Asian crisis, and
increasing evidence of the destructive impacts of SAPs, the Bank and Fund
changed their tack somewhat. SAPs started to be called poverty-reduction
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GLOBALISATION
77
78
Resistance
As corporate-led globalisation sweeps the world, it transforms those that it
touches and, in so doing, it creates spaces and avenues for its dismantling
and the possibility of its imminent arrest. Globalisation has not delivered
(and cannot deliver) on its promises. Private corporations, national elites, and
those able to access higher education have reaped benefits, to be sure. But for
hundreds of millions across the world, the actual effects of neo-liberal policies
have been inequality, poverty, hunger, increased susceptibility to disease and
sickness, and economic and political marginalisation. Peasants, small-scale
farmers and fishers, small and medium entrepreneurs, workers, pastoralists,
and indigenous communities have faced deep and shattering livelihood crises
as a result of free trade and investment, and the depredations of speculative
capital. Public goods and services that once were and should still be within equal reach of all those living within a common territory are now being
offered as private goods and services accessible only to solvent consumers.
Non-state and supra-state actors (such as private corporations and multilateral
organisations) often perform the political functions of states, but without being under effective, sovereign control.
For every system of domination, there is a hacker. And progressive civilsociety actors are devising increasingly creative and powerful ways of hacking
into the neo-liberal regime, exposing its flaws and weakening its institutions.
GLOBALISATION
79
References
Bello, Walden (2006a) Globalization in retreat, Foreign Policy in Focus, 27
December, www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3826 (retrieved 23 April 2007).
Bello, Walden (2006b) Chain-Gang Economics: China, the US, and the Global
Economy, 1 November, www.focusweb.org/chain-gang-economics-chinathe-us-and-the-global-economy.html?Itemid=94 (retrieved 23 April 2007).
Brooks, Mick (2006) Globalisation and imperialism, In Defence of Marxism, 11
April, www.marxist.com/globalisation-imperialism-economy110406.htm
(retrieved 23 April 2007).
Roberts, Michael (2005) Globalisation and empire, In Defence of Marxism, 7
December, www.marxist.com/globalisation-empire-barbarism071205.htm
(retrieved 23 April 2007).
Singh, Kavaljit (2005) Questioning Globalization, New Delhi: Madhyam Books.
CHAPTER 7
82
83
communities isnt the issue, and the government needs to reach all organisations that can reach people, then why not include trade unions? Very odd.
And also very funny. The World Faiths Development Dialogue website carries an article, albeit with a disclaimer covering all similar documents, which
earnestly compares Differences between Secular NGOs and Religious based
NGOs. It asserts that while in secular organisations The management concept is based on management position and responsibility. The relationship
with management is of employer and employee, in religion-based NGOs
After God, all are equal, assigned with specific responsibilities based on skills
and capacity. The relationship is like members of a family or community.
Beneficiaries are members of an extended community (Sabur 2004). Youre
kidding, right?
At the level of international development policy, donors and aid agencies
have been increasingly obsessed with religion since the mid-1980s, when
there was an increase in the strength of extreme right-wing politico-religious
groups (fundamentalists), combined with a mushrooming of womens and
human-rights groups in developing countries, and greater donor commitment
to advocacy initiatives (which meant that one had to start talking politics
and ideology). For example, international seminars on Women, Islam and
Development started appearing (but hardly, if ever, Women, Christianity and
Development). All of this long preceded the attacks of 11 September 2001
and the subsequent War on Terror, although clearly the latter has led to an
increasing desperation in terms of international development policy.
But fundamentalism is on the rise not only in the Global South, where
even Sri Lankas Buddhists now have their very own fundamentalists. Christian fundamentalists are hugely influential in both US and British policy. The
US National Security Councils top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic
Christians eager to ensure that US policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios (Perlstein 2004), and in recent US elections all candidates seemed to find it obligatory to preface their speeches with a statement of
faith. Tony Blair publicly emphasises his Christian beliefs, and no one should
be surprised that the former British Secretary of State for Communities and
Local Government is a member of Opus Dei, the right-wing Catholic group.
In current international development policy, religion is simultaneously
seen as the biggest developmental obstacle, the only developmental issue, and
the only developmental solution. The co-existence of these three seemingly
contrary approaches, which can often be found within a single bilateral or
international development agency or NGO, is possible because they all stem
from the same Orientalist presumption about the underdeveloped Other
(Said 1979). It basically boils down to racism.
Let me simplify an argument that I have made elsewhere (Balchin 2003).
In the first approach (seeing religion as the biggest developmental obstacle),
irrational people are blamed for their own underdevelopment (as opposed
to, for example, gross global trade inequalities perpetuated by the North),
and frequently custom is inaccurately conflated with religion. In the second
84
approach, factors influencing poverty such as class, gender, and racial discrimination are ignored or downplayed. In the third approach, it is presumed that all proper Indonesians, Ugandans, Moroccans, Chileans, etc.
are religious; secular initiatives are de-legitimised, and the work of many
local service-delivery and human-rights groups ignored.
Whatever happened to inter-sectionality: the recognition that we are all
subject to multiple identities that construct and are constructed by each other? Are my friends in Sisters in Islam a faith-based group or a feminist group
or a Malaysian group? I think they see themselves as all of the above and
why cant they be all of these without having to exclusively prioritise one or
other aspect of their work?
Added to the problem of prioritising one aspect of our identities to the
exclusion of others is the tendency inherent in this faith-based business
to conflate ethnicity, culture, race, and religion. International development
policy makers do it, the fundamentalists encourage it because it suits their
self-importance, and we all slip into the habit. In 2005 I was working with a
group of Muslim women in Britain, eliciting the problems that they face as
women in the community. A long, angry list of deprivations and discriminations emerged. Do English Muslim converts face these problems, I asked,
hoping to help them to identify more clearly the sources of the problems that
they faced and thereby to identify what policies should be changed. Stunned
silence. Most of the problems were going to drop off the list.
Have we stopped to really think what this whole faith groups business
means in terms of international development resources and policies? Under
President Bushs Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and related legal
measures (which had to be introduced through executive orders and not
through democratic congressional process owing to strong opposition), one
third of AIDS-prevention money overseas (about US$ 1 billion) had to be spent
on programmes that encouraged abstinence until marriage. A report issued in
2006 by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the
US Congress, found that the effort to steer money to abstinence programmes
has taken funds away from other anti-AIDS programmes (Kranish 2006). Thats
an awful lot of money that could have usefully been spent on promoting safe
sex or addressing the power imbalances (especially gender-related imbalances)
that mean some cannot negotiate safe sex for themselves. Thats an awful lot of
lives. And if you are a lesbian or a gay man, a child, or a prostitute (or maybe all
three), forget any hopes of getting sex education or support if you dont want
to become HIV-infected.
Perhaps less dramatic, but no less frustrating, for local rights activists is
the recent announcement that the British government will double its aid to
Pakistan and all of the extra money will go to making sure that madrassahs
dont become terrorist hotbeds (BBC 2006). Perhaps the obsession with religion is also then linked with the neo-conservative economic agenda of winding
down state infrastructure and services (and hoping that community services
offered by religious groups will plug the gap): investing that much money in
85
the state education sector in Pakistan might ensure that no one needs to go to a
madrassah in the first place.
In the context of the War on Terror especially, faith-based is implicitly
counterposed to extremism, but this may lead to quite different development policies. To take just one example, in US policy faith-based is shorthand for Christians we can do business with, and extremism translates into
Muslims. An investigative report by The Boston Globe found that USAID spent
US$ 57 million from 2001 to 2005 (out of a total of US$ 390 million allocated
to NGOs) to fund almost a dozen projects run by faith-based organisations in
Pakistan, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Of the nearly 160 faith-based organisations that have received prime contracts from USAID in the past five years,
only two are Muslim. Christian groups share of USAID funding has roughly
doubled under George Bush Jr and accounts for 98.3 per cent of all money
given to faith-based groups (Milligan 2006).
By contrast, in British development policy, working with faith-based initiatives has been code for funding moderate Muslims. Progressive Muslim groups
rarely get funding, because they dont match the stereotype of what a Muslim
should or should not be a stereotype that suits both the Orientalist and fundamentalist worldviews. Indeed, the word moderate appears in virtually every
DFID programme relating to Muslim contexts without definition at any point.
The only definition I could find was an indirect one, in an internal document:
By extremism, we mean advocating or supporting views such as support
for terrorist attacks against British or western targets, including the 9/11
attacks, or for British Muslims fighting against British or allied forces
abroad, arguing that it is not possible to be British and Muslim, calling
on Muslims to reject engagement with British society and politics, and
advocating the creation of an Islamic state in Britain. (FCO/HO 2004)
Thus any organisation which holds misogynist, homophobic, or antisemitic views could, under this categorisation, pass for moderate.
Because many Western governments and indeed major international development and human-rights NGOs have been so ignorant about the role of
religion in peoples lives, particularly about this role in non-Christian contexts,
for decades they failed to develop the tools to analyse religious groups and
thereby understand which of the groups within this potentially vast ideological array actually work for human rights and equitable development (assuming
that these governments and NGOs actually support such rights and development). In their recent rush to do religion or to support faith-based initiatives,
governments have on occasion made friends with some unsavoury characters
(Bright 2006). Meanwhile, gender specialists working in international development and human-rights NGOs still find it hard to get acceptance for the simple
message that fundamentalism is bad for womens health.
In the name of tradition, the faith communities approach accords some
religious figures a place that they have traditionally never had. Women activists in Muslim communities in the Philippines believe that USAIDs efforts in
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2003 to secure a joint fatwa from local religious figures in support of reproductive health was a major factor in enabling the Ulema to overcome previous
internal differences and work together to form a united political force that
subsequently dominated local councils until discredited as having no concrete policies to deal with the areas poverty (personal communication).
Faith-based always comes with its sidekick, inter-faith dialogue or activities. In contexts where the walls have gone up and war has been declared,
dialogue across boundaries is a Good Thing. But sometimes inter-faith dialogue can work to oppress dissenting voices within each religious community,
because it easily translates into I recognise your hegemonic definition of your
identity and you recognise mine, and well get along fine. Remember the
Holy Alliance between the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing Muslim
governments at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, and their concerted attacks on womens bodily autonomy?
In November 2006, the Commonwealth Foundation organised a discussion on Faith and Development which concluded that Faith institutions and
civil society movements have a key role in providing education and achieving
local and global justice, gender equality, and action for non-violent resolutions to conflict.4 Its recommendation was the establishment of a Multi-Faith
Advisory Group that can advise the Foundation on the role of culture and
faith in development. The report stated that this will require a balanced
membership. I wonder whether this will include groups like Catholics For a
Free Choice, who highlight the current damage being done to gender equality
by faith institutions?
This brings us to the thorny question of who gets to define who is a member of a particular faith community, or if they qualify for membership at all.
What about groups such as the Ahmedis, declared non-Muslims in some countries and visibly not represented in membership, for example, of that supposedly umbrella organisation, the Muslim Council of Britain? The whole faith
communities policy leaves international development policy makers very
close to the highly contested ground of defining who is and is not a Muslim,
or a Christian, or a Jew, and so on and so forth.
What is wrong with the focus on faith-based groups is that it misses the crucial point about who is actually exercising power in a community, and for what
purposes. At a 2005 Oxfam GB workshop that considered questions of gender
and religion, we shared stories of experiences where religion had appeared as
the obstacle to a particular development initiative at the very local, grassroots level. But when we analysed who was using religion and for what purpose
(mostly men, mostly to preserve the status quo), it transpired that a religious
principle actually lay at the heart of only one of the dozen stories shared.5
So where does this leave us? What is the alternative? Secularism? It has
become such a dirty word that international development policy makers have
not even discussed publicly whether it means non-religious or anti-religious,
and how either of these is to be realised in social policy. Ironically, people in
developing countries are indeed discussing the issue: for example, Abdullahi
87
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
References
Abrams, Len (2003) Faith, Development and Poverty Some Reflections,
www.wfdd.org.uk/articles_talks/abrams.pdf (retrieved 27 February 2007).
Balchin, Cassandra (2003) With her feet on the ground: women, religion and
development in Muslim communities, Development 46(4): 3949.
BBC (2006) UK and Pakistan forge terror pact, BBC News, 20 November,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6161500.stm (retrieved 27
February 2007).
Bright, Martin (2006) When Progressives Treat With Reactionaries: The British States flirtation with radical Islamism, Policy Exchange, www.policyexchange.org.uk/Publications.aspx?id=192 (retrieved 27 February 2007).
88
Centre for Islamic Legal Studies (2005) Promoting Womens Rights Through
Sharia in Northern Nigeria, Zaria: Centre for Islamic Legal Studies, Ahmadu
Bello University, with support from DFID and the British Council.
Engineer, Asghar Ali (2006) Secularism in India, parts I and II, Secular Perspectives, 16 June 15 July, www.csss-isla.com/archive.php (retrieved 27
February 2007).
Foreign & Commonwealth Office/Home Office (2004) Young Muslims and
Extremism, draft report, www.stoppoliticalterror.com/media/youngmuslims070805.pdf (retrieved 27 February 2007).
Kranish, Michael (2006) Democrats inspect faith-based initiative, The
Boston Globe, 4 December, www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/12/04/democrats_inspect_faith_based_initiative/ (retrieved 27
February 2007).
Mbow, Penda (2006) The secular state and citizenship in Muslim countries:
bringing Africa into the debate, www.ned.org/events/past/events06.
html#Jan2606 (retrieved 27 February 2007).
Milligan, Susan (2006) Together, but worlds apart: Christian aid groups raise
suspicion in strongholds of Islam, The Boston Globe, 10 October.
Perlstein, Rick (2004) The Jesus landing pad: Bush White House checked
with rapture Christians before latest Israel move, The Village Voice, 18
May, www.villagevoice.com/news/0420,perlstein,53582,1.html (retrieved
27 February 2007).
Sabur, M. Abdus (2004) Case Study of the Asian Muslim Action Network
(AMAN), www.wfdd.org.uk/programmes/case_studies/aman.doc (retrieved
2 March 2007).
Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, New York,
NY: Vintage Books.
Shaheed, Farida (1998) The other side of the discourse: womens experiences
of identity, religion and activism in Pakistan, in Farida Shaheed, Sohail
Akbar Warraich, Cassandra Balchin and Aisha Gazdar (eds.) Shaping
Womens Lives: Laws, Practices and Strategies in Pakistan, Lahore: Shirkat Gah
Womens Resource Centre.
Vaggione, Juan Marco (2002) Paradoxing the secular: religion, gender and
sexuality at the crossroads, Transregional Center for Democratic Studies
Journal 3(8): 119.
Ward, Lucy (2006) Muslim women angry at views being ignored, study
shows, Guardian Unlimited, 7 December, www.guardian.co.uk/religion/
Story/0,,1965867,00.html (retrieved 27 February 2007).
Yuval-Davis, Nira (2006) Belonging and the politics of belonging, Patterns of
Prejudice 40(3):196293.
CHAPTER 8
90
degradation after more than five glorious development decades. What is striking is the time and manner in which it came upon the institutional development scene, and this chapter seeks to explore this particular issue.
The historic and systemic failure of the development industry to fix
chronic underdevelopment puts it in the challenging position of having both
to renew and reinvent its discourse and practice enough to make people believe that a change has, in fact, taken place and to make these adjustments
while maintaining intact the basic structure of the status quo on which the
development industry depends. This explains why we have seen, over the
past 50 years, a rich parade of successive development trends: community
development in the post-colonial period, modernisation in the Cold War
period, and basic human needs and integrated rural development throughout the 1970s. The neo-liberal period (1980s to the present day) witnessed a
pageant of such trends as sustainable development and participatory development from the late 1980s and all through the 1990s; capacity building,
human rights, and good governance throughout most of the 1990s; and,
we must not forget, poverty reduction/alleviation in the dawn of the twentyfirst century.
Michel Chossudovsky (2002:37) explains the phenomenon in simple and
lucid terms:
The official neoliberal dogma also creates its own counter-paradigm
embodying a highly moral and ethical discourse. The latter focuses on
sustainable development while distorting and stylizing the policy issues pertaining to poverty, the protection of the environment and the
social rights of women. This counter-ideology rarely challenges neoliberal policy prescriptions. It develops alongside and in harmony rather
than in opposition to the official neoliberal dogma.
It is clearly more than coincidence that participation appeared as a new
battle horse for official development precisely at the time of the shock treatment of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) inflicted on the underdeveloped world by the World Bank and the IMF. SAPs were the operational
methodology that, in practice, implemented neo-liberalism in poor nations.
By using the re-negotiation of Third World debt as leverage, the international
financial institutions were able to force poor countries to do things that were
clearly against their best interest. Thus the wave of privatisation, denationalisation, elimination of subsidies of all sorts, budgetary austerity, devaluation,
and trade liberalisation initiated a deep social desperation throughout the
Third World. The anti-SAP riots in Caracas in 1989, which left more than 200
people dead; the bread riots of Tunis in January 1984; the anti-SAP riots led by
students in Nigeria in 1989; the general strike and popular uprising against the
IMF reforms in Morocco in 1990; and the Zapatista uprising of 1994 against
the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are but
some of the most emblematic examples of the social and political backlash
that the SAPs produced.
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Radical neo-liberalism
The World Bank praises the privatization of Zambias public health system: It is a model for Africa. Now there are no more long line-ups in
the hospitals. The Zambian Post completes the idea: There are no
more long line-ups at the hospitals because people now die at home.
(Galeano 2002)
When taking into consideration the radical nature of the participatory proposal for social transformation and the neo-liberal structural-adjustment
context in which it has been co-opted, the incompatibility between the two
might seem far too deep-seated to permit such a co-optation to take place. But
if we factor in the growing social discontent, popular mobilisations, and antiSAP riots that were taking place across the Third World, we begin to understand how the development industry could not simply ignore the increasing
critiques and challenges to its reigning paradigm. In Rahnemas words (1990:
92
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93
groups such as NGOs and voluntary organisations such that these might create channels of participation, by establishing links both upward and downward in society and [voicing] local concerns more effectively than grassroots
institutions (World Bank 1989:61, cited in Leal and Opp 1999). According to
the Bank, with the creation of a proper enabling environment, poor nations
can channel the energies of the population at large, and ordinary people
should participate more in designing and implementing development programs (ibid.).
But the mutations of the official discourse did not stop there, and the
irony that they produced was indeed something to behold. By employing the
language of empowerment, self-reliance, and participation, the Bank assumed a populist appearance reminiscent of PAR. The new rhetoric assumed
a pseudo-political stance in its suggestion that the crisis of governance in
many countries is due to the appropriation of the machinery of government
by the elite to serve their own interests, and went so far as to state that a deep
political malaise stymies action in most countries (ibid.). At a first glance,
one might naively infer that the logical implication is to call for people to be
empowered to overturn the current and oppressive state of affairs through
increased political participation. However, the actual intent is somewhat different. By having identified the nasty state as the culprit, the World Bank was
not advocating a popular government, but rather creating a populist justification for the removal of the state from the economy and its substitution by the
market. As Moore (1995:17) asserts:
...the World Bank is not about to give the state to these people even
though it contends that the state has taken the resources from them.
Rather than have the state controlled by the common people, the World
Bank would control the local states withdrawal from the economy.
Resources must be taken away from the state and placed in the market,
where all citizens will supposedly have equal access to them.
Thus liberation or empowerment of poor people in this rationale is not
linked with political or state power. Rather, the implication is that empowerment is derived from liberation from an interventionist state, and that
participation in free-market economics and their further enlistment into development projects will enable them to take fuller charge of their lives, and it
is this which is cast as inherently empowering (Leal and Opp 1999).
The World Bank would go on to manufacture products such as the Participation Source Book in 1996, a methodological guide to doing participatory
development. And later it would produce the stirring report Voices of the Poor
(Narayan et al. 2000), making heart-felt calls for all development institutions
to pay closer attention to the needs, aspirations, and subjectivities of the planets marginalised classes and to consider how these might influence development policy. Linked to Voices of the Poor were the Poverty Reduction Strategy
Papers (PRSPs), an initiative also led by the World Bank, that sought to articulate poverty reduction with participation, with empowerment as an implicit
94
adjunct (Cornwall and Brock 2005: 1045). And finally, the cherry on the
cake, were the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ratified by the United
Nations General Assembly in 2000, in which the worlds governments committed themselves to the goal of halving global poverty by 2015. The declaration
is peppered with buzzwords such as sustainability, participation, empowerment, equality, and democracy, but it makes no reference to what might be
the forces that produce and perpetuate poverty. Maintaining a politically and
conceptually ambiguous stance, the MDG declaration affirms that the central
challenge faced by the planets governments and respective institutions is
to ensure that [neo-liberal] globalization becomes a positive force for all the
worlds poor (United Nations General Assembly 2000: 2).
Peoples participation and empowerment filter into all of the above equations, sometimes implicitly, but more often than not explicitly identified as
foundational pillars of the global poverty-reduction crusade. According to
Cornwall and Brock (2005: 1046), by remaining politically ambiguous and
definitionally vague, participation has historically been used both to enable
ordinary people to gain agency and as a means of maintaining relations of
rule. However, in the hands of the development industry, the political ambiguity has been functional to the preservation of the status quo.
Preserving the hegemony of the status quo, in the Gramscian sense, entails the reproduction of discourse through various channels in order to create
and maintain a social consensus around the interests of the dominant power
structures, which in the twenty-first century are encased in and are functional
to the neo-liberal world order. Thus, the manipulations required to neutralise
challenges and threats to its dominant rationale and practice cannot afford to
lack sophistication. Whatever the method used to co-opt, the dominant order
has assimilated an historic lesson, as White (1996) affirms with simple clarity:
incorporation, rather than exclusion is the best form of control. Since frontal negation or attacks to those challenges to the dominant order often serve
only to strengthen and legitimate the dissent in the eyes of society, co-option
becomes the more attractive option for asserting control. Counter-ideology is
thus incorporated as part of the dominant ideology, as Chossudovsky (2002:
37) argues:
Within this counter-ideology (which is generously funded by the research establishment) development scholars find a comfortable niche.
Their role is to generate within this counter-discourse a semblance of
critical debate without addressing the social foundations of the global
market system. The World Bank plays in this regard a key role by promoting research on poverty and the so-called social dimensions of
adjustment. This ethical focus on the underlying categories (e.g. poverty alleviation, gender issues, equity, etc.) provides a human face
to the World Bank and a semblance of commitment to social change.
However, inasmuch as this analysis is functionally divorced from an
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95
understanding of the main macro-economic reforms, it rarely constitutes a threat to the dominant neoliberal economic paradigm.
For participation to become part of dominant development practice, it
first had to be modified, sanitised, and depoliticised. Once purged of all the
threatening elements, participation could be re-engineered as an instrument
that could play a role within the status quo, rather than one that defied it.
Co-optation of the concept depended, in large measure, on the omission of
class and larger social contradictions. As such, participation became another
ingredient in the prevailing modernisation paradigm. This conceptualisation
holds that poverty, inequity, and marginalisation are results of a lack of application of technology, capital, and knowledge combined successfully through
appropriate policy and planning mechanisms, leading to pertinent reforms of
institutional structures (i.e. SAPs) (Escobar 1995; Tandon 1996). The dominant
discourses of mainstream development hold as fundamental the assertion that
the pattern for these types of intervention are found in the Western rationalist
tradition which focuses on behavioural models of rational choice rather than
structural inequity or the human response to oppression (Cowen and Shenton
1995; Porter 1995; Pieterse 1991).
As such, institutional development opts for the route of technocracy or the
technification of social and political problems. By placing emphasis on the
techniques of participation, rather than on its meaning, empowerment is thus
presented as a de facto conclusion to the initiation of a participatory process
part and parcel of technical packages like PRA, PLA, and stakeholder analysis.
Power or political issues are thus translated into technical problems which
the dominant development paradigm can easily accommodate (White 1996).
Freed from its originally intended politics and ideology, participation was
also liberated from any meaningful form of social confrontation, aside from
the very superficial dichotomy between outsiders and insiders, or uppers
and lowers. Power, in the current global context, and especially so in the
context of Third World societies, implies significant degrees of social confrontation and contradiction which are inherent and imminent in processes of
social change and transformation. However, for reasons that should by now
be self-evident, social confrontation is an issue that the development industry
has never been able or willing to address.
This process of depoliticisation has been well documented in a series of
critiques, culminating with Cooke and Kotharis (2001) Participation: The
New Tyranny? Nevertheless, to say that institutional development effectively
depoliticised participation is not entirely true. Either tacitly or overtly, participation is either functional to the dominant social order or it defies it. The
depoliticised versions of participatory action (participatory development,
PRA, etc.), liberated from their transformative elements, are still, in fact,
political, since they inevitably serve to justify, legitimise, and perpetuate current neo-liberal hegemony. As such, by having been detached from its radical nature, participatory action was consequently re-politicised in the service
of the conservative neo-liberal agenda. As Williams (2004:1) states:
96
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97
actions can be taken to confront and affect those causes, then any efforts are
unlikely to be empowering. Genuine empowerment is about poor people seizing and constructing popular power through their own praxis. It is not handed
down from the powerful to the powerless, as institutional development has
conveniently chosen to interpret the concept. Those who give power condition it, for, as Paulo Freire (1970) best put it himself: Freedom is acquired by
conquest, not by gift.
98
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99
to our own praxis, beginning with the recognition that our primary task is, as
it should always have been, not to reform institutional development practice
but to transform society.
Note
1.
For some examples, see John Hammond (1998), Bud Hall (1997), and
Paulo Freire (1978).
References
Chambers, Robert (1983) Rural Development? Putting the Last First, Harlow:
Longman.
Chossudovsky, Michel (2002) The Globalization of Poverty: The Impacts of IMF
and World Bank Reforms, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. (Spanish version)
Cooke, Bill and Uma Kothari (eds.) (2001) Participation: The New Tyranny?,
London/New York: Zed Books.
Cornwall, A. and K. Brock (2005) What do buzzwords do for development
policy? A critical look at participation, empowerment and poverty reduction, Third World Quarterly 26 (7): 104360.
Cowen, Michael and Robert Shenton (1995) The invention of development,
in Jonathon Crush (ed.) Power of Development, London: Routledge.
Dr, Rubn (1998) Crisis y reconstruccion del sujeto poltico popular, paper
presented at Primeras Jornadas de Teora y Filosofa Poltica, Buenos Aires,
2122 August, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Available at: www.clacso.org/ www.clacso/espanol/html/biblioteca/sala/
sala2.html.
Escobar, Arturo (1995) Imagining a post-development era, in J. Crush (ed.)
Power of Development, London: Routledge.
Fals-Borda, Orlando (2000) Peoples SpaceTimes in global processes: the
response of the local, Journal of World-Systems Research 3 (Fall/Winter):
62434.
Fals-Borda, Orlando, and Muhammad Anisur Rahman (eds.) (1991) Action and
Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action-Research, New
York, NY: Apex Press.
Freire, Paulo (1970) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York, NY: Continuum.
Freire, Paulo (1978) Pedagogy in Process: Letters to Guinea Bissau, New York, NY:
Continuum.
Galeano, Eduardo (2002) Paradojas, La Jornada, Mxico City, 19 October.
Guijt, Irene (1998) Waking up to power, conflict and process, in I. Guijt and
K. Shah (eds.) The Myth of Community, London: IT Publications.
Hall, Budd L. (1997) Reflections on the Origins of the International Participatory Research Network and the Participatory Research Group in Toronto,
Canada, paper presented to the Midwest Research to Practice Conference
in Adult, Continuing and Community Education, Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan, 1517 October.
Hammond, John (1988) Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War
in El Salvador, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hickey, S. and G. Mohan (eds.) (2004) From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring New Approaches to Participation, London: Zed Books.
Leal, Pablo and Robert Opp (1999) Participation and Development in the Age
of Globalization: Institutional Contradictions and Grassroots Solutions,
available at www.pdforum.org. Abridged version published in Development
Dialogue, published by CIDA.
Moore, David (1995) Development discourse as hegemony: towards an
ideological history 19451995, in David Moore and Gerald Schmitz
(eds.) Debating Development Discourse: Institutional and Popular Perspectives,
London: Macmillan.
Narayan, Deepa, Raj Patel, Kai Schafft, Anne Rademacher and Sarah KochSchulte (2000) Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us?, New York, NY: Oxford
University Press/World Bank.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (1991) Dilemmas of development discourse: the
crisis of developmentalism and the comparative method, Development
and Change 22(1): 529.
Porter, Doug J. (1995) Scenes from childhood: the homesickness of development discourses, in Jonathan Crush (ed.), Power of Development, London
and New York: Routledge.
Rahman, Muhammad Anisur (1993) Peoples Self-Development: Perspectives
on Participatory Action Research, London/Dhaka: Zed Books and Dhaka
University Press.
Rahnema, Majid (1990) Participatory action research: the Last Temptation of
Saint Development, Alternatives 15:199226.
Tandon, Yash (1996) Poverty, process of impoverishment and empowerment,
in Vangile Titi and Narech Singh (eds.) Empowerment for Sustainable Development: Toward Operational Strategies, London: Zed Books.
United Nations General Assembly (2000) United Nations Millennium
Declaration: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly, www.un.org/
millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf.
White, Sarah C. (1996) Depoliticising development: the uses and abuses of
participation, Development in Practice 6(1): 615.
Williams, Glyn (2004) Towards a re-politicisation of participatory development: political capabilities and spaces of empowerment, in S. Hickey and
G. Mohan (eds.) From Tyranny to Transformation? Exploring new approaches to
participation, London: Zed Books.
World Bank (1989) Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth,
Washington, DC: World Bank.
CHAPTER 9
as the integration of individuals into the market, while at the same time previously acquired rights, in particular labour rights, are being progressively eroded. Meanwhile, in response to increasing poverty and social exclusion, there
has been a resurgence of philanthropic endeavours from the so-called Third
Sector, which convey their own version of citizenship.
The contested definitions of citizenship are the principal axis of political
struggles in Latin America today, a reflection of the confrontation between a
democratising, participatory project to extend the meaning of citizenship and
the neo-liberal offensive to curtail any such possibility. In this chapter, I draw
on the experience of Brazil in relation to these issues in order to highlight the
challenges and contradictions to be addressed in using the term citizenship in
international development discourse.
A perverse confluence
Todays democratisation processes are locked in a perverse confluence of two
distinct political projects. On the one hand, many countries have seen the increasing involvement of civil society in discussion and decision making about
public policy. In Brazil, in particular, efforts to enlarge democracy through
participation have been recognised and incorporated in the 1988 Constitution. As a result, the confrontational relations between the state and civil
society have been largely replaced by an investment by social movements
in the possibility of joint initiatives and in institutional participation in the
newly created participatory spaces (see, for example, Abers 1998; Dagnino et
al. 1998; Fedozzi 1997; Santos 1998). At the same time, neo-liberal governments throughout Latin America are bent on achieving a reduced, minimal
state1 that progressively abandons its role in guaranteeing universal rights by
rolling back its social responsibilities and transferring them to civil society,
now envisaged as a mere implementer of social policies.
The perverse nature of the confluence between the participatory and the
neo-liberal projects lies in the fact that both not only require a vibrant and
proactive civil society, but also share several core notions, such as citizenship,
participation, and civil society, albeit used with very different meanings. The
common vocabulary and shared institutional mechanisms obscure fundamental distinctions and divergences. The apparent homogeneity conceals conflict
and contradictions by displacing dissonant meanings.
The neo-liberal project has also re-defined meanings in the cultural sphere.
The notion of citizenship offers perhaps the most dramatic case of how such
meanings are displaced. First, because it was precisely through the notion of
citizenship that the participatory project managed to achieve its most important political and cultural gains, to the extent of generating an innovative
definition that has penetrated deep into Brazils political and cultural fabric
(Dagnino 1994a; 1998). And second because such a displacement determines
how the most critical challenge facing Latin America inequality and poverty
is addressed.
103
Participatory citizenship
Citizenship came to prominence as a crucial weapon in the struggle against
social and economic exclusion and inequality, and in broadening the prevailing conception of politics. Thus, the struggles for a deepening of democracy
that were undertaken by social movements in Latin America sought to redefine citizenship by challenging the existing definition of what constituted the
political arena its participants, its institutions, its processes, its agenda, and
its scope (Alvarez et al. 1998).
Adopting as its point of departure the notion of a right to have rights, this
new definition of citizenship enabled new social subjects to identify what they
considered to be their rights and to struggle for their recognition. In contrast
to a view of citizenship as a strategy by the elites and by the state for the gradual and limited political incorporation of excluded sectors of society, or as a
legal and political condition necessary for the establishment of capitalism, this
is a definition of non-citizens, of the excluded: a citizenship from below.
Much of the attraction of citizenship and its core category of rights lies in
the dual role that it has played in the debates on democracy that characterise contemporary politics in Latin America. The struggle for the recognition
and extension of rights helped to make the argument for the expansion and
deepening of democracy much more concrete. And the reference to citizenship provided common ground and shared principles for a huge diversity of
social movements that adopted the language of rights as a way to express their
demands. This in turn helped these movements to avoid fragmentation and
isolation. Thus the building of citizenship was always conceived as a struggle
for the expansion of democracy that could incorporate both a broad range
of demands and particular concrete struggles for rights, such as the rights
to housing, education, and health care, whose achievement would further
deepen democracy.
The focus of social movements on the need to assert the right to have rights
is clearly related to extreme levels of poverty and exclusion, but also to the
pervasive authoritarianism and hierarchical organisation of Brazilian society.
Class, race, and gender differences have historically underpinned the social
classification that pervades our cultures by establishing each persons place
in the social hierarchy. Thus, for marginalised sectors, the political relevance
of cultural meanings that are embedded in social practices is part of their daily
life. As in most Latin American societies, to be poor means not only to experience economic or material deprivation, but also to submit to cultural rules
that convey a complete lack of recognition of poor people as subjects, bearers
of rights. In what Telles (1994) called the incivility embedded in that tradition, poverty is a sign of inferiority, a form of existence that makes it impossible for individuals to exercise their rights. The cultural deprivation imposed
by the absolute absence of rights which is essentially the denial of human
dignity finds its expression in material deprivation and political exclusion.
The perception of cultural social authoritarianism as a dimension of exclusion, in addition to economic inequality and political subordination, constituted a significant element in the struggle to redefine citizenship. First, it
made clear that the struggle for rights, for the right to have rights, had to be
a political struggle, thus enabling the urban popular movements to establish
the link between culture and politics which became embedded in their collective action. The experience of the Assemblia do Povo (Peoples Assembly) from
1979 to the early 1980s, a movement of favelados (shanty-town dwellers) in
Campinas in the state of So Paulo, illustrates this. Right from the start of their
struggle for the right to the use of the land, favelados knew that they would
have to struggle first for their very right to have rights. Thus, their first public
initiative was to ask the media to publicise the results of their own survey of
the favelas, in order to show the city that they were not idlers, misfits, or prostitutes, as they were assumed to be, but decent working citizens who therefore
should be seen as bearers of rights (Dagnino 1994b).
Making this connection made it possible to establish alliances with other
social movements such as ethnic, feminist, gay, ecological, and humanrights movements in seeking more egalitarian social relations and helping
to articulate a distinctive, enlarged view of democracy. Rights and citizenship
(Santos 1979) became the core of a common ethicalpolitical field in which
many of these movements and other sectors could share and reinforce each
others struggles. For instance, the emergence of the Sindicato Cidado (Citizen
Trade Unions) in the early 1990s shows that this vision penetrated even the
Brazilian labour movement (Rodrigues 1997), traditionally associated with a
more strictly class-based stance.
Secondly, the broader scope of citizenship went far beyond the formal legal
acquisition of a set of rights within the politicaljudicial system. Rather, it
represented a project for a new sociability: a more egalitarian way of organising
all social relations, new rules for living together in society (new ways to deal
with conflicts, and a new sense of a public order, of public responsibility, a
renewed social contract) and not only the incorporation into the political
system in the strict sense. More egalitarian social relations imply recognising
the other as having valid interests and rights, and the constitution of a public
domain in which rights determine the parameters for discussion, debate, and
the negotiation of conflicts, thus bringing in an ethical dimension to social
relations. Such a vision is profoundly unsettling for both the social authoritarianism that characterises Brazilian society and for more recent neo-liberal
discourses that elevate the importance of private interests at the expense of an
ethical dimension to social life (Telles 1994).
Thirdly, once rights are no longer limited to legal provisions, access to existing rights, or the implementation of formal rights, it is possible to include new
rights that emerge from specific struggles or campaigns. In this sense, the definition of rights and the assertion of something as a right become themselves
the objects of political struggle. The rights to autonomy over ones own body,
to environmental protection, or to housing, for instance, illustrate something
105
of the diversity of these new rights. The inclusion not only of the right to
equality, but also the right to difference, specifies, deepens, and broadens the
right to equality (Dagnino 1994a).
Fourthly, an additional element in this redefinition transcends a central
reference in the liberal concept of citizenship: the claim to access, inclusion,
membership, and belonging to an already given political system. What is really at stake in struggles for citizenship in Brazil is more than the right to be
included as a full member of society; it is the right to participate in the very
definition of that society and its political system, to define what we want to be
members of. The direct participation of civil society and social movements in
state decisions constitutes one of the most crucial aspects in the redefinition
of citizenship, because it conveys a potential for radical transformations in the
structure of power relations that characterise Latin American societies.
A further consequence of such a broadening in scope is that citizenship is
no longer confined to the relationship between the individual and the state,
but becomes a parameter for all social relations. This may be more evident
for social movements of women, blacks, or gays, for example, since such a
significant part of their struggles is concerned with fighting the discrimination and prejudice that they face in every aspect of daily life. The process of
building citizenship as the affirmation and recognition of rights was seen as a
way to transform deeply embedded social practices. Such a political strategy
implies moral and intellectual reform: a process of social learning, of building
new kinds of social relations in which citizens become active social subjects. It
also means that all members of society have to learn to live on different terms
with citizens who refuse to accept the social and cultural places previously
ascribed to them.
Social movements, whether organised around basic claims such as housing, water, sewage, education, and health care, or broader interests such as
those of women, blacks, or ecological movements, emphasised that citizenship meant the constitution of active social subjects who can thus become political actors. Some even defined citizenship as consisting of this very process.
Thus consciousness, agency, and the capacity to struggle are evidence of ones
citizenship, even if other rights are absent. Among 51 activists interviewed in
Campinas, So Paulo, in 1993, most members of popular movements and of
workers unions expressed this view. By contrast, answering the same question Why do you consider yourself a citizen? members of business organisations stressed the fact that they fulfil their duties and have rights, whereas the
middle-class activists highlighted their position in society, derived from their
professional activities, as indicators of citizenship. Interestingly, while a large
majority of these two sectors considered that they were treated as citizens, a
similar majority of those belonging to social movements and workers unions
expressed the opposite view (Dagnino 1998: 4041).
The role of the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s in shaping this
redefinition of citizenship is obviously rooted in their own struggles and practices. Although they drew on a history of rights that had given rise to regulated
citizenship (Santos 1979), they reacted against the conception of the state and
of power embedded in that history. They also reacted against the control and
tutelage of the political organisation of popular sectors by the state, political
parties, and politicians. Their conception of rights and citizenship embodied
a reaction against previous notions of rights as favours and/or objects of bargain with the powerful (as in the case of citizenship by concession, cidadania
concedida) (Sales 1994). In this sense, the struggle for rights, also influenced by
the 1970s human-rights movements against the military regime, encapsulated
not only claims for equality but the negation of a dominant political culture
deeply rooted in Brazilian society.
This notion of citizenship and the participation of civil society as a mechanism for its extension were formally recognised in the 1988 Constitution.
The Collor government, brought to power in 1989, began the move to neoliberalism, which reached its peak under Cardoso from 1994 to 2002, and
created what we have referred to as the perverse confluence between the two
political projects. Citizenship was once again redefined in neo-liberal terms,
in order to neutralise the meanings that the term had acquired in its use by
social movements while trying to retain its symbolic power.
107
Conclusion
This analysis has important consequences for the contested conceptions of
citizenship, such as the displacement of issues such as poverty and inequality: in being addressed solely as technical or philanthropic issues, poverty and
inequality are effectively withdrawn from the public (political) arena and so
from the proper domain of justice, equality, and citizenship, and reduced to a
problem of ensuring minimum conditions for survival.
Moreover, the solution to the problem of poverty and inequality is presented as an individual moral duty. The idea of a collective solidarity that underlies
the classical reference to rights and citizenship is being replaced by an understanding of solidarity as a strictly private moral responsibility. This is why
civil society is being urged to engage in voluntary and philanthropic work.
It is no coincidence that voluntary work is becoming the favourite hobby of
the Brazilian middle class. This understanding of citizenship also accords with
that held by corporate foundations. Seeking to maximise profits while also
nurturing a public image of social responsibility, these foundations also view
solidarity as a question of individual ethics, with no reference to universal
rights or to the political debate on the causes of poverty and inequality.
This re-signification of the notions of citizenship and solidarity block off
their political dimension and erode the sense of public responsibility and public interest that had been so hard-won in the democratising struggles of Brazils
recent past. As the targeted distribution of social services and benefits comes to
occupy the place formerly held by rights and citizenship, so the institutional
channels through which to claim rights are closed down; instead, distribution
depends only on the good will and competence of those involved. It becomes
increasingly difficult, therefore, even to formulate the notion of rights within
the public sphere (Telles 2001). The symbolic importance of rights as the cornerstone of an egalitarian society is thus being dismissed in favour of social
relations based on individualism.
A second set of consequences relates to the participation of civil society,
another central plank of the democratising project that has been re-signified.
While the neo-liberal project requires the participation of civil society, this
increasingly means that organisations of civil society take over the role of
the state in providing services. The effective sharing of decision-making power, i.e. the full exercise of citizenship as conceived by democratising forces,
takes place in most cases within the limits of a neo-liberal framework, with
decision-making power remaining the preserve of the strategic nucleus of
the state (Bresser-Pereira 1999). The political meaning of participation has
thus been reduced to management, and related concerns with efficiency and
client satisfaction have come to replace the political debate on inequality
and social justice.
The perverse confluence described here constitutes a minefield in which
sectors of civil society, including NGOs, that do not support the project of
the minimal state feel deceived when, motivated by the shared vocabulary of
citizenship, they get involved in initiatives with government sectors that are
committed to rolling back the state. Many of the social movements who participate in public spaces to formulate public policies share the same reaction.
Some of them define this situation as a dilemma, and several contemplate
rejecting altogether any further joint initiatives, or being extremely cautious
with respect to the correlation of forces within these initiatives and the concrete possibilities opened by them (Dagnino 2002).
Under an apparent homogeneity of discourse, what is at stake in these
spaces is the advancement or retreat of very different political projects and
conceptions of citizenship. Although the election in 2002 of Lus Incio Lula
da Silva of the Workers Party (PT) renewed hopes that the democratic participatory project would advance, his broad coalition government has not been
immune to the effects of the perverse confluence described in this chapter.
Ironically, since the PT itself emerged in the 1980s as a result of civil societys
109
Acknowledgement
This chapter draws on the authors earlier work We all have rights but:
contesting conceptions of citizenship in Brazil, in Naila Kabeer (ed.) Inclusive
Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions of Citizenship, London: Zed Books, 2005,
pp. 14763.
Notes
1.
References
Abers, Rebecca (1998) From clientelism to cooperation: local government,
participatory policy, and civic organizing in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Politics &
Society 26(4): 51137.
Alvarez, Sonia E. (1999) Advocating feminism: the Latin American feminist
NGO boom, International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(2): 181209.
Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (eds.) (1998) Cultures
of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements,
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Avritzer, Leonardo (2002) Democracy and Public Spaces in Latin America,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bresser-Pereira, Luiz Carlos (1999) From bureaucratic to managerial: public
administration in Brazil in Reforming the State: Managerial Public Administration in Latin America, Luis Carlos Bresser Pereira and Peter Spink (eds.)
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 11546.
Dagnino, Evelina (1994a) Os movimentos sociais e a emergncia de uma nova
noo de cidadania, in E. Dagnino (ed.) Os Anos 90: Poltica e Sociedade no
Brasil, So Paulo: Brasiliense
Dagnino, Evelina (1994b) On becoming a citizen: the story of D. Marlene,
in Rina Benmayor and Andor Skotnes (eds.) International Yearbook of Oral
History and Life Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dagnino, Evelina (1998) Culture, citizenship, and eemocracy: changing discourses and practices of the Latin American left, in S. Alvarez, E. Dagnino,
and A. Escobar (eds.).
Dagnino, Evelina (2002) Sociedade Civil e Espaos Pblicos no Brasil, So Paulo:
Paz e Terra.
CHAPTER 10
A brief history
Both the word itself and the concept of empowerment have a fascinating history.1 According to some recent research into the terms origins and meanings
(Gaventa 2002), it can be traced back as early as the Protestant Reformation in
Europe and it reverberates through the centuries in Europe and North America
through Quakerism, Jeffersonian democracy, early capitalism, and the black
power movement. The concept of empowerment, although expressed in
other linguistic equivalents, was embedded in many other historic struggles for
social justice: in my own state of Karnataka in southern India, for instance,
the twelfth-and thirteenth-century Veerashaiva movement against caste and
gender oppression called for the redistribution of power and access to spiritual
knowledge through the destruction of these forms of social stratification. But
the term became revitalised and acquired a strongly political meaning in the
latter half of the twentieth century, when it was adopted by the liberation
theology, popular education, black power, feminist and other movements engaged in struggles for more equitable, participatory, and democratic forms of
social change and development.
From these historically, politically, and geographically diverse locations,
empowerment was hijacked, in the 1990s, into increasingly bizarre locations, converted from a collective to an individualistic process, and skilfully
co-opted by conservative and even reactionary political ideologies in pursuit
of their agenda of divesting big government (for which read: the welfare
state) of its purported power and control by empowering communities to
look after their own affairs. Management gurus discovered empowerment
and infused it into the human-resource development and motivational practices of the corporate world, turning it to the service of profit making and
competitiveness in the market place. Thus the 1990s witnessed a widespread
co-option of the term by corporate management, neo-con political movements, and consumer-rights advocates.
Whats in a word?
Should we be troubled by what many may consider the inevitable subversion of an attractive term that can successfully traverse such diverse and even
ideologically opposed terrain? I believe we should, because it represents not
some innocent linguistic fad but a more serious and subterranean process of
challenging and subverting the politics that the term was created to symbolise. This political project is most clearly evident in the domain of womens
empowerment, and I shall use the subversion and de-politicisation of the term
within this context, particularly in my country India to demonstrate why
it is a matter of concern.
The concept of womens empowerment emerged from several important critiques and debates generated by the womens movement throughout the world
during the 1980s, when feminists, particularly in the Third World, were increasingly discontent with the largely apolitical and economistic WID, WAD, and
GAD models in prevailing development interventions. There was growing interaction between feminism and the concept and practice of popular education,
based on the conscientisation approach developed by Paulo Freire in Latin
America in the 1970s as part of his liberation theology. The latter, though
113
115
The South Asia document defined empowerment as a process, and the results of a process, of transforming the relations of power between individuals
and social groups. Since feminist activists were among the first to use this
word widely, it also had a specific gendered meaning: the transformation of
the relations of power between men and women, within and across social
categories of various kinds. The document defined empowerment as a process
that shifts social power in three critical ways: by challenging the ideologies
that justify social inequality (such as gender or caste), by changing prevailing
patterns of access to and control over economic, natural, and intellectual resources, and by transforming the institutions and structures that reinforce and
sustain existing power structures (such as the family, state, market, education,
and media). The document emphasised that transformatory empowerment
could not be achieved by tackling any one of these elements of social power
even at that early stage, its architects were clear that there was no one-shot
magic-bullet route to womens empowerment, such as providing women with
access to credit, enhanced incomes, or land titles. The framework stressed that
the ideological and institutional change dimensions were critical to sustaining
empowerment and real social transformation.
Through the 1980s and early 1990s, initiatives around the subcontinent,
and particularly in India, were engaged in a diverse range of experiments that
attempted to enact the process of empowerment on the ground with various
marginalised communities, but most often focused on poor rural and urban
women. These approaches tried to depart from past interventions that treated
women either as beneficiaries of services or as producers or workers. Instead
they adopted feminist popular-education strategies that created new spaces for
women to collectivise around shared experiences of poverty, exclusion, and
discrimination, critically analyse the structures and ideologies that sustained
and reinforced their oppression, and raise consciousness of their own sense of
subordination. These spaces and the activists working within them facilitated
women to recognise their own agency and power for change their power
to organise themselves to confront and transform the social and economic
arrangements and cultural systems that subjugated them. The main inputs in
these processes were new ideas and information, not hand-outs or services; an
opportunity for women to locate and articulate the changes that they wanted
to make, and evolve strategies to do so. Grassroots women in different corners
of the country, in cities, towns, and villages, were mobilised into sanghs or
samoohs2 through which they developed a political and personal agenda for
change, and the collective strength and creative power to move their agendas
forward.
These basic strategies found expression in a range of activities across the
country. Womens groups and grassroots womens collectives began to address
their unequal access to economic and natural resources, to education, health
services, to reproductive health and rights, aiming to change the gender
division of labour and access to training, technical skills, and employment.
Micro-credit programmes successfully shifted productive resources into poor
womens hands and they, in turn, were demonstrating how womens enhanced
incomes were applied to raise household nutrition levels and improve the
health and education status of their children. There were struggles to make
visible and redress the pervasive and diverse forms of violence against women
dowry-related violence and murders, rape, female infanticide and foeticide,
domestic violence, caste-based and communal violence that targeted women, and state-sanctioned violence. Major public campaigns were launched
for legislative reform and enforcement for special cells for women in police
stations, for greater representation of women in Panchayat Raj3 institutions,
for changes in the rape law that would shift the burden of proof from the
victim to the perpetrator, for banning or regulating sex-determination and
sex-selection technologies, and for more stringent punishment for dowry
harassment and domestic violence (see Kumar 1993).
Interestingly, during this entire phase, womens movements saw the state
as a critical enabler of the empowerment process, even if their stance was
adversarial. In turn, several arms of the Indian state and especially some
committed senior bureaucrats took the lead in supporting and launching
programmes that were built upon a transformative notion of empowerment,
providing space for the mobilisation and organisation of some of the countrys poorest and most oppressed women to challenge and change their social,
political, and economic conditions, even when this meant confronting other
sections of the state and its policies and programmes.4 This support was not
entirely altruistic, of course, but often sprang from an astute understanding
that these womens empowerment processes might better enable the administration to deliver its schemes and services, outperform other states and provinces in development indicators, and lower the poverty line.
Donor agencies quickly followed suit and abandoned their earlier WID,
WAD, and GAD approaches to adopt the empowerment framework as both
an objective and a methodology. While donors did not play a critical role in
India in defining or advancing the empowerment approach, they quickly promoted it among their development partners, and many NGOs and womens
development organisations were compelled to switch their language, if not
their strategies, to fit the new empowerment mantra. This was a huge factor,
along with government adoption of the term, in spreading the use of the
empowerment terminology and eventually rendering it into a meaningless
buzzword.
In retrospect, it is the early successes of the empowerment approach despite contemporary angst about how difficult it was to measure, or how it took
too long to demonstrate impact, and other anxieties that contributed inadvertently to its subsequent instrumentalisation, and its conversion into not
only a buzzword but a magic bullet for poverty alleviation and rapid economic
development, rather than a multi-faceted process of social transformation,
especially in the arena of gender equality. By the mid-1990s, India had enthusiastically embraced neoliberal economic policies, but it was also an electoral
democracy where the poor particularly the rural poor were the largest vote
117
banks, who routinely threw out regimes that failed their interests and needs.
Opening up rural markets and raising incomes of the poor was thus critical
to political survival. In Indias populist politics, empowerment was a natural
target for co-option by varying political players, most of whom were anxious
to limit its transformatory potential.
Consequently, ruling regimes and political parties of various hues rapidly
adopted and simultaneously constricted the concept and practice of womens
empowerment into two relatively narrow and politically manageable arenas:
(1) the so-called self-help womens groups (SHGs) which were meant to simulate the empowering nature of the sanghs and samoohs mentioned above,
but in reality engage in little else but savings and lending; and (2) reservations for women within local self-government bodies which are deemed to
lead to political empowerment. Both of these are described as womens empowerment approaches, although there is little evidence that either result
in sustained changes in womens position or condition within their families,
communities, or society at large. Indeed, there is a growing body of analysis
that argues that the empowering effects of these interventions are complex,
and that they can consolidate existing power hierarchies as well as create new
problems, including manipulation and co-option by dominant political interests, growing indebtedness, doubling and tripling of womens workloads, and
new forms of gendered violence (Cornwall and Goetz 2005: 783-800; Burra et
al. 2005; Fernando 2006). On the other hand, policies such as rural development, which have the widest sway, have determined that the goals of poverty
alleviation and empowerment will be achieved through self-help groups and
panchayats.5
Although virtually every government policy claims to support womens
empowerment, a deeper scrutiny of both policy and implementation strategies (available on the websites of every ministry concerned with poverty
eradication, marginalised social groups, women and girls) reveals that the
broad-based, multi-faceted, and radical consciousness-raising approaches
fostered in programmes like Mahila Samakhya in the 1980s and early 1990s
have more or less disappeared. Every departments narrow-bandwidth intervention, in the era of increasing divestment and privatisation, is packaged in
the language of empowerment. Indias rural development policy describes its
objectives as poverty alleviation and empowerment, claiming that these will
be achieved through the strategies of self-help groups and strengthening local governments, the twin sites of womens empowerment. The Education
Departments Womens Empowerment Project offers an even better example
of this downsized empowerment strategy:
Since the overall empowerment of women is crucially dependent on
economic empowerment, ... the main purpose of the Women Empowerment Project (WEP) is to organize women into effective Self Help
Groups.6
In the larger political arena, there has been an equally disturbing trend whereby the idea of womens empowerment has been distorted and co-opted into
the ideological frameworks of the religious fundamentalism that has become
deeply entrenched in Indian politics: the status of women in certain minority
groups, and their need for empowerment (in its vernacular equivalents), was
a key component of the Hindu nationalists ideological and political project, as
was the construction of the Hindu woman as the educated, equal, empowered
opposite despite the fact that they remain deeply hostile to the questioning
of the disempowerment and subjugation of millions of women with the spread
of particular regional and upper-caste Hindu practices such as dowry or female
foeticide through sex-selective abortions (Hassan 1998; and Sarkar 1998).
A requiem
In the new millennium, the once-ubiquitous term empowerment has virtually disappeared from the Indian development discourse, including in the
context of gender equality, except in a few niches of government policy.7 I
attribute this to several tendencies that began emerging in the late 1990s:
the overwhelming sway of the micro-credit model and SHGs as substitutes
for the more comprehensive empowerment processes of early feminist activism; the displacement of empowerment by the emergence of the rights-based
approach within critiques and counters to neo-liberal reductionist and instrumentalist strategies for economic development and social justice; and the
management-influenced results-based approach that has been adopted by a
large number of development-assistance programmes and donors, including
those that had remained steadfastly opposed to fast-track strategies.
With donors increasingly abandoning empowerment as a no-longer-fashionable indeed practical methodology, and enthusiastically championing
(with a few exceptions) large-scale micro-finance programmes as the quickest
route to womens empowerment (and overall economic development!), the
old feminist concept and practice of empowerment have been interred without ceremony. Grassroots practitioners and movements find that they can no
longer raise funds with the language and strategies of empowerment, or that
they must disguise these within au courant frameworks or rhetoric (such as
rights, micro-finance, transparency, accountability, and so forth). Some donors have moved resources out of broader-based empowerment approaches,
because they dont show countable results and/or because empowerment
doesnt work fast enough.
Because the process and its effects and impacts was so shaped by the
interests and contexts of those engaged in it, and hence less predictable in its
outcomes, the empowerment approach is not sufficiently results-oriented,
an important priority in current development funding. In such agencies, the
rights-based approach (as though empowerment is about anything but rights!)
finds greater favour, because rights-based interventions greater access to redress, achievements of the Millennium Development Goals, new legislation
119
are more readily quantified. But these approaches often shift agency into the
hands of professional intermediaries (lawyers, NGO activists, policy specialists) and away from marginalised women and communities. They also focus
on formal structures and equality, rather than on the informal institutions
and cultural systems that older empowerment processes attempted to transform (though not always successfully).
Meanwhile, in keeping with the insidious dominance of the neo-liberal
ideology and its consumerist core, we see the transition of empowerment out
of the realm of societal and systemic change and into the individual domain
from a noun signifying shifts in social power to a verb signalling individual
power, achievement, status. Empower yourself screamed a billboard advertisement for jobs in yet another IT company in Bangalore, my home town, last
year. Ironically, the permeation of the concept into corporate management
practices reflected some of the principles that infused it in the world of social
change: reducing hierarchy, decentralisation, greater decision-making power
and autonomy for managers on the ground all essential to efficiency and
competitiveness in the era of global corporations (Morris and Willocks 1995;
Cook and Macaulay 1996). But this journey out of social struggles and into
management practice is deeply disturbing: can the empowerment of the local
manager of a multinational corporation achieve the same social good as the
struggles of impoverished Dalit women with whom I have worked to claim
the right to burn their dead in the upper-caste cremation ground or have their
children seated in the classroom with caste-Hindu classmates, or the efforts of
indigenous women to regain their traditional rights to forest produce, or the
campaigns of pavement dwellers to secure housing in Indias burgeoning metros? Would these women equate their experience to that of the manager who
is advised to hold an exercise on Friday afternoon, with the advice to Present
a daft award for the best bit of empowerment, the most empowered person of
the day (Morris and Willcocks 1995:77, quoted in Gaventa 2002)?
Postscript
I called this chapter an experiential account, because I did not want to pretend
to be presenting an exhaustive, thoroughly researched analysis of the buzzword empowerment and also because I was an unapologetic champion of
the powerful and transformatory concepts and practices that it represented at
the height of feminist grassroots organising in another India. But today, I ask
myself a simple question: if this word, and the idea that it represented, has
been seized and re-defined by populist politics, fundamentalist and neo-con
ideologies, and corporate management, if it has been downsized by microfinance and quota evangelists, and otherwise generally divested of all vestiges
of power and politics, is it worth reclaiming? These very processes signal the
vagueness and lack of political accuracy that its critics always highlighted.
They also warn us that the subversion of powerful political techniques that
organise the marginalised will always first occur through the co-option and
distortion of its language.
Clearly, we need to build a new language in which to frame our vision
and strategies for social transformation at the local, national, or global level.
I for one intend to do so not by re-reading Foucault or Gramsci or other great
political philosophers, but by listening to poor women and their movements,
listening to their values, principles, articulations, and actions, and by trying to
hear how they frame their search for justice. From this, I suspect, will emerge
not only a new discourse, but also new concepts and strategies that have not
yet entered our political or philosophical imaginations.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
References
ASPBAE/FAO (1993) Womens Empowerment in South Asia: Concepts and Practices, New Delhi: ASPBAE (Asia South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education).
Batliwala, Srilatha (2007) When rights go wrong, Seminar 569: 8994.
Burra, Neera, Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive, and K. Murthy, Ranjani (eds.) (2005)
Micro-Credit, Poverty and Empowerment: Linking the Triad, New Delhi: Sage.
Cook, Sarah and Steve Macaulay (1996) Perfect Empowerment: All you need to get
it right first time, Arrow: London, quoted in Gaventa 2002.
Cornwall, Andrea, and Anne Marie Goetz (2005) Democratizing democracy:
feminist perspectives, Democratization 12(5): 783800.
Fernando, Jude L. (2006) Microfinance: Perils and Prospects, London: Routledge.
Gaventa, John (2002) Empowerment: A Briefing Note, unpublished monograph, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.
121
Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Dept of Education, 2006, http://india.gov.in/outerwin.htm?id=http://education.nic.in/,
retrieved February 2006.
Hassan, Zoya (1998) Gender politics, legal reform, and the Muslim community in India, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds.), Appropriating
Gender: Womens Agency, the State, and Politicized Religion in South Asia,
London: Routledge.
Kabeer, Naila (1994) Reversed Realities Gender Hierarchies in Development
Thought, London: Verso.
Kumar, Radha (1993) The History of Doing An Illustrated Account of Movements
for Womens Rights and Feminism in India, 18001990, New Delhi: Kali for
Women.
Morris, Steve and Graham Willcocks (1995) Successful Empowerment in a Week,
London: Hodder & Stoughton for the Institute of Management.
Sarkar, Tanika (1998) Woman, community and nation a historical trajectory for Hindu identity politics, in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds.),
Appropriating Gender: Womens Agency, the State, and Politicized Religion in
South Asia, London: Routledge.
United Nations (1995) Beijing Platform for Action, Annexe 1, para 7, www.
un.org/esa/gopher-data/conf/fwcw/off/a20.en/, retrieved 12 February 2006.
CHAPTER 11
Social capital
Ben Fine
In parallel with, and as a complement to, globalisation, social capital has enjoyed a meteoric rise across the social sciences over the last two decades. Not
surprisingly, it has been particularly prominent across development studies, not
least through heavy promotion by the World Bank. As a concept, though, as has
been argued persistently by a minority critical literature, social capital is fundamentally flawed. Although capable of addressing almost anything designated as
social, it has tended to neglect the state, class, power, and conflict. As a buzzword,
it has heavily constrained the currently progressive departure from the extremes of
neo-liberalism and post-modernism at a time of extremely aggressive assault by
economics imperialism. Social capital should not be ignored but contested and
rejected.
Introduction
Social capital as a concept rose to prominence during the 1990s, towards the
latter half as far as development is concerned. Although before then it had
scarcely warranted a mention1, its leading proponent, Robert Putnam, was
acknowledged in the 1990s to be the single most cited author across the social
sciences. As a word, or two, social capital had certainly raised a buzz. What,
how, and why is the subject of this contribution.
This chapter is written from a highly personal point of view: I was heavily
involved, if critically, with social capital from an early stage, and have disseminated my views in a number of publications. I draw on my own writings
extensively in this piece, along with an anecdote or two that might shed some
light on the source and nature of buzzwording. Throughout, I assume at least
a passing knowledge of what social capital is or is about although, as will
become clear, it has far exceeded its initial popularisation as Its not what you
know, its who you know that counts.2
In the next section, I offer a short account of the key features of social capital as it has come to be deployed across the social sciences. This is followed
by a discussion of its role within development studies, and how it came to
acquire it. The final section offers some more general commentary on social
capital as buzzword.
SOCIAL CAPITAL
125
Social capital is equally at home as a residual or complementary category, explaining what was previously inexplicable in its absence. Thus, for example,
social inclusion might be a form of social capital, it might be explained by social
capital, or it might reinforce the effects of social capital (with social exclusion as
the corresponding dark side). Inevitably, though, the social-capital prism filters
out more light than it lets through, in drawing simplistically upon basic categories of social analysis, stripped of their rich traditions and contested meanings.
Third, social capital is an oxymoron. It presumes that there can be a capital that is not social. It is rarely made explicit what this asocial capital is, where
the boundary lies between it and social capital, and what role is played by
that other capital in itself and as complement to, or constraint upon, its alter
ego. Social capital might be the counterpart to economic capital (asocial?), the
state, or even personal capital. In what respect it is social and/or capital, and
hence distinctive as such, is under-explored.
Fourth, as a result, the economy, and economic theory, tend to remain
unexamined in the context of social capital. There is some loosely formulated
presumption that markets cannot work at all or cannot work perfectly in the
absence of social capital. This opens the potential for (more) social capital to
enhance the working of the market, just as it enriches non-economic behaviour and outcomes through collectivity.
Fifth, social capital offers a highly attractive analytical fix for economics,
as a residual theoretical and empirical factor. Differences in economic performance had traditionally been seen as the consequence of different quantities of capital and labour. The former had been refined to various types, such
as physical, financial, environmental, and human capital. Social capital, for
economists in their own limited departure from neo-liberalism, could be added to capture anything else that might contribute to performance, with the
non-market such as social capital understood as the path-dependent response
to market imperfections.
Sixth, despite its wide scope of definition in principle, social capital in practice has exhibited a number of taboo aspects, despite these being at the core of
social interaction. Generalising over such an extensive literature is dangerous,
but omissions (apart from the economy other than as something given but to
be enhanced), despite being significant elements in social interaction, include
class, the state, trade unions, and political parties and organisations.5 And, by
the same token, co-operation and collectivity have been emphasised at the
almost absolute expense of power and conflict.
Seventh, the policy perspective induced by uses of the concept of social
capital, although never put in these terms, is self-help raised to the level of
the collective. However good or bad things might be, they could be better if
people interacted more, trusted one another, and co-operated. Social capital
offers the golden opportunity of improving the status quo without challenging
it. Everything from educational outcomes through crime prevention to better
psychological health can be improved if neighbours and communities would
only pull together and trust one another.
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127
at the rhetorical level was evident. This was even carried through in scholarship to some extent, even if not immediately, for example in the case of privatisation. Yet it is arguable whether these shifts had any impact on policy itself,
as an even wider range of market-supporting interventions than under the
Washington Consensus became legitimised through a rationale of correcting
market and non-market interventions.
These shifts also reflected changes underway within the discipline of economics in general and development economics in particular (Jomo and Fine
2006). The old informal, classical development economics had long given
way to the new, with its emphasis on mathematical techniques, econometrics, the virtues of the market, and the corresponding need not to distort it
through rent-seeking, corruption, and the like. But, in its reaction against neoliberalism, mainstream economics had begun to emphasise the importance
of market imperfections and the need to correct them through non-market
mechanisms. This has fed through into what I have termed the newer development economics, with the PWC to the fore.
In one major respect, the CDF and PWC exhibit a marked difference from
earlier ideologies emanating from the World Bank. Although completely
different, the Keynesian/welfarism/modernisation stance of the McNamara
period and the neo-liberalism of the Washington Consensus had their own
relatively simple message on how to achieve development. In contrast, the
PWC emphasises that the incidence of market and non-market imperfections is uneven and contingent in form, extent, and consequences, so that
not one model fits all, and so on, and everything is micro. Social capital is at
its core the negative mirror-image of rent-seeking, etc., with the same analytical framework but diametrically opposed conclusions that non-market
influences can be beneficial (rather than detrimental) to the market. As such,
it incorporates the non-economic in a way that is consistent with the (non-)
market imperfections approach and is sensitive in principle to difference
from one application to another. I hasten to add that this does not necessarily make a policy difference; rather, it simply offers richer scope in justifying
policy. After all, there are limits to using neo-liberalism as the rationale for
substantial intervention.
In short, social capital offered considerable leverage in the World Banks
dealings with the external world. In addition, it allowed for certain internal
institutional interests to be promoted. The World Bank is dominated by economists, numerically and intellectually, and of the worst type from the perspective of the social scientists under the shadow of the Washington Consensus.
The CDF and PWC offered some opportunity for non-economists to be taken
seriously. Social capital was strategically chosen as a judicious concept for that
purpose. In a paper that is unusual for its information and honesty over the
internal workings of the World Bank (Bebbington et al. 2004), all this is revealed: from Putnams initial invitation to be involved, through the attempts
to engage (successful), but not to be dominated by (unsuccessful) the economists. Not surprisingly, this is not entirely the take of the papers authors.
SOCIAL CAPITAL
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Rather, they see themselves as the heroes, unrecognised, strategically compromising and so reviled, of a hidden internal battle to civilise the World Banks
economists, and so bring the progressively social to the intellectual and policy
practices of the World Bank (Fine 2007b) for response.
In this respect, for them, criticism of social capital has missed the point
of its inner significance in shifting the Banks thinking and hence policy. Of
course, this leaves aside both the other influences on the thinking and practice of the World Bank and the broader impact of the promotion of social
capital in development thinking and practice elsewhere. Essentially, at least
in retrospective self-justification, these authors are asking us to devolve our
intellectual responsibilities to them, in order that they can promote their own
positions within the World Bank around a concept that they themselves admit to be flawed. The parallels with the never mind the arguments, just do
it stance on privatisation are striking. And they are ironic. For whatever the
impact of social capital on the design and implementation of particular World
Bank projects, the strategy of the organisation in practice has been to shift as
much of its finance as possible from the public to the private sector. This is
so despite a World Bank rethink on privatisation, adjudging it to have been
previously too premature a gamble (Bayliss and Fine 2007).
Polemics aside, the account of Bebbington et al. (2004) is a striking illustration of how strategic thinking within the World Bank is forced, individually
and institutionally, to conform to its shifting needs and practices, and how
limited is the scope to buck its requirements. Such is the case on a grander
scale for the resignations of Joseph Stiglitz, Ravi Kanbur, and others. But where
professional recruitment and careerism prove insufficient to serve the World
Banks scholarship, rhetoric, and policy, the delusion of internal influence and
reform incorporates those who offer a little more by way of free thinking and
altruistic motivation. This is not to say that the scholarship, rhetoric, and
policy of the World Bank are pre-determined in and of themselves and in relation to one another. But they are embedded, to coin a phrase, in an institution
and its practices that are heavily constrained and can be perverse in attaching
intentions to outcomes. The reduction of the impact of social capital to the
activities of a few scholars within the World Bank is at best partial and at worst
misleading.
Given my own interest in social capital for other reasons, I was alert to its
importance for the World Bank from an early stage. I dredged through the
Banks dedicated website, http://worldbank.org/poverty/scapital, and initially
exaggerated its importance as a way of circumventing the idea of the developmental state as an alternative to the Washington Consensus (Fine 1999b),
although that the PWC would circumvent the developmental state proved
correct. But my efforts did prompt a mole within the World Bank to contact
me with three gems of wisdom in terms of the reaction that I was likely to
receive to my criticisms. First, I would be asked to back off, as the World Bank
was changing for the good. Second, none of my criticisms would be addressed.
These questions were indicative of a wish to explore the relationship between social capital and globalisation, economic development, and the practices of the World Bank itself. I do not have a record of Woolcocks questions,
but one was to ask what I would say to a South African nurse asking me
how I would deal with HIV/AIDS,9 and another was why I did not publish
in respectable journals. The latter is ironic in view of the knowledge Banks
total exclusion of my work from its social-capital website (including its extensive annotated bibliography) and from its overall website altogether (other
than once for a legitimising exercise10). In the event, while I did answer his
questions, he totally ignored mine, preferring to offer a tangential discourse
on some obscure management framework before departing to survey the implementation of the World Banks social-capital toolkit household survey for
Albania. With social-capital surveys having been widely adopted across developed and developing countries, whatever the intentions of the World Banks
social capitalists in moving internal dialogue and practice, the external impact
has been considerable in this respect at least.11
SOCIAL CAPITAL
131
Second, social capital is contextual, like all concepts, in the more general
sense of itself being a specific product of the material and intellectual circumstances that mark the turn of the millennium. This aspect of social capital is
brought out by Putnams foisting it, as an afterthought, upon his study of regional disparities in Italy from the twelfth century onwards. He then exports it
to the twentieth-century USA as the way to understand the decline of bowling
clubs and the rise of television prior to finding an entre into the World Bank.
Todays context allows this to happen, and for social capital to be accepted
and promoted as a legitimate and legitimised concept. It is the contemporary
phlogiston of social theory.
Third, social capital is chaotic, not least in its multifarious uses and meanings. Far from this resulting in its dismissal from the intellectual arena, this
appears to have promoted its use. It has been subject to hundreds of measures,
or elements that make up a measure, so much so that it has been felt necessary to re-aggregate into intermediate categories such as linking, bonding, and
bridging. These all mutually contradict one another across traditional social
variables (such as class, gender, ethnicity), quite apart from the conundrum of
its perverse, dark, or negative side (mafia and the like).
Fourth, social capital is construed, that is it is not simply passively received
as a well-defined and given concept but is reinterpreted and worked upon
by those who engage with it. One aspect of that reworking, for example, has
been to disassociate social capital both from Bourdieu (too radical) and from
Coleman (too reactionary), unless one or other of these is the intent.
Fifth, social capital is the product of contradictory pressures, as it seeks
to accommodate both material and intellectual developments. How can the
World Bank legitimise itself while pretty much continuing business as usual? How can the economy be ignored when we are deploying social capital?
And how can we set aside power and conflict when we are addressing social
capital?
Last, then, social capital is contested, or subject to conflict over its meaning.
Among social capitalists themselves, this is resolved through chaotic compromise. Otherwise, contestation takes the form of exposing and rejecting social
capital for its sore conceptual inadequacies and corresponding consequences
for practice. Social capital has in part risen to prominence because it has been
allowed to do so by those who have not engaged critically with it. One index
of this is that my polemic in Antipode, according to its editors, has been one
of its most accessed pieces (Fine 2002c). I suspect that this reflects its racy
title, the prominence of social capital, and silent but unengaged opposition
to it. By contrast, while globalisation has been shown to be equally flawed
as a conceptual panacea, it has been universally addressed by its critics and
won away, not only from neo-liberalism but also from the intellectual Third
Wayism characteristic of social capital.
The current intellectual scene is marked by the demise within academia of
the extremes of (attention to) neo-liberalism and post-modernism, and by the
coincidental rise of economics imperialism in the form of market and non-
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the editors for comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1.
For debate about the (absence of) history of social capital, see Fine (2007a)
and Farr (2004, 2007). The latters response, to the effect that there is a
history, reports six million items for social capital on an Internet search.
Yet his own history is more or less forcibly confined to a single source,
John Dewey, with a few other bit players.
2. Key texts include Harriss (2001), Smith and Kulynych (2002), and Bebbington et al. (2004). See also Fabio Sabatinis website www.socialcapitalgateway.
org/. For my own works, and more general context of economics imperialism, see www.soas.ac.uk/departments/departmentinfo.cfm?navid490
3. On Becker and Bourdieu, see Fine (1999a). For a fuller account of economics imperialism, see Fine and Milonakis (2007).
4. See especially Fine (2002a, 2003).
5. Although there is a healthy literature on social capital and political
activity as such.
6. Note that Coleman as individual tends to be acknowledged more than his
rational choice approach, explicit reference to which would deter many
punters.
7. See Moore (2001) for a more general critique of incorporation of such notions in anaesthetised forms.
8. Given the excellent Woolcock (1998), it seems that the moles condition
three is operative on occasion.
9. I cannot resist pointing to the answer that might have been given by a
World Bank lead economist, Bonnel (2000: 849), who, in discussing social capital, argues that Reversing the spread of the HIV/ AIDS epidemics
and mitigating its impact require three sets of measures: (1) sound macroeconomic policies; (2) structural policy reform; and (3) modifying further
the systems of incentives faced by individuals.
10. See Foreword to Fine (2004).
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133
11. Note, though, that Bebbington et al. do at least reference (and essentially
accept) my criticisms of social capital (other than strategically), but in the
context of its having served its purpose within the Bank, which can now,
with its civilised economists, move on to issues of empowerment and the
like. The mind boggles.
References
Arestis, P. and M. Sawyer (eds.) (2004) The Rise of the Market, Camberley:
Edward Elgar.
Bayliss, K. and B. Fine (eds.) (2007) Privatization and Alternative Public Sector
Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa: Delivering on Electricity and Water, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Bebbington, A., S. Guggenheim, E. Olson and M. Woolcock (2004) Grounding
discourse in practice: exploring social capital debates at the World Bank,
Journal of Development Studies 40(5): 3364.
Bonnel, R. (2000) HIV/AIDS and economic growth: a global perspective,
South African Journal of Economics 68(5): 82055.
Farr, J. (2004) Social capital: a conceptual history, Political Theory 32: 633.
Farr, J. (2007) In search of social capital, Political Theory.
Fine, B. (1999a) From Becker to Bourdieu: economics confronts the social sciences, International Papers in Political Economy 5(3): 143, reproduced with
afterword in Arestis and Sawyer (eds.) (2004).
Fine, B. (1999b) The developmental state is dead long live social capital?,
Development and Change 30(1): 119.
Fine, B. (2001) Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social
Science at the Turn of the Millennium, London: Routledge.
Fine, B. (2002a) It aint social, it aint capital and it aint Africa, Studia
Africana No. 3: 1833.
Fine, B. (2002b) The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited,
London: Routledge.
Fine, B. (2002c) They f**k you up those social capitalists, Antipode 34(4):
79699.
Fine, B. (2003) Social capital: the World Banks fungible friend, Journal of
Agrarian Change 3(4): 586603.
Fine, B. (2004) Economics and ethics: Amartya Sen as point of departure,
ABCDE Conference, Oslo, 2426 June, 2002, published in The New School
Economic Review 1(1):15162, available at www.newschool.edu/gf/nser/
articles/0101_fineb_econandethicssen_fall04_final.pdf
Fine, B. (2005) Addressing the consumer, in Trentmann (ed.) (2005).
Fine, B. (2007a) Eleven hypotheses on the conceptual history of social
capital, Political Theory 35(1): 753.
Fine, B. (2007b) Social Capital in Wonderland: the World Bank Behind the
Looking Glass, mimeo available from author.
Fine, B. and D. Milonakis (2007) From Political Economy to Freakonomics:
Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory,
London: Routledge.
Fine, B., C. Lapavitsas and J. Pincus (eds.) (2001) Development Policy in the
Twenty-First Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus, London and
New York: Routledge.
Harriss, J. (2001) Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital,
New Delhi: Leftword Books, revised edition, London: Anthem Press, 2002.
Jomo, K. and B. Fine (eds.) The New Development Economics: After the Washington Consensus, Delhi and London: Tulika and Zed Press.
Moore, M. (2001) Empowerment at last, Journal of International Development
13(3): 32129.
OConnor, J. (1973) The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York, NY: St Martins
Press.
Oishi, T. (2001) The Unknown Marx: Reconstructing a Unified Perspective,
London: Pluto Press.
Smith, S. and J. Kulynych (2002) It may be social, but why is it capital? The
social construction of social capital and the politics of language, Politics
and Society 30(1): 14986.
Trentmann, F. (ed.) (2005) The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and
Identity in the Modern World, Oxford: Berg.
Woolcock, M. (1998) Social capital and economic development: toward a theoretical synthesis and policy framework, Theory and Society 27(2): 151208.
CHAPTER 12
Introduction
Funding organisations have a plethora of terms for the intended targets of
their largesse: recipients, beneficiaries, counterparts, clients, grantees, partners,
etc. But what do these terms mean? Are they equivalents, interchangeable
synonyms? And, specifically, under what circumstances is a partnership said
to exist between development-oriented funding organisations in the global
North and their, well, whatever, in the global South?
What follows is a general reflection on the term partnership, undertaken by
activists working in NGOs in Mexico. We suggest here that partnership denotes
a special relationship between equal participants or, yes, partners, who enjoy
a distinctive bond of trust, a shared analysis of existing conditions in society,
and thus in general a common orientation of what needs to be done to construct a more just, equitable, and democratic world.
This chapter surveys how partnerships are regarded in the eyes of five informants, all of whom are currently working at NGOs in southern Mexico.
The work of these non-profit NGOs centres on specific themes: for example,
economies of solidarity, conflict resolution, human rights, citizens participation in formal electoral politics, and alternative information and analysis for
grassroots organisations. It is worth stating at the outset that these themes are
not the NGOs raisons dtre. Rather, they are means to a greater end, which
might be summarised as a long-term commitment to the empowerment of
social and civil organisations. These NGOs believe in general that such organisations will be the agents of change, or perhaps will combine, mutate,
and permutate into new social actors or agents who will undertake the task of
societal transformation.
For the purposes of this chapter we use two (what we hope are) generic
terms for donor and donee within the development field: agencies in the
North and recipients in the South. The term agency annoys some Northern aid
workers, yet it is our generic term in Mexico for external, non-government,
non-corporate sources of funding, and it is used here and in general with no
derogatory intention.
The NGOs surveyed share one important trait. We are dependent on funding from Northern agencies for our existence and survival. There is no tradition in our area of the global South, or an extremely weak one at best, of
individual donations to good and noble causes. Self-financing schemes cover
at best only a small percentage of the budget. The only in-country sources
of funding in our field are government coffers or corporate profits. To accept
funds from the first would, in the minds of many, convert NGOs to Government Organisations, and corporate funding is seen to be too tainted, especially in a moral or ethical sense, to accept. None of the NGOs interviewed for
this discussion accepts corporate funding. One does accept government funds
within a trilateral (government/NGO/agency) scheme described below.
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137
A historic setting
For two of our informants, chequered relationships between Northern agencies and Southern recipients have been the rule for the past several decades.
After World War II, the relationship was essentially paternalistic, even neocolonial. One part of the world was developed, the other underdeveloped.
One part of the world had solutions to underdevelopment, the other lacked
them, and the received wisdom of the time posited simply transferring knowledge, technology, and resources from the North to jumpstart development in
the South. In this rather linear way of thinking, development was a matter of
inputs.
During the late 1950s and into the 1960s, as the global South gained greater
political independence, the prevailing development paradigm increasingly met
with criticism and rejection. After decades, transfers of millions of dollars had
had no appreciable effect on poverty or underdevelopment. With time, development practitioners and academics agreed: poverty in the developing world
was less a cause, and more an effect, of overarching structural problems. It was
these structures, then, that had to be transformed or eliminated in order for
poverty to be reduced. The focus of attention shifted from poverty to the root
causes of underdevelopment.
In Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, wars of national liberation,
though often unsuccessful in overthrowing political and economic elites,
nonetheless were important in instilling at the grassroots a sense of nationalism and self-determination. This idea percolated to the development sector, where, over time, it altered the existing paternalistic and neo-colonial
paradigm.
What emerged was the determination of stakeholders in developing countries to be considered social subjects, i.e. actors fully capable of participating
in the development debate and proposing innovative and home-grown solutions to structural problems affecting the majority of the population. These
local social subjects had to be seen as autonomous, in the sense that they had
a particular, perfectly valid understanding of their own reality and could act
to transform it. Thus the global South was more than capable of generating
its own objectives, perspectives, and strategies. The top-to-bottom, North-toSouth chain of command of ideas, methods, and strategies in the development field underwent a radical transformation. Other more horizontal, or
democratic, models appeared. And Northern agencies that resisted changes
found themselves increasingly estranged from their Southern counterparts.
Increasingly, the proper role of development agencies was thought to be
participation with, and strengthening of, local social subjects, to collaborate
in building alternative social and economic paradigms. From a Southern perspective, it was incumbent upon the Northern agencies to join the South. As
participants in an effort to help to eradicate the structural causes of poverty,
Northern agencies were always welcome, but now the relationship with the
South had to be put on a more equal footing.
Some Northern agencies enthusiastically took up the challenge. In this new
context, the idea of a shared commitment between Northern and Southern
organisations to help to create socially based alternatives took hold. One informant says that during this period, which covered roughly the 1970s, 1980s
and into the 1990s, Northern and Southern entities considered themselves
allies. In fact, a wide range of terms came into the development lexicon to
describe this new-found relationship. For some Northern agencies, the Southern allies were counterparts, colleagues even; one agency in Germany coined
the term mutual parts, in an effort to express the commonality of action and
commitment, harkening back to our word partnership. A US agency preferred
to talk of associates. It is at this time that informants agree that something
akin to a partnership existed among the Northern and Southern institutions
working to eliminate the root causes, or structural reasons, behind the lack of
opportunity that characterised the lives of most of the worlds population.
Behind this blossoming spirit of collegiality there was in addition an effort to define what a new society might look like. This was a joint activity
among various actors within the development field, such as Northern agencies, Southern social and civil organisations, and the greater civil society. And,
as such, a new actor (or, to use the Latin American term, social subject) was in
the making. This actor undertook actions in favour of social change, thought
about social change as a strategic goal, and recognised that, in order to create,
change introspection and self-criticism were necessary, as was a willingness
to change established modes of thinking, acting, working, and relating to the
greater community.
In other words, belonging to a partnership required a shared vision; but,
just as important, that vision had to be jointly constructed, never imposed. It
also, in the end, required a shared ideology, though not necessarily one that
arose from any particular political current. It was rather a matter of opposing the status quo where it had proved unjust, undemocratic, discriminatory,
and exclusionary. Structural changes could be brought about through greater
political awareness and mobilisation on the part of the oppressed majority,
not only by resisting and rejecting existing structures and ways of thinking,
but also by building alternatives.
Importantly, within this partnership a common dialect evolved which recognised the role that imperialism, colonialism, racism, capitalism, and (later)
patriarchy had played in forming the current status quo.
Given this search for greater equality and collegiality, most Southern partners sought to ensure that funding from outside sources would not interfere
with their own priorities, objectives, and goals. Suggestions from the North
were of course welcome, and so were technical, methodological, or knowledge
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139
inputs, but funding had to be given without attached strings. It was impermissible to use funding to influence a Southern partners activity to conform
to Northern priorities. A new ethics became a part of this new-found partnership: the South gained a greater independence in thought and movement,
and funding requests were granted for overall strategic objectives, rather than
mere specific activities. But likewise, Southern partners were expected to exercise grants with professionalism, with timely and transparent accountability.
Further, mutual commitments were intended to apply to the long term.
Structures were not easily modified, and it was thought quite useless to insist
on deadlines. Northern partners either had to commit support for an undefined future in the South or, if they withdrew earlier, had to be satisfied with
having contributed to modifying the status quo, even if concrete results were
difficult to identify. That was the nature of the beast, or so it appeared at the
time.
of the United Nations, were often eager to make their own contributions. In
line with the democratic glaze that accompanied this new age, trilateral or
multilateral boards of directors were established over these joint investments,
giving Northern agencies, local governments, and grant recipients voice and
vote to administer funds and decide on specific grant proposals.
These new arrangements pleased some Southern recipients. They took
pains to argue that the boards were indeed representative and non-coercive,
and, perhaps most importantly, afforded innovative means whereby Southern
organisations could legitimately access tax revenues, since part of that money
is ours to begin with. The funding, they argued, could be destined to meeting
the needs of the poor, the disenfranchised, the disempowered. Other Southern
organisations were less than pleased, however, and refused to participate, alleging that involvement in these schemes legitimised governments that still
did not represent majority interests.
Further, in the intervening neo-liberal years, efforts to eliminate poverty
had given way to alleviating poverty and attending to the poor, or rather, to
the losers of the new economic game. And neo-liberal economists were quite
willing to admit that there would be losers. A large amount of government
funding for social causes was admittedly used to prop up the consumption of
the most impoverished. And with token exceptions, governments had little
tolerance for rude questions regarding the status quo or even ruder talk of
changing it.
Yet another reason behind the paradigm shift was the supposed accession of some countries to the status of developed countries. For example,
in the case of Mexico, one presidents decision to join the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and then negotiate a
free-trade agreement with the USA, was sufficient reason for some Northern agencies to channel grants elsewhere. A publicity campaign to convince
world opinion of the countrys arrival in the First World was successful,
but unsubstantiated by basic economic data that pointed to persistent and
widening poverty and unemployment, greater wealth concentration, and
increasing rates of emigration.
Finally, another turning point during the 1990s was the shift of fundraising strategies among Northern agencies. The decades-old practice of appealing to the general public for funds was not entirely forgotten, but certainly
downgraded in importance. Agencies of all sizes chose to accept increasingly
wider slices of their budget pie from their governments. Southern recipients
immediately detected the change. Beholden to government back-funders and
anxious to demonstrate success of resources applied, or required to do so by
management in order to justify renewed grant applications, Northern agencies
now distanced themselves from the previous thinking that associated poverty
reduction with long-term processes.
Unfortunately for all, those processes had been especially difficult to document. They involved qualitative changes that were nothing if not subjective. Since such processes involved inherently slow social evolution, many
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141
agencies, as mentioned earlier, had to end their commitments without conclusive proof that their participation had indeed wrought greater empowerment of the people.
By accepting government funding and quickly becoming dependent on it
to sustain programmes, projects, and bureaucracies, Northern agencies began
to turn screws on Southern recipients to show conclusive results. Indicators,
especially quantifiable ones, became important. Certain agencies emphasised
particular themes (gender, AIDS, environmental issues, agro-ecology, fair
trade) in an effort to distinguish their brand of overseas aid, or to hop on to
fashionable development bandwagons in order to please governments in the
North. At times, concern about particular themes was welcomed in the South;
one informant says that, for example, stimulating greater gender awareness
was in itself not a problem, although sometimes the way it was done caused
friction.
But more importantly, there was a dramatic change in the way in which
priorities were determined. Harkening back to the 1950s, once again it was
the North that set priorities, often unilaterally. Conceptual gains of previous
decades were wiped away, as Northern agencies scrambled to satisfy backfunders criteria. For example, the idea that partners in the North and South
had to jointly design priorities and strategies to have an impact on a long-term
process suddenly disappeared. Now, funds were very often conditioned on recipients taking on particular themes, or adjusting on-going programmes and
projects to highlight aspects thought to be important in the North.
Part and parcel of this shift towards quantifiable and supposedly more objective criteria was the emphasis on finding indicators of success. This continues to be an on-going debate (or battle) between Northern funders and
Southern recipients, given the latters frequent insistence on working within
long-term processes of social transformation that are unsuited to easy, shortterm quantification. The main problem, says one informant, is that funders
are asking to see quantitative indicators that come from financial-investment
circles and have nothing to do with social processes. At best, says another
informant, these indicators are an interesting and useful means of looking
at activities but they cannot, and should not, be converted into objectives.
In other words, she adds, Northern funders have begun requesting a logic
of methodological construction that does not respond to the construction of
social subjects.
A consequence of the paradigm shift and the newly imposed emphasis
on quantifiable indicators was that some Northern agencies concluded that
Southern counterparts lacked the basic skills to address basic poverty. This,
once again, was a task to be carried out at the behest and direction of Northern
agencies, which supposedly did have the required skills set. Southerners could
be selected to help with specific inputs, according to demonstrated competencies. What ensued was the contracting-out of these competencies, so that a local NGO could be called in to conduct workshops on specific topics, from bee
keeping to human rights. One informant recounted the unsettling prospect
CHAPTER 13
Introduction
Why do so many of us use the language of gender as a camouflage that
fools no one and does none of us any favours? (Cornwall 2006:1)
Several years ago I wrote an article (Smyth 1999) reflecting on how development organisations appeared to be afraid of using feminist language and
concepts, opting instead for safer and less challenging discourses. My reflections focused most directly on Oxfam GB, since as a staff member of that
organisation I inhabited, heard, and spoke its language.
Enough time has gone by to warrant revisiting these thoughts and expanding them. Here I am not attempting to monitor progress in Oxfam
GB, in the manner often required in development work. Even if this was the
intention, changes in knowledge-management systems at different levels of
the organisation would not allow for a methodical review of whether the
language of feminism is any more in favour now than it was in 1999. What I
seek to do here is to consider more broadly the vocabulary that we use in the
development world to communicate about what is often referred to, in its
most common short-hand, as gender and development. Oxfam GB remains
the main subject of this investigation.
This is not an easy piece to write, since it requires using language that has
become densely layered with contradictory meanings and interpretations, and
which, in the rest of the chapter, I challenge and criticise. In so doing I am
chipping away at the very blocks that should be building my argument, or
turning them into traps of my own making.
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of orderly tools (an interesting term in itself) and systems through which
profoundly internalised beliefs and solidly entrenched structures are miraculously supposed to dissolve and be transformed. At the root of all this is the
fact that terms that originated in feminist thinking and activism have somehow lost this mooring, although there are indications that the emerging
rights language could be heralding a return to such foundations.
Speech impediments
What are the terms that are being used or deleted from daily spoken and written language in the field of international development?
Silence on feminism
The first thing to note is that there is still a resounding silence around words
such as feminism and feminist (as well as class). This was the subject of my
article of 1999, and nothing seems to have changed much, either in Oxfam
GB or in other organisations. Occasionally the connection with feminism
is acknowledged. This is the case, for example, with various documents in
which ActionAid acknowledges feminism as the inspiration for some of its
thinking.
These remain exceptions, however, and it would seem that the fear of
feminism to which I had earlier attributed the absence of certain terms is still
dominant. While, as I stressed in my earlier article, feminist-inspired work can
take place even in the absence of such explicit language, feminist, feminists,
and feminism are certainly not the kind of warm and reassuring (Cornwall
and Brock 2006: 45) words of which the discourse of development organisations has become redolent. On the contrary, they either evoke the derogatory
and faintly ridiculous notions through which feminists of all eras have been
belittled and demonised, or they instil fear by pointing, accurately, to an arena
of struggle and contestation. For this reason they are avoided.
This absence is perhaps also a consequence of the fact that individuals (the
majority of whom are women) who are engaged in intrinsically feminist work
seem to inhabit two separate domains: that of the womens movement on the
one hand, and that of development bureaucracies (including NGOs) on the
other. This was certainly the consensus expressed at the AWID Forum held
in Bangkok in November 2005, where there was a real sense of the existence
of these two separate worlds, as echoed in the repeated calls for creating new
bridges and connections (see Development 49(1), 2006 for all the key speeches
at the Forum).
Contrary to what happens within the womens movement, those who, for
whatever reasons, choose to inhabit the so-called mainstream development
sector (Win 2006:62) struggle to champion gender equality and womens
rights, in speech and in practice. This has to do with organisational structures and changes, and with the power relations inherent in hierarchies. The
Empowerment
Empowerment perhaps has the richest and most complex history and evolution
of all relevant terms: from the seventeenth-century meaning of delegation
and granting licence (Pieterse 2003) to its reverse meaning in a feminist
sense of self-generated positive change. In this long trajectory, the term has
attracted contributions from the most extreme traditions: feminist scholarship, the Christian right, New Age self-help manuals, and business management (Cornwall and Brock 2006: 50).
When the term empowerment is used, the emphasis is often on the idea of
processes leading to broader outcomes. According to the UK governments
Department for International Development (DFID), empowerment refers to
individuals acquiring the power to think and act freely, exercise choice, and
to fulfil their potential as full and equal members of society (DFID 2000:11).
Oxfam GB has adopted this definition verbatim, adding: This will of course
take different forms and move at different paces according to the particular
social, cultural, economic and political context. It is a critical part of working
toward the attainment of gender equity ... (Oxfam 2001).
There are, however, two common problems with the way the term is used.
one is that it can easily become too broad and generalised, and thus the answer to questions on life, the universe and everything.1 An example is the
DFID definition quoted above, which continues that empowerment is also
about negotiating new kinds of institutions, incorporating new norms and
rules that support egalitarian and just relations between women and men.
The other, more common, problem occurs especially within development
agencies when they attempt to operationalise the term and shift the focus
from empowerment as process to empowerment as end product. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are an example of this, quantifying as they
do womens empowerment in the specific and rather limited fields of education, waged employment, and participation in formal politics.
This focus on outcomes has been amply criticised by feminist analysts, not
least because it predefines what are highly individual experiences and perceptions. As Mosedale (2005a: 244) points out: [E]mpowerment is an on-going
process rather than a product. There is no final goal. One does not arrive at a
stage of being empowered in some absolute sense. People are empowered, or
disempowered, relative to others or, importantly, relative to themselves at a
previous time.
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In some of the NGO literature, the distinct impression is also given that development programmes can empower women, while a feminist perspective
would emphasise that only women themselves can be agents of such a process
of change. The first approach is typical of many microfinance projects. For
example, the US Grameen Foundation states: Our programs are designed to
empower the worlds poorest by providing affordable capital, financial services, appropriate technology, and capacity building resources to those front-line
microfinance institutions (MFIs) that serve them (www.grameenfoundation.
org/programs).
Finally, a feminist tradition understands relevant processes of empowerment as being collective endeavours, versus those that promote individualism and even consumerism (Rowlands 1998), again as appears to be the case
among popular microfinance interventions.
Despite the problems, current research on how womens empowerment can
be achieved in practice through development interventions is allowing different agencies to engage in dialogue on shared concerns, and to link abstract
notions of empowerment to concrete attempts to establish how development
programmes can genuinely contribute to womens empowerment (Mosedale
2005b).
Gender
Perhaps the most confusing of all terms is that of gender itself. We know that
often the word is used to mean women. At a more basic level, words such
as engendering and gendered are usually helpful, for example in titles such as
Engendering Development (World Bank 2001; for Oxfam see Zuckerman 2002).
Other expressions, such as genderising, doing gender, and even you are gender
(though admittedly those are mostly verbal rather than written usages), are
certainly much less so.
The transition that seems to have occurred in this case is one that gradually
has eroded any meaning from the term gender. Emptied of meaning, it pops
up in the most inappropriate places and manners. Clearly gender ...is a widely
used and often misunderstood term (Momsen 2004:2).
I am not suggesting with these comments that the term gender and those
associated with it should be entirely dropped. On the contrary: with increased
clarity and consistency of use, they can provide important bridges between
understandings and practices of feminist activists on the one hand, and those
of feminists and others operating within the confines of development organisations, on the other.
Gender mainstreaming
The most common use of the term gender is in association with mainstreaming.
The notion of gender mainstreaming grew out of the realisation that the concerns for women and gender issues should not remain marginal to the ideas
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As Joanna Kerr is reported to have said: All of us were very excited in Beijing, in governments, donor agencies and womens organizations. But something has happened since then: the last few years a terrible gender fatigue has
developed within governments and within donor agencies.... Possibly one of
the explanations is that the use of the concept of gender mainstreaming led
to an overemphasis on instruments and tools, whilst neglecting to look at the
political process (Hivos 2006: 4).
Thus the term gender mainstreaming as a chain of equivalence has become
highly depoliticised, in the sense that it is disconnected from political and
structural realities, and alternative or radical ideas are diluted or neutralised
(Utting 2006: 4).
that they will lead to a consensus on the fact that, given that women continue
to face specific and substantial barriers to the enjoyment of their rights, the
promotion of womens human rights is the logical and necessary aim for a
rights-based development organisation.
In summary, there are major problems associated with the absence of certain terms, the emptying of meaning and depoliticisation of others. At the
same time there are indications that debates and language may be taking a
more radical turn, with the acknowledgement of the shortcomings of gender
mainstreaming, the deepening of interest in the notion of empowerment, and
the explicit adoption of a human-rights language.
Note
1.
The question concerning Life, the Universe, and Everything was posed
and answered by Douglas Adams in his series The Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy.
References
Cornwall, A. (2006) Ten Years After Beijing Time to Bid Farewell to Gender?,
IDS News Archive, www.ids.ac.uk/IDS/news/Archive/BeijingCornwall.html
(retrieved 16 November 2006).
Cornwall, A. and K. Brock (2006) The new buzzwords, in P. Utting (ed.)
Reclaiming Development Agendas, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan and
UNRISD.
DFID (2000) Poverty Elimination and the Empowerment of Women, DFID
Target Strategy Paper, London: Department for International Development.
Freeman, M. (2002) Womens Human Rights Evaluation, unpublished
paper written as part of the Oxfam GB Gender Review, September 2001
May 2002, Oxford: Oxfam GB.
Gell, F. and M. Motla (2002) Gender Mainstreaming Tools, Questions and
Checklists, to Use Across the Programme Management Cycle, unpublished
paper, Oxford: Oxfam GB.
HIVOS (2006) Womens Rights Unfinished Business. What Should International NGOs Be Doing? Report of International NGO Conference,
Amsterdam, 1517 November 2006.
House, S. (2005) Easier to say, harder to do: gender, equity and water, in A.
Coles and T. Wallace (eds.) Gender, Water and Development, Oxford: Berg.
Kabeer, N. (2003) Gender Mainstreaming in Poverty Eradication and the MDGs: A
Handbook for Policy-makers and Other Stakeholders, Ottawa: Commonwealth
Secretariat, IDRC, and CIDA.
Kerr, J. (2006) Womens rights in development, Development 49(1): 611.
Momsen, J. (2004) Gender and Development, London: Routledge.
Mosedale, S. (2005a) Assessing womens empowerment: towards a conceptual
framework, Journal of International Development 17: 24357.
Mosedale, S. (2005b) Strategic Impact Inquiry On Womens Empowerment,
Report of Year 1.
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CHAPTER 14
Sustainability
Ian Scoones
As a consummately effective boundary term, able to link disparate groups on
the basis of a broad common agenda, sustainability has moved a long way from
its technical association with forest management in Germany in the eighteenth
century. In the 1980s and 1990s it defined for a particular historical moment
a key debate of global importance, bringing with it a coalition of actors across
governments, civic groups, academia and business in perhaps an unparalleled
fashion. That they did not agree with everything (or even often know anything of
the technical definitions of the term) was not the point. The boundary work done
in the name of sustainability created an important momentum for innovation in
ideas, political mobilisation, and policy change, particularly in connection with
the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio in
1992. All this of course did not result in everything that the advocates at the
centre of such networks had envisaged, and today the debate has moved on, with
different priority issues, and new actors and networks. But, the author argues, this
shift does not undermine the power of sustainability as a buzzword: as a continuingly powerful and influential meeting point of ideas and politics.
Introduction
Sustainability must be one of the most widely used buzzwords of the past two
decades. There is nothing, it seems, that cannot be described as sustainable:
apparently everything can be either hyphenated or paired with it. We have
sustainable cities, economies, resource management, business, livelihoods
and, of course, sustainable development. Sustainability has become, par excellence, what Thomas Gieryn (1999) calls a boundary term: one where science
meets politics, and politics meets science. The boundary work around sustainability of building epistemic communities of shared understanding of
and common commitment to linking environmental and economic development concerns has become a major concern across the world. In the past
two decades, networks of diverse actors have been formed, alliances have been
built, institutions and organisations have been constructed, projects have
been formulated, and money in increasingly large amounts has been spent
in the name of sustainability. It is at this complex intersection between science and politics where boundary work takes place, and where words, with
SUSTAINABILITY
155
could only dream of. The challenge for such organisations and many others
besides who adopted the creed of sustainable development as central to their
mission was to move from theory to practice, from ideals to real results on
the ground. What did implementing sustainable development mean? The result was an exponential growth in planning approaches, analysis frameworks,
measurement indicators, audit systems, and evaluation protocols designed to
help governments, businesses, communities, and individuals to make sustainability real. This was great business for consultants, trainers, researchers, and
others. But did it make a difference?
SUSTAINABILITY
157
was adapted and embellished and became a framework, and, later, a whole
suite of approaches (Carney 1998; 2002). And, with this, the acronyms
started to flow, a brand was created, and a whole industry of trainers, consultants, web-based information specialists, and others were commissioned to
make sustainable livelihoods a central thrust of UK development policy.
This flurry of activity and discussion was not confined to the new DFID:
other aid agencies looked with interest at what was happening in London.
NGOs such as Oxfam GB were also developing their own approaches (Neefjes
2000), and even large UN agencies such as the FAO became interested in the
approach as one that transcended narrow sectoral concerns and took a more
integrative approach to development and poverty reduction.1
This was classic boundary work. Scientific concerns, drawing from ecology,
economics, and politics, merged with specific political and bureaucratic agendas in a process of mutual construction of both science and policy. Alliances
were formed, spanning government, NGOs, private consultants, and academia,
linking often unlike organisations and individuals, both North and South. It
seemed that a word (or in this case two) had created a whole network, loosely
affiliated around a set of often rather vague and poorly defined understandings
of a complex and rather ambiguous concept. But at the time and in certain
places, notably DFID it had an important uses, both conceptual and political.
Buzzwords and the ambitions with which they are associated that become mainstream and incorporated into routine, bureaucratic procedures often (perhaps always) suffer this fate. For many commentators writing since
2000, the simplistic managerialism of many initiatives labelled sustainable
development left much to be desired (Berkhout et al. 2003). Critiques focused
on the lack of progress on major targets set in 1992, the endless repackaging
of old initiatives as sustainable this or that, and the lack of capacity and commitment within governments and international organisations to make the
ideals of sustainability real in day-to-day practice (Vogler and Jordan 2003).
With the default bureaucratic mode of managerialism dominating and its
focus on action plans, indicators, and the rest the wider political economy of
sustainable development was being neglected, many felt. Its politics, stupid,
commentators argued. And, with mainstreaming and bureaucratisation, the
urgency and political vibrancy is lost, and, with this, comes a dilution and loss
of dynamism in a previously energetic and committed debate.
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But what is equally sure is that the existing sustainable development institutional and policy machinery is incapable of dealing with them effectively.
The Kyoto Protocol on climate change has all but collapsed, and the options
for a post-Kyoto settlement that involves the USA, China, and India have yet
to be elaborated. Questions of biosafety surrounding GM crops have not been
resolved, and the UN Biosafety Protocol seems far from an effective answer.
And recent disease scares have shown that neither global institutions nor local
health systems are able to deal with the likelihood of a global pandemic.
So how have new coalitions, networks, and affiliations formed around the
concept of sustainability? In contrast to the BrundtlandRio period of the
1980s and 1990s, today there is nothing that can be constructed as a global
consensus. While the post-Rio institutions such as the UN Commission for
Sustainable Development and the secretariats of the different conventions
still exist, they are not necessarily seen as the rallying points for new initiatives. For these we have to look beyond these institutions to new actors and
groupings.
The 2002 Rio-plus-10 conference in Johannesburg was not such a big deal
as its predecessor, but it did attract some interesting groups and some strong
debate and, importantly, much dissent. Conflicts were sparked by the still
very live GM debate, for example, where anti-GM activists and social movements were pitched against corporations that had re-branded themselves as
committed to sustainable agriculture globally. More generally, there was a
heated debate about whether the sustainable development mainstream had
sold out to the needs of business and global capital, or whether such accommodation and dialogue with big business was the only route to getting corporate responsibility on sustainability issues (Wapner 2003).
Debate also flourished around the pros and cons, successes and failures
of the divergent routes of the Rio commitments between local solutions
(around Agenda 21) and international legal processes (around the global conventions). Some groups argued that local solutions had shown more promise, particularly where intransigent governments subject to extreme corporate
lobbying pressure (notably the USA, but perhaps increasingly in Asia) were
unable to realise any sustainable development goals, yet cities and neighbourhoods could make great strides towards, for example, tackling the effects of
climate change, conserving green spaces, or meeting recycling targets. Others,
by contrast, argued that the big sustainability agendas remain global, and, in
an increasingly globalised economy and inter-connected world, seeking some
form of international agreement on such issues perhaps with new institutions such as a World Environmental Organisation remained, despite the pitfalls and obstacles, a key objective for achieving sustainability (Newell 2001).
Thus by 2002, the sustainable development movement, so confidently ambitious at Rio a decade before, was more muted, more fractured, and perhaps a
bit more realistic. The term sustainability has however persisted, and indeed
been given more conceptual depth in explorations of resilience (cf. Folke et al.
2002; Clark and Dickson 2003). As a boundary term, linking diverse groups
even those who violently disagree with each other it remains a useful unifying link. To be effective in this boundary work, it is often essential to remain
contested, ambiguous, and vague. While academics continue to endeavour
to refine its meaning, locating it in ever more precise terms within particular
disciplinary debates, it is the more over-arching, symbolic role of aspiration,
vision, and normative commitment that remains so politically potent.
Note
1.
References
Berkhout, F., M. Leach, and I. Scoones (eds.) (2003) Negotiating Environmental
Change. New Perspective from Social Science, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Carney, D. (ed.) (1998) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: What Contribution Can We
Make? London: Department for International Development
Carney, D. (2002) Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches: Progress and Possibilities
for Change, London: Department for International Development.
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161
Chambers, R. and G.R. Conway (1992) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, Discussion Paper 296, Brighton: Institute
of Development Studies.
Clark, W. and N. Dickson (2003) Sustainability science: the emerging research
program, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100: 805961.
Common, M. and S. Stagl (2005) Ecological Economics An Introduction,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DFID (1997) Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century,
White Paper on International Development, Cm 3789. London: Stationery
Office.
Dobson, A. (1999) Justice and the Environment: Conceptions of Environmental Sustainability and Dimensions of Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elkington, J. (1997) Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century
Business, London: Capstone.
Folke, C., S. Carpenter, T. Elmqvist, L. Gunderson, C. S. Holling, and B. Walker
(2002) Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity
in a world of transformations, Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment,
31(5): 43740.
GEC Programme (1999) The Politics of GM Food: Risk, Science and Public Trust,
University of Sussex: ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme.
Gieryn, T. (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line, Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press.
Holling, C.S. (1973) Resilience and stability of ecological systems, Annual
Review of Ecology and Systematics 4: 123.
Holmberg, J., S. Bass, and L. Timberlake (1991) Defending the Future: A Guide to
Sustainable Development, London: Earthscan.
Kates, R.W., W.C. Clark, R. Corell, J.M. Hall, C. Jaeger, I. Lowe et al. (2001)
Environment and development: sustainability science, Science 292: 6412.
May, R. (1977) Thresholds and breakpoints in ecosystems with a multiplicity
of stable states, Nature 269: 4717.
Neefjes, K. (2000) Environments and Livelihoods: Strategies for Sustainability,
Oxford: Oxfam (UK and Ireland).
Newell, P. (2001) New environmental architectures and the search for effectiveness, Global Environmental Politics 1(1): 3544.
Pearce, D. and G. Atkinson (1993) Capital theory and the measurement of
sustainable development: an indicator of weak sustainability, Ecological
Economics, 8: 1038.
Schmidheiny, S. and L. Timberbake (1992) Changing Course: A Global Business
Perspective on Development and the Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Scoones, I. (1998) Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: A Framework for Analysis,
Working Paper 72, Brighton: Institute for Development Studies.
Selman, P. (1998) Local Agenda 21: substance or spin?, Journal of Environmental
Planning and Management 45(5): 553.
Solesbury, W. (2003) Sustainable Livelihoods: A Case Study of the Evolution
of DFID Policy, ODI Working Paper 217, London: Overseas Development
Institute.
Stirling, A. (2007) Resilience, Robustness, Diversity: Dynamic Strategies for
Sustainability, paper submitted for ESEE Conference, Leipzig, 35 June.
CHAPTER 15
Introduction
Rights, human rights, and rights-based are relatively recent additions
to the development lexicon (Tomasevski 1993; Sano 2000). For decades,
the development enterprise lived in perfect isolation, if not ignorance, of
the human-rights system and its implications for development. During the
1990s this began to change, for three main reasons. The first was the end of
the Cold War, which opened the door to greater missionary zeal. The second
was the manifest failure of structural adjustment programmes, which came
to be seen as caused by a lack of government accountability and prompted a
major push for good governance and democracy. And thirdly, development
thinkers always seek to redefine development as being about more than economic growth: talking about human rights is one way to construct a more
holistic definition.
By the end of the 1990s, both the PowerPoint presenters and the dirtyfingernails folk had converged around some acceptance that human rights
ought to play a larger role in development. But quite what role, and what
this might mean for the development enterprise itself, has remained both
vague and contested. This chapter offers an intellectual genealogy of rights
in development from the formulation of a right to development to the
rhetorical incorporation of rights within prevailing development discourse,
to the articulation of a rights-based approach to development.1
165
Rhetorical-formulaic incorporation
During the 1990s, bilateral and multilateral aid agencies published a slew of
policy statements, guidelines, and documents on the incorporation of human
rights in their mandate. An enormous amount of this work was little more than
thinly disguised presentations of old wine in new bottles. A few quotes suffice.
[The World Banks] lending over the past 50 years for education, health care,
nutrition, sanitation, housing, environmental protection and agriculture have
helped turn rights into reality for millions (Lovelace 1999: 27; World Bank
1999: 3, 4). Or UNDP, claiming that it already plays an important role in the
protection and promotion of human rights. Its program is an application of
the right to development (UNDP 1998: 6). What these statements essentially
do is colonise the human-rights discourse, arguing, like Molires character
who discovered that he had always been speaking prose, that human rights
is what these development agencies were doing all along. Case closed; high
moral ground safely established.
A more benign interpretation is that these verbal changes constitute the
first steps towards a true change of vision. Indeed, much scholarship argues
that discourse changes have real-world impacts: they slowly redefine the
167
having a social guarantee (Shue 1980), which implies that it is about the way
the interactions between citizens, states, and corporations are structured, and
how they affect the most marginal and weakest in society. This is obfuscated
in a lot of the easy and self-serving rhetoric that agencies produce.
Freedom as development
A new paradigm emerged in the early 2000s. In it, development and rights
become different aspects of the same dynamic, as if different strands of the
same fabric. Development comes to be re-defined in terms that include human rights as a constitutive part: all worthwhile processes of social change are
simultaneously rights-based and economically grounded, and should be conceived of in such terms. Without doubt the most referred-to reflections on this
new paradigm are found in Amartya Sens Development as Freedom, in which
he defines development as the expansion of capabilities or substantive human
freedoms, the capacity to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value
(Sen 1999: 87). He argues for the removal of major factors that limit freedom,
defining them as poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities
as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as
intolerance or over-activity of repressive states (Sen 1999:1).
Sen treats freedom as simultaneously instrumental, constitutive, and constructive for development, setting out the deep mutually constitutive links
that exist between these two concepts and domains in ways that make their
inseparability clear. With Sen as their champion, these ideas have made great
inroads in international development discourse. But they are not in themselves new: democracy and development have long been linked in political
and development discourse. Take this statement, for example, from the UN
Secretary-Generals Agenda for Development:
Democracy and development are linked in fundamental ways. They are
linked because democracy provides the only long-term basis for managing competing ethnic, religious, and cultural interests in a way that
minimizes the risk of violent internal conflict. They are linked because
democracy is inherently attached to the question of governance, which
has an impact on all aspects of development efforts. They are linked
because democracy is a fundamental human right, the advancement of
which is itself an important measure of development. They are linked
because peoples participation in the decision-making processes which
affect their lives is a basic tenet of development. (United Nations 1994,
para. 120)
This was written five years before Sens book, by an institution that is
not exactly the hotbed of philosophical innovation. We have to acknowledge that these ideas have been around a long time in the development
field. Rather than congratulating ourselves on how smart and perceptive we
have become since reading and discussing Sens work, we ought to ask why
we have not acted on these ideas before. And this is where we encounter
the limits of Amartya Sens major contribution to development. There is no
politically grounded analysis of what stands in the way of his approach.
This is hardly cause for discarding his contribution: no man is obliged to do
everything. What it does mean, though, is that agencies, by signing up to
169
As we can see, four of the five implications are of the largely meaningless
legalistic and technical kind that will not challenge anyone: ensure that governments make references to human rights in their constitutions and remove
laws that are contrary to human rights; educate, sensitise, or mobilise people
in human rights; create national human-rights commissions, ombudsmen,
and the like. These are all potentially useful activities, but they do not reflect
any mainstreaming of human rights into development practice; they are simply small, technical add-ons, of doubtful operational relevance. Only the fifth
seems to offer the potential of going further. Allow me to quote from it at
some more length:
How to create an enabling environment in which public policy can most
effectively provide resources for advancing human rights? First, the public sector must focus on what it can do and leave for others what it should
not do. Second, with this division of labour, the state can focus on
the direct provision of many economic, social, and civil rights. ...Third,
the major economic ministries, such as finance and planning, need to
integrate rights into the economic policy-making process. Fourth, the
private sector also has responsibilities in creating an enabling economic
environment. Chambers of commerce and other business organizations
should contribute to efforts to further improve human rights (UNDP
2000: 118-19)
This is all that the new approach amounts to: a standard repetition of the
end-of-the-1990s liberal dogma of the sanctity of economic growth combined
with some human-resource development and a few pious recommendations
that ministries and corporations and the Chamber of Commerce? ought to
think about human rights. Vagueness dominates. Note also that none of the
human-rights objectives relates to UNDP, the aid enterprise, or the international community itself. All of them are to be implemented out there, in the
Third World, without requiring a critical look at oneself.
171
Nice as this all sounds, it still poses the so what? question rather acutely.
After all, the insight that all development ought to take place in a participatory manner, with priority given to the poorest and the most excluded, is
hardly revolutionary for the development community. All these issues have
been on the agenda for anywhere between ten and 30 years. Development
practitioners did not need to wait for human-rights lawyers to tell them that
these things are important; rather, what they need is a sense of the extent to
which the human-rights paradigm can constitute the basis for a different practice. And of course that has been much, much harder to achieve, or to implement. The risk always exists that taking up a rights-based approach amounts
to little more than making nice statements of intent regarding things that it
would be nice to achieve, or duties we would like the world to assume one day,
without setting out either the concrete procedures for actually achieving those
rights or methods of avoiding the slow and dirty enterprise of politics. A number of more progressive NGOs are trying to think through what it concretely
means to apply a rights-based approach, but the jury is still out on whether
this makes any difference in either programming or impact on the people for
whom and with whom they work.
Conclusion
As might be expected, there is a lot less in the emerging human-rights-indevelopment regime than meets the eye. Much of it is about the quest for
the moral high ground: draping oneself in the mantle of human rights to
cover the fat belly of the development community, avoiding challenging the
status quo too much, or questioning oneself or the international system. As
a result, one can see power at work here. This is to be expected: most of this
rethinking constitutes a voluntary act by people in New York, Washington,
London, or Geneva smart and well-intended, most of them, but not exactly
those in great need of overthrowing the established order. This stuff has not
been fought for by the masses in whose name it is adopted. It is not part of a
fundamental reshuffling of the cards of power, or a redistribution of resources
worldwide: no such dynamic has occurred. As a result, one could expect little
more, maybe, than fluff, self-congratulation, and more or less hidden transcripts of power.
At the same time, there is no reason to be exclusively cynical. Major
change always starts small, and even rhetorical gains sometimes turn out to
be the snowballs that set in motion fresh avalanches. In addition, there are
organisations and people, in both rich and poor countries, who are courageously rethinking their long-held ideologies and practices in terms of human
rights. And there are many more development practitioners, everywhere, who
debate questions in a new manner and try to add layers of accountability, transparency, and organisation to their own work. Much more can be done with
human rights.
173
aims, assessments, resources, and constraints are known (or could be known)
by all those concerned.
The resulting clarity may benefit not only wide participation and frank
discussion among all parties concerned: it may also contribute significantly
to an increase in donor credibility. It also calls for a broad commitment by
aid agencies to give much greater priority to promoting local dialogues, to
stimulate local knowledge-generation and research, to find ways of making
peoples voices heard by those in power both out of respect for the dignity of
people, and because they are the ones who have to live with the consequences
of being wrong.
Acknowledgements
1.
References
DFID (2000) Realizing Human Rights for Poor People, Strategy Paper, London:
DFID.
Donnelly, Jack (1999) Human rights, democracy, and development, Human
Rights Quarterly 21 (3): 60832.
Duffield, Mark (2000) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of
Development and Security, London: Zed Books.
de Feyter, Koen (2001) World Development Law, Antwerp: Intersentia.
Frankovits, Andr and Patrick Earle (eds.) (2000) Working Together: The Human
Rights Based Approach to Development Cooperation, Report of the NGO Workshop, SIDA, Stockholm 1619 October.
Human Rights Council of Australia (HRCA) (2001) Submission to the Joint
Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Inquiry into the Link
between Aid and Human Rights, Canberra: HRCA.
Lovelace, James C. (1999) Will rights cure malnutrition? Reflections on
human rights, nutrition, and development, SCN News, 18.
Mukasa, Stella and Florence Butegwa (2001) An Overview of Approaches to
Economic and Social Rights in Development in Uganda Draft Report for
DANIDA, Kampala: Nordic Consulting Group.
Obiora, L. Amede (1996) Beyond the rhetoric of a right to development, Law
and Policy 18, 3/4 (July- Oct): 355418.
Rosas, Allan (1995) The right to development, in Asbjorn Eide, Catarina
Krause and Allan Rosas (eds.) Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 247256.
CHAPTER 16
Civil society
Neera Chandhoke
The idea of civil society has proved very elusive, escaping conceptual grasps and
evading surefooted negotiation of the concept itself. Resurrected in a very definite
historical setting, that of authoritarian states, the concept of civil society came
to signify a set of social and political practices that sought to engage with state
power. The close connection with the re-emergence of the concept and the collapse
of dictatorial states made civil society attractive to a variety of political agents
pursuing different agendas: expanding the market at the expense of the state,
transiting from mass politics to single-issue and localised campaigns, undermining confidence in accepted modes of representation such as political parties, and
in general shrinking the domain of the state and that of accepted modes of politics. That the concept of civil society could suit such a variety of different political
projects is cause for some alarm, for it might well mean that civil society has come
to mean everything to everyone remotely interested in it.
Introduction
The concept of civil society was rediscovered and accorded pre-eminence in
political practices in a very definite political context: in Stalinist states in Eastern and Central Europe, which had denied their citizens basic rights, and in
Latin America, where military regimes had managed to survive by employment of the same methods. In the context of autocratic states, the concept
quickly acquired a subversive edge. It was in civil society that individuals and
groups set out to challenge unresponsive and authoritarian states through
peaceful and non-violent methods: strikes, protest marches, demonstrations,
dissemination of information through informal networks, and the formation
of associational life through the setting up of reading clubs and discussion
forums. The net effect of mobilisation in civil society is well known: some
very powerful states collapsed, in the face of mass protests, like the proverbial
house of cards.1
In retrospect, two aspects of the argument on civil society appear tremendously significant. The first aspect was the sustained demand for political
rights, and more particularly civil rights: the right to freedom of all kinds,
from freedom of expression to freedom to form associations. The second aspect was signified by complete disenchantment with vocabularies that spoke
of taking over state power through revolutionary means, smashing the state,
CIVIL SOCIETY
177
flattened out, jaded avatar of civil society, stripped of all contradictions and
tensions, may justifiably give us cause for thought.
The ubiquity of a concept, we can conclude somewhat regretfully, may
prove ultimately to be its undoing. For if it comes on to everyones lips with a
fair amount of readiness, it must have lost both shape and content. Amid all
this acclaim, ritual invocations of civil society as a panacea for the ills of the
modern world simply sound insipid and dreary. Where in all of this are the
grey areas of civil society that Hegel spoke of? Where are the exploitations and
the oppressions of civil society that Marx passionately castigated? Where is
the state-inspired project of hegemony that Gramsci unearthed so brilliantly
and perceptively? What we are left with is a one-dimensional, watered-down
concept that has ceased to have any meaning, least of all for those who are
supposed to benefit from it.
CIVIL SOCIETY
179
power. John Locke, the quintessential liberal thinker, may well have authored
the civil-society script for and in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.
Secondly, the message conveyed by the experience of Eastern Europe was
to validate precisely what Antonio Gramsci had conceptualised in the 1930s:
that wherever and whenever states whether absolutist or socialist deny
their people political and civil rights, we can expect the eruption of discontent
against exclusions from structures of citizenship and representation. Gramscis
dictum that states that do not possess civil societies are more vulnerable than
those that do possess them was to prove more than prescient in this case. The
tragedy here was that because people in Eastern Europe were deprived of civil
rights, and because the civil-society argument concentrated on resuscitating
those rights, the Eastern Europeans, through and by the civil-society argument, proclaimed a final end to the revolutionary imagination. The argument
effectively killed off the idea of politics as social transformation. From the
1980s onwards, civil society replaced revolution as the prime locus of passions
and imaginations. It is not surprising that scholars and political commentators wedded to bourgeois liberalism hastened in the aftermath of the velvet
revolutions to proclaim an end to ideology and an end to history.
CIVIL SOCIETY
181
CIVIL SOCIETY
183
and the general incivility of much of civil society, because they are completely
indifferent to the notion of power.
Taking a long hard look within civil society itself focuses our attention on
power equations of all kinds: on material deprivation, unevenly shared conceptual understanding, dominant and marginal languages, and the many oppressions, the many incivilities, the many banishments of civil society. Some
groups possess overlapping political, material, symbolic, and social power;
others possess nothing, not even access to the means of life. The former find
a space in civil society, and civil society finds a place for them; the latter are
banished to the dark periphery of the sphere. The irony is that even though
most countries of the developing world are primarily rural, it is the urban
middle-class agenda that is best secured by the invocation of civil society. The
agenda of oppressed and marginal peasants, or of the tribals who are struggling for freedom, remain unrepresented either in the theory or in the practice
of civil society. Therefore, in order to find a voice, marginal groups may well
have to storm the ramparts of civil society, to break down the gates, and make
a forcible entry into the sphere.
Beyond normativity
Like other domains of collective interaction, civil society too is a contested
site. That is why dreams of a democratic civil society are also a project of civil
society. But for this, we have to accept that it is not enough that there be a
civil society, or even a civil society that is independent of the state. It is not
something that, once constructed, can be left to fend for itself; nor is it an
institution. Civil societies are what their inhabitants make of them. They can
easily become hostages to formal democracy at best, and undemocratic trends
at worst. There is nothing in civil society that automatically ensures the victory of democratic projects. All that civil society does is to provide actors with
the values, the space, and the inspiration to battle for democracy.
It is critical to go beyond the buzzword that civil society has become if it
is to regain the vitality that it once had as an essentially contested concept.
In this chapter, I suggest that it is vital to disentangle normative expectations
from the analysis of actually existing civil societies, and to see what civil society actually does or does not do for different people who inhabit the sphere.
If we want to see what kind of civil society is feasible and possible for our
historical agendas, then we cannot allow our political passions and normative
concerns to obfuscate our understanding of this sphere.
Note
1.
References
Chandhoke, Neera (2003) The Conceits of Civil Society, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Fukuyama, Francis (1995) Trust: The Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity,
New York, NY: Free Press.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) [19291935] Selections from Prison Notebooks of
A. Gramsci (Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith eds.), New York, NY: International
Publishers.
Habermas, Jrgen (1987) Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2. Lifeworld and
System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrik (1942) [1821] The Philosophy of Right (trans. T.M
Knox), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Putnam, Robert D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam, Robert with Robert Leonardi and Raffaelle Y. Nanetti (1994) Making
Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Smith, Adam (1952) [1776] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, in Robert Maynard Hutchin (ed.) Great Books of the Western World,
Chicago, IL: William Benton.
Tocqueville, Alexis de (1955) [1835 and 1840] The Old Regime and the French
Revolution (trans. Stuart Gilbert), Garden City, NY, Doubleday Press.
CHAPTER 17
Introduction
Public advocacy has become a bandwagon that everyone is clambering on to.
But hardly anyone seems to know what it really is. The bandwagon is certainly
very appealing. The fast-food toolkits on the streets of the development market find a ready-made clientele. But they turn the ideas and action required for
long-term social change into trivial, quick-fix tools for scaling up impacts. In
the process, public advocacy becomes a victim of the bandwagon syndrome.
Many people claim that they are promoting or doing advocacy without really
thinking about what they mean by this. How many of its proponents know
that it is about actions that are rooted in the history of socio-political and
cultural reform? Few seem to go beyond the bandwagon syndrome to redefine
the concept and practice of advocacy in promoting social change.
As a form of social action, the nature and character of both public and peoplecentred advocacy are very much shaped by the political culture, social systems,
and constitutional framework of the country in which they are practised. And
they are influenced by the ways in which decision making and public policies
are influenced by public-interest or social-action groups in different contexts. It
is the practice of advocacy that determines the theory, and not vice versa. The
trouble is that public advocacy is used to signify a broad sweep of practices,
ranging from public relations, market research, and report-writing to lobbying,
public-interest litigation, and civil disobedience.
Public advocacy can be considered from three perspectives: political, managerial, or technical. While effective public advocacy integrates all three, the
emphasis will depend on the beliefs and background of the proponent. For
instance, a social or political activist will perceive public advocacy basically
as a political process, which may involve some professional skills or technical
understanding of the appropriate methods. But someone with a managerial
background may see it as the effective use of technical devices, skills, and professional practices, with or without much of a political component. Hence the
need for a long-term political and historical perspective on the concept and
practice of public advocacy and people-centred advocacy, and their relevance
for advancing a more humane, just, and equal world.
187
long-term interests of the environment and the general public, the primary
focus of advocacy is to influence policy formulation, change, and implementation. But public policies are a function of the dominant political equation
at a given time. Hence, in order to influence public policies, it is necessary to
influence the prevailing power relations in favour of the marginalised.
Influencing power relations is a complex process involving confrontation
and negotiation among different interest. To do this effectively depends on
having other sources of power. In the context of public advocacy, there are six
major sources of power:
Advocacy does not depend only on having information, but on being able
to transform such information into knowledge by interpreting it with reference to specific values.
Advocacy in India
India has seen public advocacy on issues such as environmental degradation,
the rights of dalits and tribal peoples, womens rights, civil rights, and many
others. While voluntary organisations and activist groups have focused on
social, developmental, and political interventions at the micro level, their efforts to influence the formulation or implementation of public policies have
tended to be fragmented, with little national impact. Even so, successful advocacy campaigns like the Silent Valley Movement in Kerala (described below)
and the amniocentesis campaign in Maharashtra illustrate the potential of
organised advocacy in exerting pressure to enact progressive legislation.
As the lives of ordinary Indians are increasingly affected by economic liberalisation, so there is a growing realisation among social-action groups of the
need to empower the people to influence public policies. The isolated murmurs of dissent can be amplified and channelled through advocacy efforts.
Clearly the methods and approaches that are adopted must be grounded in the
Indian context. It is also necessary to understand the limitations of public advocacy, as well as its potential for achieving social change in India. In many of
the more effective advocacy campaigns, mass mobilisation, improvised forms
of non-violent protest and persuasion, public-interest litigation, pressure for
legislative change, lobbying of public officials, and media work were strategically and simultaneously used to build up an effective public argument.
Advocacy without mobilisation is unlikely to achieve much. The credibility and socio-political legitimacy of advocacy efforts largely depend on the
means and the ends being consistent and compatible. In the Indian context,
grassroots support rather than professional background is what most determines a lobbyists credibility. A major challenge is therefore to safeguard and
extend the political space in which to advocate for the cause of the marginalised, resisting the agendas set by others, whether the multinational corporations or various kinds of fundamentalism.
For practical as well as ethical reasons, then, public advocacy needs to go
beyond public policy to the larger arena of influencing societal attitudes and
practices so as to transform an oppressive value system into a more just and
humane one. Public advocacy cannot be undertaken in a vacuum. Issues of
deprivation, injustice, and rights violation are its impetus. Without an issue,
what would one advocate for? The second part of this chapter therefore considers the question of communication in creating the momentum for peoplecentred advocacy for social change.
People-centred advocacy
People-centred advocacy seeks to challenge and change unjust power relations at all levels: people are the alpha and omega. Though focused on public
policies, the larger purpose of people-centred advocacy is social transformation such that all people realise their human rights, including civil, political,
economic, and social rights. It seeks to promote social and economic justice,
equitable social change, and sustainable development. Public-policy change is
one means of achieving these goals.
Social-change communication is central to people-centred advocacy, seeking to inform and educate a large number of people in such a way that they
are enabled to change or redefine their attitudes and values and become more
socially responsible and empowered citizens. In the past 20 years, there have
been concerted efforts to build effective communication strategies on issues
such as human rights, womens rights, development, and ecology. While these
strategies helped to increase the outreach and efficiency of information dissemination, a big question mark hangs over their effectiveness in terms of
bringing about attitudinal change.
Communication is ideally a sort of communion or sharing or exchanging
the same set of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. Creativity, communication,
and community are what distinguish human beings from other living species.
Language and symbols make for an organic and dynamic interplay between
human creativity, a primordial urge to communicate, and the need for community living. One of the crises of the post-modern condition is that these
organic linkages have broken down. Language and symbols have become
subservient to highly mechanised tools for disseminating information. Hence
MTV, Star New, Zee TV, BBC, Doordarshan, the Internet, etc. all have their own
language and symbols. When the content is determined by the medium, the
act of communication becomes increasingly alienated from real communities.
Even if such media do give rise to imagined or virtual communities who feel
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191
difference was peoples participation in a communicative process and communicative action: the community-oriented folk methods clicked; they drew
people into debates and discussions. This did not give people much space
for indifference. Communication took the form of grounded debates at the
grassroots. The issue was discussed and debated in the local teashops with
the morning cup of tea and newspaper. The press could not afford to ignore
an issue that had become the focus of such interest. As student activists, we
made posters, wrote songs, and performed street plays to build up a public
debate and discourse. No one told us what the strategy was, but we knew
what the message was. We were emotionally and intellectually involved. We
had a language and a song on our tongues. We had grown up with the symbols of folklore. We were from the people. Many of us were at our creative
best. We were the grassroots. Without learning any theory of communication,
I instantly realised the organic linkages between creativity, community, and
communication.
Fifteen years later, when I studied the Silent Valley Campaign from the
perspective of public advocacy, I was keen to know what exactly had changed
public perceptions. Then I realised it was the active involvement of four
poets and five poems that played a major role in drawing young people to
the campaign. Poetry, Sanmskarika Jathas (cultural processions), street plays,
indigenous and spontaneous poster campaigns, village-level debates, and
pamphlets were all extensively used. But the major factor was the conviction in and clarity of the main message. The message preceded the medium,
tools, and strategies. There were no institutional interests or communication
framework to mediate between the people and the message. People became
the medium, and the message travelled across drawing rooms to back yards,
to tea shops, to schools and colleges, to the countryside and city streets.
There was no television or newspaper advertising. But there was a lot of
poetry and lots of people. It played a major role in my own and many others
formative years of convictions and activism.
I have also experienced the power of socially mediated communication in
the villages of Mizoram. Mizoram has a unique press culture, hosting scores
of newspapers of different shapes and sizes. There is a culture of discussion
and debate on issues of social importance. The Young Mizo Association (YMA)
makes use of songs and community-level discussions. When communication
gives rise to action, it creates a social momentum with the power to influence
peoples attitudes. The key is in the organic linkages between the process of
communication with popular collective action. Communication without potential action is a passive exercise. The best examples of such linkages can be
seen in the ways that religious leaders such as Buddha or Christ and reformers like Thukkaram and Kabir communicated. Parables were powerful ways
for communicating with the people. The messages were clear, simple, and
straightforward. Messages were for action. That linkage changed peoples attitudes, and it changed history. The songs of Kabir do not need any extra
music; they go straight to the heart.
CHAPTER 18
Introduction
The growth of NGOs is a worldwide phenomenon. It is commonly seen as
evidence of the weakening of ideological political parties and the retreat
of the state from providing social entitlements and services, in response to
structural adjustment policies imposed on most Third World countries by
the World Bank and the IMF, and under the pressure of neo-liberal reforms
(Hann 1996; Edwards and Hume 1995; Omvedt 1994). Some see NGOs as
the product of neo-liberal policies, as financially dependent on neo-liberal
sources, and as directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities (Petras
1997). Others see them as mechanisms deployed for the creation of civil
society by external intervention (Sampson 1996:12142), noting the problematic conflation of NGOs with civil society itself. A number of studies
emphasise the negative impact of NGOs on social movements (Petras 1997;
Hann 1996) and explore the impact of what Sonia Alvarez (1998) has termed
NGOisation on mobilisation and social action.
Many scholars view the proliferation of NGOs in the Middle East as evidence of a vibrant civil society (Ibrahim 1995; Norton 1995; Moghadam
1997). NGOs are conflated not only with the democratising features of civil
society but with social mobilisation itself: an association which this chapter
seeks to bring into question. Little has been done to evaluate the impact of
the proliferation of NGOs on the empowerment of the various social groups
that NGOs claim to represent in the Middle East. Nor has their claim to success in mobilising such groups to assert their rights been verified. Equally, few
studies on the Middle East focus on how NGOs affect and interlink with other
forms of social organisation, whether in the form of unions, political parties,
or social movements involving students, women, or workers.
In this chapter, I draw on research in Palestine to explore the consequences
of the mushrooming of NGOs, and, in particular, the NGOisation of Palestinian social movements. I suggest that empowering consequences have not
been brought about by NGOisation as the process through which issues of
collective concern are transformed into projects in isolation from the general
context in which they are applied and without due consideration of the economic, social, and political factors affecting these projects. On balance, my
research has found that the rights-based agenda of womens NGOs has had a
negative impact on the mobilising potential of mass-based womens organisations; and that this impact, in turn, created a space that has helped Islamist
groups to establish themselves as a powerful and hegemonic force in Palestinian civil society.
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197
favour of their linkages to the international community (through participation in many activities and conferences), the second intifada witnessed a shift
to NGO leaders representing the voice of Palestinian civil society. Analysing
this shift, Tabar and Hanafi refer to what they call the emergence of a Palestinian globalised elite, tied more closely to the global actors in other words
international NGOs and donors than to local constituencies. They were
characterised by being informed by a global agenda, supporting the peace process, and being urban and professional (Hanafi and Tabar 2002). It was noted
that the globalised elite had overturned the old elite (charitable societies and
womens grassroots groups), through a process of competition and through
vying for organisational continuity.
Projectising peace
The visual display of the peace process (the handshake between Rabin and
Arafat in the lounge of the White House in 1993) was accompanied by an
abundance of internationally funded projects on conflict resolution, peacebuilding measures, building trust, engendering the peace process, and parallel negotiations. These projects, written in highly technical English, usually
involved womens activists in conferences in Europe or in the USA where they
could meet with their Israeli counterparts, in order to dismantle psychological
barriers, push women into decision making, and enhance gendered parallel
negotiations. In most cases, it was the international actors who chose their
local interlocutors.
Many political positions concerning vital issues related to refugees,
Jerusalem, forms of resistance, and the formation of the future state are adopted by the participants of international conferences without consulting
anyone back home. One might argue that there is no single interlocutor to
consult with. This may be true, and indeed many male actors in the international arena do not consult back home. The difference for Palestinian NGO
activists is that they lack the backing of any legitimate political actors in
the PA or civil society, since they have no constituency or political party or
organisations to belong to. Claiming feminist credentials and professionalism are the main criteria to qualify as participants in these forums. In this
context, professionally written reports and easy and efficacious channels of
communications are important. However, their lack of political training as
activist leaders weighs heavily on the legitimacy back home of some of these
NGO elites.
199
local professionals can meet expectations, the better their chance of being part
of the virtual community (Castells 1996), which creates a common career path
set out by those humanitarian-oriented organisations that shape their common
culture and belief system. This system includes a belief in the centrality of development to human progress, in the responsibility of governments to promote
it, in the imperative for international development assistance to support it, in
the definition of development in human rather than strictly economic (or political) terms (Chabbott 1999). Thus, the link with international donors is not a
one-way relationship, but donors and local actors interlink in a web of relations
that is far more complicated than one party imposing its will on the other. This
is not to say that both parties have equal power, but simply to problematise the
links between them to include the personal interests of both donors and recipients that give them the power to decide what to take and what to leave.
Concluding remarks
In the above analysis, I argue that professionalisation, as part of an NGO-isation process, might not lead to more participation for the target groups or the
grassroots. Project logic pushes towards upward vertical participation and not
downward horizontal participation, and can lead to further concentration of
power in the hands of administrators or technocrats. NGOisation leads to the
transformation of a cause for social change into a project with a plan, a timetable, and a limited budget, which is owned for reporting and used for the
purposes of accountability vis--vis the funders. This concentration of power
might impede the spread of a social movement in continuous need of networking, deliberation, and mobilisation, based on daily contact and personal connections. This process of dissemination is time-consuming and hard to frame
in timetables, especially in the constantly changing situation in Palestine. In
this context, professionalism and the project logic also provided a new power
base for NGO elites to determine which womens issues should be brought to
public attention. Lack of awareness by NGO professionals of the forces active
in civil society and the public sphere risks weakening calls for more equitable
gender relations and empowering more conservative actors in civil society.
NGOs are often presented as passive recipients of external influence, at the
mercy of the whims of donors: yet analysis of the Do[nor]-NGOs in Palestine
shows the extent to which NGO representatives also have the power to manipulate, re-negotiate, and legitimise donor agendas, using funds earmarked
for peace to further their own agendas. They are part of a globalised elite, in
that they are tied to international players and informed by global agendas.
These links proved instrumental to the NGOisation of the national agenda
in Palestine, transforming it from a struggle to realise self-determination and
sovereign statehood into projects for donor funding, in which donors play a
vital role in choosing their local interlocutors.
What we see as a result of the rise of NGO as a development buzzword is
the mistaken tendency to assume that any and all of the organisations who
201
adopt this term are thereby describing themselves as progressive and democratic. In the case of Palestine, the discourse of NGOs was used to forge a space
in the public arena at the expense of old mass-based organisations. It recast
the old basis for legitimacy founded on resistance and sacrifice as a basis for
womens subordination and isolation. And it spoke less to the overall social,
economic, and political context than to the desires of the donors and elites
who were to propel the rapid growth of these organisations in this setting.
Against this background, I believe that womens NGOs and the new discourses
that they brought to the public sphere might however inadvertently have
acted to disempower, de-legitimise, and fragment civil-society secular actors
and their movements in Palestine.
For all the assumptions that circulate in international development circles
about NGOs being closer to the people, able to speak for the grassroots, and
a motor of democratisation and development, the Palestinian case is a vivid
reminder of the need to get beyond the buzzword itself and take a long, hard
look at what is actually going on. That, as I suggest here, the NGOisation of
Palestinian womens movements and the use by womens NGOs of the currency of rights talk promoted by international NGOs has contributed to the
growing power and legitimacy of the Islamists is consequence enough for such
circumspection to be necessary.
References
Alvarez, Sonia (1998) Womens movements and gender politics in the Brazilian transition, in J. Jaquette (ed.), The Womens Movement in Latin America:
Feminism and the Transition to Democracy, London: Unwin Hyman.
Carapico, Sheila (2000) NGOs, INGOs, Go-NGOs and Do-NGOs: making sense
of non-governmental organizations, Middle East Report 214: 1215.
Carapico, Sheila (2002) Foreign aid and democratisation, Middle East Journal,
56(3): 37995.
Castells, Manuel (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I:
The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.
Chabbott, Colette (1999) Development INGOs, in John Boli and George
Thomas (eds.), Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental
Organisations Since 1875, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Edwards, Michael and D. Hulme (eds.) (1995) Non-Governmental Organisations:
Performance and Accountability: Beyond the Magic Bullet, London: Earthscan
and Save the Children.
Friedman, John (1992) Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development,
Oxford: Blackwell.
Goetz, Anne Marie (ed.) (1997) Getting Institutions Right for Women in Development, London: Zed Books.
Hammami, Rema (1995) NGOs: the professionalization of politics, Race and
Class [Special Issue on Palestine: Diplomacies of Defeat] 37(2): 5164.
Hanafi, Sari and Linda Tabar (2002) NGOs, elite formation and the Second
Intifada, Between the Lines 2(18): 3137.
CHAPTER 19
self-serving, the good cop of international aid vis vis the bad cop of international capitalism, then it follows that hindering social transformation is not
the intended outcome. So what is it that goes so wrong?
There are no easy answers, as every context presents its own specific challenges: the sustained political violence that wracks Colombia is not the same
as the gang violence throughout much of Central America, though doubtless
they share some of the same roots in drug trafficking. And regions that seem
quite calm, at least to an outsider, can erupt apparently overnight. Witness
the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, which burst into life on 1 January 1994, the
very day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into
effect.
My focus here is on the role that development NGOs might play in the
areas of capacity building. This is partly because I have worked mainly in the
development NGO sector for almost 30 years, but more importantly because
it is often assumed that NGOs have some unique ability or role to play in this
arena.2
In time-honoured feminist tradition, I shall start with a thumbnail sketch
of where I am coming from in order to locate myself in this analysis. For most
of my professional career I have worked in the international NGO sector. For
ten years I was on the spending side, based in a regional office for Mexico
and Central America. Though at pains to establish relationships that were
not predicated only on money, we and our partners were under no illusions
about the fact that it was our job to decide who should be funded to do what,
for how long, and on what conditions; and to defend these decisions within
our own regional team and to our managers and oversight committees in the
UK. We saw our role as twofold: on the one hand to provide critical accompaniment to our counterparts, and on the other to marry these to the NGOs
values and criteria in a way that allowed everyone to feel comfortable in the
relationship.
Then followed a wretched time spent working as a bureaucrat in the UK.
Now my job was not to relate to our counterparts, but to police the money.
Counting beans offers no food for the soul, so it was a relief to take on the
editorship of Development in Practice. But as a result, I found my job security
depending initially on a trickle of one-year grants (with the plug likely to
be pulled at short notice), being evaluated by managers with no particular
expertise in journals publishing, chasing funding applications that had languished in someones in-tray for months, having to meet reporting requirements that bore no relation to the needs and rhythms of the project, and so
on. In short, this experience was the same as that of hundreds of thousands of
organisations worldwide that depend on Northern NGO partners. (The contribution to this volume by my former colleague in Mexico, Miguel Pickard,
addresses this problem in greater depth.)
Having been on both sides of the partnership fence has given me some
insight into what constitutes good capacity-building practice, and into how
205
many NGO practices are ultimately about holding on to their own power,
rather than empowering others. This leads me to pose three questions:
What do we understand by capacity building in the context of development, and specifically of development aid?
How central are NGOs in taking forward a capacity-building agenda?
What is their track record in this? Do they really make a difference?
How can the South engage with the North in capacity building?
that much time, roughly one per minute for an entire 24-hour day. And they
are only the ones at the tip of the iceberg.
My point here is that capacity building originally drew on a generally leftleaning range of intellectual and political traditions, but is today commonly
used to further a neo-liberal pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of
economic and political agenda. If NGOs are not aware of these competing
agendas, their role in capacity building will be at best insignificant, at worst
damaging.
207
Development NGOs
How relevant are development NGOs to capacity building? Reading some of
the literature, one could be forgiven for thinking both that capacity building
is an exclusively Southern need, and that international NGOs are among
those best placed to meet it.
The sad reality is that most development aid has precious little to do with
building the capacities of The Poor to transform their societies. Not even the
best-intentioned NGOs are exempt from the tendency of the Development
Industry to ignore, misinterpret, displace, supplant, or undermine the capacities that people already have. Recognition of this danger is precisely what lies
behind NGO initiatives to establish standards of behaviour and accountability
in the humanitarian field: initiatives such as the Sphere Project, ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability in Humanitarian Action), or HAP
(Humanitarian Accountability Partnership). Even so, how often do end-users
or clients get to shop around to choose their service provider? The Salvadoran refugees who withdrew their co-operation with the European NGO charged
with providing medical assistance remain an exception that proves the rule.3
There are two points to be made here. The first is that while NGOs may be no
worse than other development actors, they do not have any inherent capacity
to build the capacities of The Poor. Some are of course better equipped than
others to do so: the local faith-based NGO that replaced the ousted European
agency in the Salvadoran case was committed to training the refugee community alongside its provision of health-care services, although this came hand in
hand with what many regarded as a conservative and authoritarian theology.
Conventional wisdom holds that operational NGOs tend to replace rather
than build local capacities, but even here it is difficult to generalise. One British co-operant-sending organisation, for example, has moved away from exporting experts to work overseas for a couple of years towards employing
local experts who can commit to a longer period, building up new social relationships in the process. Similarly, it is often thought that material inputs and
capacity building are at opposite ends of the aid spectrum. Capacity building
is about people and therefore not about things, so training and education are
all right, while bricks and mortar are not. The reality is seldom so stark. I well
recall spending a Sunday morning helping a network of health workers in the
outskirts of San Salvador to build a small clinic, while the afternoon heat was
spent under the mango trees in more conventional health education activities. For them, both were essential: they needed a place to meet and to attend
to patients, particularly in the rainy season, and building a joint community
clinic was critical to establishing mutual trust; they also, of course, needed to
acquire new skills and knowledge. They saw both activities as being on the
same capacity-building spectrum. I learned a lot about building techniques
that day. And I learned a lot more about building a shared vision based on
trust and co-operation.
To take a slightly different example, a Northern NGO that advocates energetically on behalf of its partners in the South may be experienced by them
as diminishing their own voices and knowledge, rather than helping them
to acquire the skills needed to undertake their own lobbying, in their own
time and in their own way arguments reminiscent of the nothing about us
without us slogan that originated in the South African disability-rights movement.4 What this means is that we cannot look at an input in isolation and say
a priori that X represents capacity building while Y doesnt. It is much more
a question of understanding the subtleties of the context and direction; an
approach, rather than a thing.
The second point is that a capacity-building approach hinges on the capacity for self-criticism. We have heard a thousand times that if you give a man
a fish, you feed him for a day, and if you teach him to fish, you feed him for
a lifetime. But, as a friend in El Salvador once asked: What if that fisher is not
a man but a woman? And what if she doesnt own the water in which she is
fishing? Or her customary fishing rights have been taken away from her? An
NGO in South Africa takes the question a step further: what if the NGO does
not even know how to fish? For NGOs to make a lasting difference means that
they must reflect hard on their own role(s) and be alert to changes in the environment in which they operate. It also means a commitment to learning as
intrinsic to their interventions to build the capacities of others.
209
as well as fostering the hubris of the stronger one. Organisations that have priorities projected on to them, however subtly, are almost bound to shift their
agendas to match those of their donors. Few Southern organisations have the
capacity to generate no strings funds from the general public. In-country
fundraising is beginning to happen in nations with large and wealthy middleclasses such as Brazil, India, Mexico, or South Africa while remittances from
migrant workers may be more important in weaker economies or in particular
regions of stronger ones (Jennings and Clarke 2005). Southern organisations
that depend on Northern funding are thereby compromised in their role as
civil-society organisations. Obviously, it makes no sense for Southern organisations to do less local advocacy and mobilising because of the constraints
imposed by financial dependency. But it is also dangerous for any NGO to
assume functions for which it is not equipped or not accountable, simply
because it has the financial muscle to do so. Jenny Pearce (1993) has shown
how, by taking on more political roles in public life roles for which they were
not politically accountable Chilean NGOs effectively depoliticised the social
movements that they set out to serve, and which had given them their legitimacy in the first place: something that Sonia Alvarez (1998) has called the
NGOization of social movements, a phenomenon that she attributes to their
professionalization and recasting as gender experts rather than as citizens
groups (Alvarez 1999). And all thanks to Northern NGO support.
Because administrative accountability has been fashioned around money,
the systems have tended to move upwards from recipient to donor, not the
other way around. Yet, as we have seen, the intended beneficiaries seldom
get to choose which NGO is going to provide services or advocate on their
behalf. The victims of floods and mudslides in Manila or Tegucigalpa or,
come to that, New Orleans may not much care whether they are helped to
safety by Catholic Relief Services, by any or all of the Oxfams, by a local Red
Cross volunteer, or (most likely) by their next-door neighbour. But when it
comes to the longer-term reconstruction effort, it may make a great difference
whether the work is designed and financed by the World Bank as opposed to,
say, World Neighbors. The Bank is likely to promote small-enterprise development, the fostering of the spirit and capacity to compete in the marketplace
(Moxham 2005); the NGO on organisational skills and on healing social divisions. The intended beneficiaries of international development assistance may
be consulted about this or that, but they rarely have the opportunity to tell an
aid agency to just leave them alone (although there are countless examples of
ways in which people express their displeasure by deliberately subverting aid
projects). NGOs, on the other hand, insist on their right to choose whom to
help and how, and what they want in return.
Dont get me wrong here. The relative autonomy of NGOs can be vital. In
the 1980s, for instance, it is what permitted Northern (mainly European and
Canadian) NGOs in Central America to work with local organisations and
informal structures that enjoyed the trust of people working for social change,
and not to be sucked into the brutal counter-insurgency effort. It is what made
211
that had grown out of such humble beginnings. If we had expected concrete
results after the three-year grant came to an end, we would have been sorely
disappointed. But how genuinely interested are NGOs in what happens after
their project has finished? While they might adopt a more programme- based
approach to grant making, with the aim of scaling up or at least ensuring
that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, seldom does this extend
beyond the final report on how the funds were used. More often than not, the
grant is disbursed, the project does what is expected, accountability for the
use of funds is assured, and the final report ends up gathering dust deep in the
organisational archives.5
Conclusion
Capacity building is an approach to solidarity-based partnerships with an infinite variety of expressions. While some of the ingredients can be identified,
there is no global recipe, no quick fix. Partnership entails mutual accountability, and you cannot have one without the other. This includes accounting back
honestly for decisions that affect others. This approach is demanding, and it
calls for time, flexibility, shared risk taking, open dialogue, and a willingness
on both sides to respond to feedback. Co-development is also far more rewarding than trying to be a catalyst, which exerts an impact or change on another
component within a system without itself changing (Eyben 2006: 48).
NGOs can foster the capacities of those Southern organisations whose aspirations they support. Partnership is not about accepting anything and everything that each other does, but for Northern NGOs it almost certainly means
getting out of the driving seat and learning to trust their chosen partners
navigational skills. Just because they paid to fill up the tank does not give
NGOs the right to determine the route. What is abundantly clear is that you
cant build capacities in others that you dont have yourself. And if you cant
learn, you cant teach either.
That said, disengagement is not an option. The gulf between rich and poor
diminishes our humanity. Another world is possible, but only by building on
the capacity of the most oppressed to repudiate injustice, and work for mutual
respect and solidarity.
Notes
1.
2.
This essay draws on my earlier work, in particular Eade 1997; Eade and
Williams 1995.
The focus on development NGOs is certainly not limited to international
or Northern NGOs; nor are the issues peculiar to the NGO sector. The
NGO world does not divide into neat NorthSouth, goodbad, powerful
powerless categories. Nor should one deny the real contests and divergences that exist between and often within them. Rather, my concern is
3.
4.
5.
213
with NGOs as holders and brokers of power vis--vis those who have more
or less power than they do.
The reasons for this vote of no confidence have of course been variously interpreted, but they revolve essentially around political agency.
The refugees argued that the NGO imposed a doctor knows best philosophy, while they wanted to develop skills as community health workers
in preparation for their return to El Salvador. The NGO claimed that it
was vital to keep medical supplies under firm control, in order to prevent
them leaking out to the FMLN fighters, and that the refugees were either
FMLN sympathisers, or were the victims of political manipulation and
threats (Terry 2002).
Space does not permit discussion on the vexed issue of advocacy by Northern NGOs; suffice it to say that Southern activists and academics alike
complain that all too often the role assigned to them is that of providing
local evidence to fuel Northern advocacy on their behalf, or case studies
to illustrate Northern analyses of the problems facing the Global South.
See Eade 2002, in particular the chapters by Maria Teresa Diokno-Pascual,
Dot Keet, Paul Nelson, and Warren Nyamugasira; and Olukoshi, cited in
Utting 2006:121.
Staff turnover seriously impedes long-term Northern NGO engagement
with Southern organisations beyond the grant period. The director of a
small agency that receives funds from various Northern NGOs once commented to me that he usually knew far more about each NGOs history
in Chiapas than did the successive new brooms sent down to sweep
through his agencys funding requests. A curious reversal of roles indeed
when Southern partners end up safeguarding the histories of their Northern NGO benefactors! Central Americans interviewed in 1997 made similar points: The international aid agencies, particularly the NGOs, lived
through the process with us and often identified deeply with it. Suddenly it was all change. The new emphasis was on technical issues, efficiency,
efficacy, and so on but without recognising and taking into account the
more subjective elements (Ardn 1999:63); Many of the international
aid workers are new. They did not live through the war years, and do not
have a detailed knowledge of the context. This has made working with
them far harder, since it is like having to start all over again which takes
up a lot of time (ibid.: 66).
References
Alvarez, Sonia (1998) The NGOization of Latin American feminisms in
S. Alvarez, E, Dagnino, and A. Escobar (eds.) Cultures of Politics, Politics
of Culture: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Alvarez, Sonia (1999) Advocating feminism: the Latin American Feminist
NGO boom, International Feminist Journal of Politics 1(2): 181209.
Ardn, Patricia (1999) Post-war Reconstruction in Central America: Lessons from
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, Oxfam Working Papers, Oxford:
Oxfam GB.
CHAPTER 20
217
person in charge and the belief that corruption in the Office was minimal.
About eight bilateral donors had been supporting the Office previously, with
each cherry-picking aspects of its work that resonated with its own interests
or even offering the Office money for doing something that otherwise it
would not have done. Getting rid of all these separately funded projects was
empowering for the recipient.5
My recommendation to London that we contribute to this basket fund was
well received. Senior management already saw DFID as being in the vanguard
of harmonisation efforts. However, those responsible for financial procedures
thought otherwise. I was told that it was procedurally not possible. To my
humiliation, even unlike-minded donors such as Belgium were finding this
easier to do than DFID. Still fired up by the experience from the DAC WID
group, I saw harmonisation as a challenge to the status quo. I engaged in a
six-month battle with much behind-the-scenes lobbying to persuade the
finance people eventually to change their procedures. This struggle is reflected
in an OECD-commissioned report that studied donor practices in relation to
harmonisation and alignment in four countries, including Bolivia:
Donors have their own procedures and policy directions, which are often adapted from their domestic procedures. For example, donors have
a mechanism through which the expenditure of public funds is made
accountable to their own taxpayers. This accountability is often the
responsibility of an intermediary audit authority or reporting to a democratic assembly. The different traditions, mechanisms and arrangements determine the way donors operate in practice and constitute a
key factor in the harmonisation process. This is particularly the case
with multi-donor initiatives and budget support. (OECD 2003:113)
The resistance to harmonisation by donors procedural units led to the
OECD commissioning another report into how to change incentives in aid
agencies. The study concluded:
Organisations with management cultures which promote and reward innovation in all fields including harmonisation, and welcome challenges
to the status quo and suggestions for improvements, are more likely to
engage in harmonisation than organisations which mostly reward compliance with existing rules and procedures. (de Renzio et al. 2005: vi)
Yet, meanwhile, harmonisation has become the new orthodoxy in Aidland,
where its practice reveals several vices.
219
Along with the World Bank under Wolfensohn, DFID has been the most
enthusiastic champion of harmonisation. The ideal for DFID is to co-finance
the Banks Poverty Reduction Support Credit, which is negotiated with the
Ministry of Finance. This enthusiasm stems from DFIDs wanting to spend
more money with fewer people, as the result of a Treasury decision to cut the
number of civil servants while increasing the quantity of aid (Gershon 2004).
The 2006 DAC peer review of UK aid criticises DFID for pushing too hard its
own interpretation of harmonisation as meaning general budget support:
DFID enthusiasm for certain initiatives is not always shared by other
partners and British advocacy can be perceived as promoting DFIDs
own model rather than leading and encouraging complementary donor
action. (OECD 2006)
While these murmurs from the bilateral community concerning DFID are
becoming stronger, collectively the donors are undermining the principles of
harmonisation and country ownership by increasingly putting much of their
money through global programme funds that bilaterals have set up with the
World Bank and United Nations agencies. A recent evaluation notes that these
programmes are largely donor-driven, with insufficient alignment between
global and country objectives and priorities (Lele et al. 2005).
Interestingly, the harmonisation agenda recently seemed to be unravelling
for another reason. Those bilaterals close to the World Bank were worried that
its then President, Paul Wolfowitz, was refusing to approve Bank loans in circumstances where there was evidence of major government corruption. By so
doing he was blocking harmonised spending by other donors such as DFID,
including its co-financing of a major loan to India. If harmonisation leads to
slower disbursement, donors will become disenchanted.
Meanwhile, the harmonisation agenda has resulted in a very large number
of papers, management tools, consultancies, training workshops, and international conferences, which surprisingly no one seems to have identified as
transaction costs. At the same time, as noted in the DAC Review of UK aid,
Country office staff should spend more time out of capital cities. Greater effort should be made in getting key staff closer to the development realities
they support (OECD 2006:7). This comment would apply to many other aid
agencies. A staff member of a bilateral agency recently told me: Joint Assistance Strategies are the thing Donor country heads now earn their spurs
by being seen to deliver the Paris Declaration. Not quite sure where country
ownership appears in all this (personal communication 2006).
Conclusion
Harmonising donor expenditures to achieve greater efficiency is an attractive
idea in theory. In practice, however, as long as donors do not recognise and
address the operations of power in the aid relationship, it is likely to be subject
to the following problems:
221
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
I am grateful to Sarah Ladbury for these figures, as well as for her overall
feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Report of workshop on the Paris Declaration: implications and implementation, Bamako, 2729 March 2006, page 5. The document was retrieved
on 24 June 2006 at www.aidharmonization.org/, but Google provides a
clue, revealing that the websites former address was www.worldbank.org/
harmonization/
The High-Level Forum took place in Paris, 28 February-2 March 2005. The
Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is available at www.worldbank.org/
harmonization/Paris/FINALPARISDECLARATION.pdf (retrieved 12 October 2006).
The High-Level Forum took place in Rome, 2425 February 2003. The
Rome Declaration on Harmonization is available at www.aidharmonization.org/ah-wh/secondary-pages/why-RomeDeclaration (retrieved 12
October 2006).
The same applies to funding local NGOs. Harmonised support from international NGOs can give recipients space to become learning organisations when they no longer have to spend so much time learning the
various procedures of the organisations funding them (Shutt 2006).
From a discussion at the DAC GenderNet meeting in July 2006 on the
implications of the Paris Declaration for gender equality.
Burkina Faso: General Framework Agreement for Organizing Budgetary
Assistance to Support the PRSP, independent evaluation mission April
2006, page 3, available at www.aidharmonization.org retrieved 30 June
2006.
References
Bond, P. (2006) A review of progression and regression in debt, aid, trade, relations, global governance and the MDGs, AFRODAD Occasional Papers No.
3, Harare: AFRODAD.
de Renzio, P., with David Booth, Andrew Rogerson, and Zaza Curran (2005)
Incentives for Harmonisation and Alignment in Aid Agencies, ODI Working
Paper No. 248 London: Overseas Development Institute.
Department for International Development (DFID) (2006) Aid Effectiveness
Network News, www.dfid.gov.uk/mdg/aid-effectiveness/newsletters/jointstrategy-bangladesh.asp (retrieved 30 June 2006).
Easterly, W. (2002) The cartel of good intentions: the problem of bureaucracy
in foreign aid, The Journal of Policy Reform 5(4): 22350.
Edgren, G. (2003) Donorship, ownership and partnership: issues arising from
four Sida studies of donor recipient relationships, Sida Studies in Evaluation No. 3, Stockholm: Sida.
Gershon, P. (2004) Releasing Funds to the Front Line, Independent Review of
Public Sector Efficiency, London: HMSO.
Government of Mozambique (2005) Joint Review 2005 Aide-Memoire
(Final version), 12 May 2005, www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/mozambiqueaide-memoire.pdf (retrieved 12 October 2006).
INTRAC (2006) Aid harmonisation: challenges for civil society Ontrac 33,
May.
Lele, U., N. Sadik, and L. Simmons (2005) The changing aid architecture:
can global initiatives eradicate poverty?, DAC News, www.oecd.org/
dataoecd/48/6/37046754.htm.
OECD (2003) Harmonising Donor Practices for Effective Aid Delivery,
Development Assistance Committee, Paris: OECD.
OECD (2006) Summary of DAC Peer Review of UK Aid, Paris: OECD, www.
oecd.org
Severino, J.-M. and O. Charnoz (2003) A paradox of development, Revue
dconomie du Dveloppement 17(4): 7797.
Shutt, C. (2006) Money matters in aid relationships, in R. Eyben (ed.)
Relationships for Aid, London: Earthscan.
CHAPTER 21
and the consultative processes associated with them, co-managed by the World
Bank and the IMF, the IMFs Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF),
the World Banks and IMFs Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC),
The World Banks Country Assistance Strategies (CAS), the World Banks Low
Income Countries Under Stress Initiative (LICUS), IMF Standby Arrangements,
World Bank Structural Adjustment Facilities (SAFs), Structural Adjustment Loans
and Sector Adjustment Loans (SALs), and a range of similar stabilisation, structural adjustment, and reform programmes.
Country ownership can refer to a number of dimensions of the multidimensional relationship of the domestic party to the programme/process and
its conditionality. Specifically, it can mean one or more of the following:
The country has designed and drafted the programme; or its weaker
siblings, ranging from The country has had a significant involvement
in the drafting and design of the programme to The authorities of the
country were informed of the programme after it had been drawn up by
other parties, typically the World Bank and the IMF.
The country agrees with the objectives of the programme.
The country believes that the implementation of the programme as
envisaged will achieve the programmes objectives.
The country implements the programme, or its weaker siblings, ranging from The country plays a significant role in the implementation of
the programme to The authorities of the country are kept informed of
how and when the programme has been implemented.
Until this point I have gone along with the sloppy usage of the word country as referring to a single purposefully acting agent. This anthropomorphic approach obscures reality and confuses the argument. Who or what is or are the
country that owns the programme, in any of the four senses just referred to?
A country is made up of populations ranging from the tens of thousands
to the billion plus. All countries, even the smallest and most homogeneous
racially, ethnically, culturally, religiously etc. contain many individuals and
groups with diverse, often divergent and conflicting views, interests, policy
objectives, and programmes. Under what circumstances and how can the concept of country ownership be relevant to a country with a myriad heterogeneous
and often conflicting views and interests?
If the country has institutions for political and economic governance that
are representative and legitimate, there may be a limited number of national
representative voices that can claim with some validity to speak for the country or to represent the interests of the country. The range of views and interests in the country may be so wide, however, that not even the representatives
of the legitimate government and of the worlds of work and business can claim
to speak for the country whose ownership is being sought for a programme.
In the case of the PRSPs, recognition of this reality has led to the development
of ad hoc consultative processes of ever-increasing complexity and duration.
Not only representatives of the government (central, state, and municipal)
225
and of parliament are now involved, but also representatives of many other
groups, associations, agencies, institutions, and organisations. Increasingly,
the PRSP process tries to involve a wide range of special interests and lobby
groups, including political, environmental, cultural, and religious NGOs (both
local and international) and other representatives of civil society.
Quite how the views and voices of such a range of sectional and special interests are aggregated into an operative concept of country ownership remains
a mystery. Also, despite the large number of NGOs and civil-society groups,
organisations, and factions involved in some of the PRSP consultative processes, the representativeness of the consultations remains an open issue. For
instance, the spectacular under-representation of the enterprise sector, and
especially the private-enterprise sector, in most PRSP consultative processes
represents a serious dent in its claim to be representative of all the parties
whose efforts are essential to a successful attack on poverty or who are affected
by it.
Moreover, it is only in a limited number of cases that there is a realistic
prospect for putting together a consultative process (let alone a process that
actually drafts the programme and designs the conditionality) that can make
any claim to being representative of the interests, wishes, and views of the
majority of the countrys population. Unrepresentative and often repressive
governments frequently preclude representative PRSP processes. This should
come as no surprise.
Why do countries become candidates for stabilisation, structural adjustment, or reform programmes? Why do countries take part in the HIPC initiative or the PRSP process? It is because they need and seek external assistance
of three kinds:
They need external financial resources and cannot access these through
the markets, because they are not creditworthy.
They need external expertise and do not have the resources to pay for
this on market terms.
They need an external commitment device because of weak domestic
political institutions.
Countries that need one or more of these external desiderata finance, expertise, commitment are countries that are in trouble, countries that cannot
help themselves, countries that are in a mess.
It is possible for a country with good institutions, good political leadership,
and good policies nevertheless to be in a mess. The cause(s) could be exogenous bad luck: bad neighbours preventing trade and transit and restricting the countrys ability to participate effectively in the regional and global
economy; armed conflict inflicted on a peaceful nation; natural disasters and
public-health disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes, or the AIDS pandemic;
bad initial conditions, such as those encountered by many of the new CIS
countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union. History can be a curse.
Most of the time, however, bad luck does not explain why a country is
confronted with the programmes and conditionality associated with external assistance. The most frequent reasons are bad institutions, bad political
leadership, and bad policies. Countries subject to IFI programmes and the
associated conditionality often have political systems that are unrepresentative and repressive, ranging from mildly authoritarian to brutally totalitarian.
The political leadership and the elites supporting it are often corrupt and economically illiterate. Rent-seeking and cronyism offer higher returns to effort
than socially productive labour and entrepreneurship. Public administration
is weak, corrupt, and has very limited implementation capacity. Moreover,
the countries with the most unrepresentative and repressive governments do
not permit a representative cross-section of civil society to participate. Indeed,
civil society tends to be weakest precisely in those countries where it is most
needed.
What would country ownership mean in Zimbabwe, in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (a HIPC-initiative country), and in Sudan? These are
extreme examples, and neither Zimbabwe nor Sudan currently has a World
Bank or IMF programme, but there are many others. What does country ownership mean in Algeria, in Egypt, or in the Peoples Republic of China? In Iraq
after the fall of Saddam Hussain, and in Afghanistan? Closer to my operational home, we have the CIS-7 poor countries: Moldova, Georgia, Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Uzbekistan. All but Uzbekistan have produced PRSPs. In Uzbekistan the World Bank Group has a modest
programme of lending, technical assistance, and analytical and policy advice.
There is no IMF programme, although an Article 4 Consultation was completed in June 2004. What would country ownership mean in Uzbekistan? That
the agreement of President Karimov has been obtained?
The term country ownership is used to describe both positive and normative features of IFI programmes. These alternative uses are exemplified by the
following two statements, both of which are commonly heard. First, Unless an
IMF programme and the conditionality it embodies are country-owned, the programme
will fail. Second, Unless an IMF programme and the conditionality it embodies are
country-owned, the program deserves to fail. I take the first statement to mean that
for an IMF programme to be successful certain actions are required of local
agents. Unless these agents are willing and able to implement these actions, the
programme will fail. This statement is true, but not very enlightening. A programme and the plan of action that it involves have to be incentive-compatible
to be credible and to succeed.
The local agents whose actions are necessary for the programme to succeed
are, however, not necessarily those who speak for the country in the meetings or consultative processes where these programmes are drafted and the
conditionality is designed. And those on whom the success of the programme
depends may not include all those affected by it. Often the majority of those
affected by a programme have had no voice in the design of the conditionality, and the programme may not serve their interests, regardless of whether
227
their efforts are essential to its success, and regardless of whether they can be
cajoled or induced to implement it and make it successful. If this is the reality
in a country that is a candidate for a programme, it is beyond the ability of the
IMF, World Bank, and other IFIs to remedy it. The effective choice for the IFIs
is then between not having a programme and having one that is not country
owned in the sense of not in the interest of and supported by the majority of
the population. There can be little doubt that at times programmes have been
designed and implemented that served the interests of an unrepresentative
few at the expense of the unrepresented many. Such illegitimate programmes
do not deserve to be implemented. In many other cases, however, the case is
less clear-cut.
Even legitimate programmes (that is programmes that are widely viewed as
fair and desirable) are constrained by the requirement that their implementation must be incentive-compatible. If they depend for their success on the
adoption of rules or on actions that are not incentive-compatible, they are not
credible. Conditionality (sticks or carrots conditional on outcomes, processes,
performance, or actions) is a means of enhancing the incentive compatibility
and thus the credibility of programmes. In practice, ensuring post-implementation irreversibility of reforms, policies, and actions is the hardest part of programme design. Most incentives (for example, the disbursement of a tranche
of a loan or grant) have a natural expiry date. Good conditionality creates
effective and lasting or irreversible incentives to take certain actions.
Conditionality can apply to actions, outcomes, or processes. Ideally, incentives should be designed to increase the likelihood of actions that contribute to desirable outcomes. In practice, key outcomes may lag far behind
actions, and the contribution of the action to the eventual outcome may be
hard to identify, measure, and verify. The effect of privatisation on economic
performance is an obvious example. Process conditionality does not directly
target specific actions, policies, or outcomes. Instead it focuses on promoting
good governance, in the hope that more accountable, transparent, responsive,
representative, and democratic government institutions will produce better
actions, policies, and outcomes. Process conditionality focuses on capacity
building broadly defined, and requires that a process (like the consultative
PRSP process) be implemented, or that certain institutions be in place to enhance the transparency and representativeness of governance at different levels. Making aid available to countries whose governments and institutions for
political and economic governance are most effective (or at least meet certain
minimum thresholds, defined, say, by international standards and codes) is an
example of process or institutional conditionality. The US Millennium Challenge Account embodies this process approach to conditionality.
If process conditionality and country ownership are to be taken seriously,
we would need international standards and codes to benchmark acceptable
practice. Failure to meet these benchmarks would mean that the country
would not have access to the external funds, expertise, and credibility brought
by an IFI-mediated programme. Sources of benchmarks could be initiatives or
reports like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative; the Publish What You
Pay, Publish What You Receive initiative; the FATF for anti-money-laundering
benchmarks; the Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International;
and the reports of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) and of the Council of Europe on electoral and political performance.
Standards for other key aspects of the accountability of the government to the
domestic population could be set by defining benchmarks or minimum standards for freedom of the media, independence of the courts, freedom to organise and register independent political parties and labour unions, the right
of peaceful assembly and protest, and the right to strike.
Process conditionality is political or governance conditionality. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has long practised
this form of conditionality because of the political nature of its mandate,
which in that regard is unlike that of the other IFIs.1 The requirement that
we operate only in countries committed to and applying the principles of multiparty democracy, pluralism and market economics has meant that the Bank no
longer engages in new public-sector projects in Turkmenistan and in Belarus,
and that similar constraints have been imposed on the Banks ability to work
with the sovereign in Uzbekistan.
While process conditionality and political benchmarks may give one a
warm glow inside, an unavoidable implication of their adoption is that a
number of potential countries of operation will fail to qualify. The EBRD still
operates, albeit at a low level of activity, in Turkmenistan, Belarus, and Uzbekistan, because the primary mandate of the Bank is in the private sector. The
World Bank and IMF would be out of business altogether if they could no longer operate in and with the public sector. More generally, if the IFIs were to get
serious about country ownership, there would be many fewer programmes.
In conclusion, the concept of country ownership has been used and
abused in so many ways that it now is at best unhelpful and at worst misleading and obfuscating. When the statement this programme is country-owned
means no more than this programme is supported by the people who own
the country, it is time to purge it from our vocabulary.
Acknowledgements
This chapter is based on remarks prepared for the Development Policy Forum
Conditionality Revisited, organised by the World Bank at the World Bank
Conference Center in Paris on 5 July 2004. The views expressed are those of
the author, who was then Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). They do not represent the views of the
EBRD. The paper is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author,
who holds copyright.
229
Note
1.
The preamble to the Agreement Establishing the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development states:
The contracting parties, Committed to the fundamental principles of
multiparty democracy, the rule of law, respect for human rights and
market economics; Recalling the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference
on Security and Co-operation in Europe, and in particular its Declaration on Principles; Welcoming the intent of central and eastern European countries to further the practical implementation of multiparty
democracy, strengthening democratic institutions, the rule of law and
respect for human rights and their willingness to implement reforms
in order to evolve towards market-oriented economies;
Article 1 of the Agreement states:
Purpose In contributing to economic progress and reconstruction,
the purpose of the Bank shall be to foster the transition towards
open market-oriented economies and to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative in the central and eastern European countries
committed to and applying the principles of multiparty democracy,
pluralism and market economics.
CHAPTER 22
Best of practices?
Warren Feek
In this brief critique of the idea of best practice, the author argues that good practice is not replicable or uniform; it cannot be reduced to its component parts for replication elsewhere. Furthermore, the criteria for what constitutes best practice are
at best unscientific and tend to discourage diversity and local experimentation.
OK, lets start with a little quiz. Picture yourself in a meeting or just chatting
with a colleague. Is there a particular word or phrase which when used by
participants in the meeting or by this colleague in an informal chat gets you
just a little agitated? Maybe very agitated? I am sure you know the feeling. The
blood moves a little quicker. You feel a little more edgy and itchy. You wish
you could ban that word or phrase being used or at least restrict it to, lets
say, five times a meeting or conversation. Ironically, though internally agitated, externally you may show contradictory signs. You slump a little in your
chair. Shoulders droop a little. A here we go again feeling gently inhabits you.
And it is even worse when you find yourself uttering that very word or phrase
that agitates you!
The word or phrase will be different for different people. Some have mentioned empowerment, capacity building, developing countries, or any
word that has the root particip participation, participatory, participative among their I get agitated prompts. It can have a theme: for example,
any phrase related to American sports (which are a mystery to most of us!),
such as who will quarterback this programme?, we are in a full-count situation, that came out of left field, this needs a full-court press, and many others. The word can be an everyday one: culture, context, and community
have been cited. It might be one of our own little inventions: results-based
management gets a number of votes. I witnessed a whole meeting actually
demonstrate open agitation when someone tried to use Mr Potato Head as
a metaphor. Sorry, no time to explain to the uninitiated what is Mr Potato
Head!1
I have avoided telling you but can delay no longer. The phrase that really
gets me going is best practice. And this makes my life difficult, as best practice seems to be everywhere. Most organisations I know have a person or a
team of people trying to identify and/or describe best practice related to their
field, and there are all manner of best practice publications in existence and
being produced regularly.
Can someone please tell me what is best practice, and why do we spend
so much time trying to identify it? I understand good practice, innovative
practice, excellent practice, and creative practice. But how do you decide
what is best when all practice all development action, including communication interventions, addressing priority development issues takes place
in different contexts, with different purposes, different population groups,
and significantly different opportunities, involving challenges within widely
varying cultural, political, and resource environments. Compounding this
problem is the implication of judging something the best: that we all need to
think about also doing what that practice is doing because it is the best. The
best practice highlighted after an exhaustive international search may work
in the poor barrio on the outskirts of Cali, Colombia, but may be completely
inappropriate perhaps even bad practice if replicated in Blantyre, Malawi;
Puna, India; Kuala Trenggannu, Malaysia; and even the town in which I was
raised: New Plymouth, New Zealand. Probably even Barranquilla, Colombia
would not do what they do in Cali, because it just would not work in Barranquilla. Things are different in Barranquilla! And, if the point of labelling something the best is not that others replicate it, then why label it the best?
As can be seen from the above paragraph, I got a little agitated although I
must say, it does feel good to get it out there (I am sure therapy has a word for
this). As a result, the calming-down process has now kicked in!
Why are best practice and its natural extensions of replication and going
to scale bad for progress on development issues? I would suggest the following reasons.
Now before anyone says Aha! But the whole of The Communication Initiative process is based on sharing best practice, let me try to clarify! We are not.
We try to share everything. There are now over 35,000 pages of summarised
BEST OF PRACTICES?
233
practice, thinking, and initiatives (so that you can quickly review if information and ideas on a page are useful to you and your work). The experiences,
ideas, and information on those pages come from you within the network. We
put them up without favour or qualification. Why? Because you will all have
different interests and demands. So, we try to put the power in your hands.
You can decide in your setting what is the best practice for you to learn
from. And, by using the review forms at the bottom of each page, you can provide your view of the idea, experience, and information on any page a peerreview process providing a practitioners and network view on practice.
So if you are in a meeting with me and someone says best practice, please
do not all look my way. I will not know what to do. Probably just shrink a
little in my chair!
Thanks for considering this.
Acknowledgement
This piece was originally placed on The Communication Initiative website on 3 March 2005, and is reprinted here with kind permission of The
Communication Initiative.
Note
1.
CHAPTER 23
What is peacebuilding?
The inclusion of so many activities, levels and actors under the umbrella
term peacebuilding has rendered its definition so broad that it is in danger of becoming meaningless. (Llamazares 2005: 23)
The Agenda for Peace is one of the cornerstones for the international debates
on how to build peace after violent conflicts. When the Cold War ended and
new mainly intra-state wars were on the rise, the international community
needed new forms of engagement to continue the delivery of development.
Right from the beginning, peacebuilding was not regarded as a concept that
would seek to transform societies in or emerging from conflict, but to maintain
stability. Beth Fetherston argues:
If conflict is caused, enabled, reproduced by particular social structures
and institutions which favour a dominant group, we cannot hope to remove or alleviate those causes, without altering those structures. Then,
peacekeeping becomes another aspect of a system which only seeks stability within the confines of that system, a system which already made
the war possible. (Fetherston 2000a: 196).
Ever more institutional arrangements and operational guidelines were adopted by international aid organisations to operationalise peacebuilding. An
entire industry of peacebuilding consultants, experts, and practitioners sprang
up to service these arrangements. After its failed engagement in Rwanda, the
international community became more interested in the approach encapsulated by the do no harm position (Anderson 1999). But the heavy weight of
five decades of development made it difficult to escape explaining contemporary processes and phenomena through a dominant conceptual framework
marked by Northern economic and social philosophy (Gosovic 2000: 447) and
Western intellectual traditions expectations, values and rationality (Duffey
2001: 143).
The framing of peace and ways of building it led to a preferred set of
methods and methodologies. As elsewhere in development, quantitative research such as that of Paul Collier for the World Bank (Collier et al. 2003)
gained prominence, offering a powerful instrument to legitimise interventions
by aid organisations. However, the deployment of such approaches to research
not only served to erase the particularity of places and experiences through its
inevitable generalisations, but it also had further costs. Fetherston comments:
The trend towards increasingly complex statistical analyses tends to leave
people out altogether. After all how can social space, cultures of violence and
militarization, and discourses be statistically analysed? (2000a: 194).
The peacebuilding discourse coalition (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003) that
has emerged over the past decade or so relies on a web of academics/academic institutions, researchers and practitioners, and different units in different
aid organisations. In the field of peacebuilding, new conceptual and organisational arrangements have been implemented to legitimise it for various
237
constituencies in Northern countries and Southern capital cities. One example of a virtual (and therefore global) meeting place is the Berghof Handbook
that features a range of contributions to engage with peacebuilding but puts
an emphasis on PCIA (Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment) and related
methodologies to merge peacebuilding with the results-based management
needs of aid organisations (for example, Anderson 2004; Hoffman 2004).
Paffenholz and Reychlers aid for peace approach is another such example,
peppered with phrases from the world of international aid:
In presenting our approach we have shown that a unified framework is
not only possible but also a useful starting point for all actors as it links
the analysis of the conflict and peacebuilding environment with the
implementation of interventions in conflict zones in a systematic stepby-step process. It also links the core of peace research (a theory of social
change) with operational requirements and provides methods and tools to
assess or anticipate conflict-related risks as well as effects (outcomes and
impact) by introducing peace-and-conflict results chains and indicators as
well as other tools. (Paffenholz and Reychler 2005: 16, my emphasis)
By introducing managerial tools such as the current focus on measuring
the effectiveness of peacebuilding (Paffenholz and Reychler 2007; Anderson
2004; Hoffman 2004) critical questions about the causes of violent conflict
and the future outlook of societies emerging from conflict are depoliticised
(cf. Ferguson 1994). These tools have become part of the daily life-worlds of
people working on peacebuilding, as shown by the following small excerpts
from a conversation between the author and a desk officer from the conflict
unit of a large bilateral donor agency in its European headquarters:
Part of my culture shock [when returning from a field assignment in
Kosovo] was about the importance of manuals and check-lists that are
perceived very differently in the field (...) The introduction of the new
conflict matrix has created needs for [in-house] consultancy. If people
from the field approach us, we provide them with manuals and checklists or examples of TORs for external consultants (...) If you talk to some
of the people in the field offices about the new conflict matrix, you get
hit by the collected frustrations about development co-operation. This is
a sort of anti-mainstreaming: People work with the conflict matrix to be
left in peace [sic!], but they do not engage with the actual meaning and
contents; this is similar to what I have observed with the gender topic.
In addition to the conflict matrix, the government of the country has
recently approved a cross-sectoral policy concept on peacebuilding and runs
a special network of different implementing organisations that collect and
disseminate best practices on peacebuilding among many other initiatives
to professionalise and institutionalise peacebuilding. Such institutional and
practical arrangements are tailored to the (perceived) need to present success
(Mosse 2005). But they never actively include those whose experience might
help to turn them from the artefacts of a non-place into something that
could respond to the particular issues that matter in particular places neither
the field staff and development and peace workers of aid organisations, nor
the people in (post-) conflict situations that should benefit from the projects
and programmes.
239
The professional life-world in Kathmandu was also matched by the sheltered private lifestyle of most international inhabitants of Aidland, because
the Maoist violence never reached the Kathmandu Valley. As another donor
representative remarked half-jokingly:
Travelling to the field was declared as too dangerous from a very early
stage of the conflict. So how did the international community experience the conflict? During one of the longest bandhs [general strikes and
blockades announced by the Maoists] people had to switch from fresh
groceries to the canned Dole-stuff in the supermarkets and then had
something to talk about for days!
Peacebuilding is almost always linked to issues of governmentality
making chaotic and unsafe places fit for (neo)liberal democracy. Nepal is
doomed to be a success-story of how a violent conflict can be transformed
through peaceful, democratic means and adoption of the latest fashion in
peacebuilding. Neither critical voices nor lessons learned from the failed
development of Nepal, nor indeed the history of failed peacebuilding interventions elsewhere, will enter the narrative of success.
241
understanding how social interactions change during war, and how relationships and power are maintained after its end, that the non-place of peacebuilding can be peopled with the diversity of experiences of war and peace of
those who live in situations of conflict.
To make sense of the disconnect between the virtual world created by the
peacebuilding narrative and lived experience, further study is also needed of
the outside actors who engage in peacebuilding, those who send dedicated
and motivated people into post-war situations or sit at the geographical or
thematic desks in ministries, aid organisations, and research institutions. Aidnography has emerged as a term to describe ethnographic research in the
realities of aid projects to uncover relationships, negotiation processes, and
the being of development projects. This is also needed for the organisations
and projects that aim at building peace.
These two avenues of further inquiry are not separate, because they are
both looking into complexity, the everyday reality of war and peacebuilding, and different forms of sensemaking of the realities that constitute the
non-place of peacebuilding. The development workers in the headquarters in
Europe, in the aid cities, and in the projects in the field will be a key factor in
pricking the bubble. Listening to people living in war and in peace, acknowledging their stories and those of the people who inhabit Aidland, and naming
the uncertainties and failures that are part of these worlds, can help to bring a
transformative element into a debate that is currently buried under the high
pressure of supermodern aid management.
Without these stories, and without more reflection on our own engagement and more qualitative insights into the social dynamics of war and peace,
peacebuilding will not even remain a buzzword. It will become another airport on the global development travel routes This is the final call for the
Aidlines flight from gender to peacebuilding, with a quick stop-over in
participation . Gillie Boltons example from medical professionals could be
an entry point for the development and peace profession as well:
Bringing our everyday stories into question is an adventure. No one
adventures securely in their backyard. Professionals need to face the
uncertainty of not knowing whats round the corner, where theyre
going, how theyll travel, when theyll meet dragons or angels, and
who the comrades are. They even have to trust why theyre going. A
student commented: What a relief it is to know that this uncertainty
is essential; knowing that makes me feel less uncertain of being uncertain. Now uncertainty is my mantra. (Bolton 2006: 210)1
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Cornwall and Deborah Eade for their helpful
comments and editorial support.
Note
1.
I have to thank Gael Robertson for sharing this reference with me.
References
Anderson, Mary B. (2004) Experiences with impact assessment: can we
know what good we do?, in David Bloomfield, Martina Fischer and
Beatrix Schmelzle (eds.) Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation,
Berlin: Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management,
available online at www.berghof-handbook.net.
Apthorpe, Raymond (2005) Postcards from Aidland, paper presented at the
Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, 10 June.
Aug, Marc (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity,
London: Verso.
Bolton, Gillie (2006) Narrative writing: reflective enquiry into professional
practice, Educational Action Research 14(2): 20318.
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros (1992) An Agenda for Peace, www.un.org/Docs/SG/
agpeace.html.
Boyce, James K. (1996) Economic Policy for Building Peace. The Lessons of El
Salvador, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Collier, Paul, V.L. Elliott, Hvard Hegre, Anke Hoeffler, Marta Reynal-Querol,
and Nicholas Sambanis (2003) Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and
Development Policy, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
David, Charles-Philippe (1999) Does peacebuilding build peace? Liberal (mis)
steps in the peace process, Security Dialogue 30(1): 2541.
Denskus, Tobias (2002) The System Seems Always to be Less than the Sum
of its Parts: International Post-War Reconstruction and the Role of Peacebuilding, unpublished MA Dissertation, Bradford: University of Bradford,
Department of Peace Studies.
Duffey, Tammy (2001) Cultural issues in contemporary peacekeeping, in
Tom Woodhouse, Oliver Ramsbotham: Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution,
London: Frank Cass.
Ferguson, James (1994) The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Fetherston, Beth (2000a) From Conflict Resolution to Transformative Peacebuilding: Reflections from Croatia, Working Paper 4, Bradford: Centre for Conflict
Resolution.
Fetherston, Beth (2000b) Peacekeeping, conflict resolution and peacebuilding: a reconsideration of theoretical frameworks, in Tom Woodhouse and
Oliver Ramsbotham (eds.) Peacekeeping and Conflict Resolution, London:
Frank Cass, pp. 190218.
Gosovic, Branislav (2000) Global intellectual hegemony and the international
development agenda, International Social Science Journal 52(4): 44756.
Hajer, Marten A., and Hendrik Wagenaar (2003) Deliberative Policy Analysis.
Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
243
CHAPTER 24
Where one stands on these issues depends on where one sits. Both concepts
are inherently relational: who is to be transparent to whom, and who is to be
accountable to whom? Yet what they share is the fact that such a wide range
of actors agree that transparency and accountability are key to all manner of
good governance, from anti-poverty programmes to corporate responsibility,
participatory budgeting, and NGO management.
Not coincidentally, the terms transparency and accountability are both quite
malleable and therefore conveniently can mean all things to all people. For
example, while the transparency banner has been held high by the environmental movement for decades, calling for public hearings to assess environmental
impacts and for the obligatory reporting of toxic emissions, corporate investors
also took up the charge in the wake of the Enron collapse, calling for managements to open their books. While accountability has long been the watchword
of human-rights movements around the world, calling for truth with justice,
technocratic managers and anti-union politicians also use it to impose their
goals on ostensibly unresponsive public bureaucracies (using the reporting tools
of tests and other quantifiable indicators). Campaigners have long challenged
the World Bank on the grounds of lack of transparency and advocate holding it
accountable for development disasters, yet World Bank managers now call for
borrowing governments to be more transparent, and claim that they are holding corrupt governments and contractors accountable for misusing development funds. Bank managers even now converge with the World Social Forum
in support for participatory budgeting, a local-government reform strategy that
brings transparency and accountability together.
The views of various stakeholders on these issues to use another development buzzword depend heavily on how exactly transparency and accountability are defined, and such definitional decisions are path-dependent. In
other words, the question of what counts as transparency and accountability
depends on how their conceptual boundaries are drawn. Moreover, in many
national and international debates over how and whether to enforce social
and environmental standards, the following trend appears to be quite pronounced: while critics call for accountability, powerful elites respond by offering some measure of transparency instead. The implication is that monitoring
and reporting measures (sometimes by interested parties) are the cure for all
ills. They offer a market-friendly substitute for the threat of authoritative
sanctions (now stigmatised as command and control measures). One notable
example was in the US debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement,
when labour and environmental side-agreements that could only promise
public hearings and modest investigations were sold as the solution to the
poor enforcement of minimum standards (in the USA as well as in Mexico).
In brief, better and more information is supposed to make both markets and
public authorities work better. But does it? What does the evidence show?
The conventional wisdom about the power of transparency is straightforward: transparency generates accountability. Several related phases come
to mind, such as information is power, the truth shall set you free, and
247
speak truth to power. Or, as one of the founders of public-interest law and
later US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it 90 years ago: [p]ublicity
is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases, sunshine
is said to be the best disinfectant, electric light the best policeman (1913).2
This proposition makes a great deal of sense, yet a review of the research
literature on this issue revealed two major puzzles. First, the actual evidence
on transparencys impacts on accountability is not as strong as one might
expect. Second, the explanations of transparencys impacts are not nearly as
straightforward as the widely held, implicitly self-evident answer to the why
question would lead one to expect.
To evoke the power of sunshine is both intuitive and convincing. Indeed,
these principles have guided my past 15 years work.3 Nevertheless, recently,
a review of the empirical evidence for the assumed link between transparency and accountability shows that one does not necessarily lead to the other.
Those who make this assumption are confusing the normative (that which
our democratic values lead us to believe in) with the analytical (that which the
social sciences allow us to claim). If the power of transparency is fuelled by the
power of shame, then its influence over the really shameless could be quite
limited.4 It turns out that transparency is necessary but far from sufficient to
produce accountability.
In this context, it is important to reframe the question in the following
terms, more analytical than normative: under what conditions can transparency
lead to accountability? To be explored in practice, such a question requires
still more precision. Both the concepts of transparency and accountability
refer to a broad range of processes, actors, and power relations. To reframe
the question: what types of transparency manage to generate what types of
accountability?
Both transparency and accountability share a conceptual problem: they
are rarely defined with precision. For both, you know it when you see it. At
least until recently, transparency has received more practical than conceptual
attention.5 In contrast, the concept of accountability has been reviewed and
deepened from diverse perspectives.6 Yet if one is interested in understanding
whether and how transparency generates accountability, it is crucial to disentangle rather than conflate the two ideas. To preview the discussion, one must
take into account the distinction between two dimensions of accountability:
on the one hand, the capacity or the right to demand answers (what Schedler
calls answerability) and, on the other hand, the capacity to sanction (1999).
Transparency pathways
Instruments for public access to information generally fall into one of two
categories: proactive and demand-driven. Proactive dissemination refers to
information that the government makes public about its activities and performance. Practical expressions can range from toxic-release inventories to
organic certification, third-party policy evaluations, and post-authoritarian
truth commissions. Demand-driven access refers to an institutional commitment to respond to citizens requests for specific kinds of information or documents which otherwise would not be accessible. Institutions can range from
classic freedom-of-information laws to ombudsman offices, social accountability agencies, and investigative bodies such as the World Banks Inspection
Panel.
The idea of transparency can also be unpacked in terms of its directionality.
Disclosure cuts both ways, channelling information upwards as well as downwards. Right to know reforms refer to measures that promote downwards
transparency, from the state to society. In contrast, state imperatives to monitor citizens can be understood as a form of upwards transparency. Consider
the examples of conditional cash-transfer social programmes, in which states
closely monitor family behaviour, or the lack of guaranteed ballot secrecy,
which leads voters to suspect that authorities will learn how they voted. In
other words, transparency can be another word for surveillance, which in turn
allows state actors to hold citizens accountable for perceived transgressions.
249
Data or information?
A second dilemma involves the difference between official data and relevant,
reliable information. Here there is a big difference between disclosure that is
voluntary, nominally mandatory vs. really obligatory. Voluntary disclosure
would seem to be inherently limited, given the incentive to conceal damaging information but with a notable exception. Firms that choose to submit
to certification of their compliance with social and environmental standards
presumably lose some control over the transparency process.10 This has led
to major debates over which certifiers are truly arms-length, as in the case
of manufacturers that hire commercial accounting firms to certify their
subcontractors, which fail to use the key instrument of unannounced factory
inspections.11
When considering obligatory disclosure of performance data, the challenge
of assuring quality control becomes clear when examining the paradigm case
for impact of transparency reforms: the toxic-release inventory system. Since
1986, in the USA and now many other countries, private firms that emit certain chemicals are required to report the quantities of their emissions to a
government agency, which in turn makes the data public. The assumption
is that this dissemination provides tools to the public to inform and motivate civic and media campaigns to encourage compliance with environmental
laws.12 Many analysts have argued that the USAs toxic-release inventory was
responsible for the reported 46 per cent reduction in emissions between 1988
and 1999 (for example, Fung and ORourke 2000; Graham 2002; Konar and
Cohen 1997; Stephan 2002). Nevertheless, evaluations by the federal governments accountability office found that the Environmental Protection Agency
did not assure reliable and consistent reporting by private firms (GAO 1993,
2001). As a result, polluters did not have to fear sanctions for under-reporting.
When public-interest groups did their own assessment in the city of Houston,
they found that independently estimated actual levels of emissions were four
times greater than had been officially reported (Environmental Integrity Project 2004). These findings do not mean that the reform had no impact, but
they do raise serious questions about the claims made for this widely recognised public alternative to so-called command-and-control approaches (for example, Dietz and Stern 2002). Disclosure that was mandatory in theory turned
out to be less than mandatory in practice.
251
Accountability
Accountability
Clear
Soft
Hard
and the clear, as well as the hard and the soft. By recognising these distinctions, one can identify the area of overlap with greater precision: institutional
answerability.
In conclusion, the point of departure for this exploration of the relationship between transparency and accountability was that we are obliged to
distinguish between the two concepts because one does not necessarily generate the other. To circle back to the question of how transparency relates
to accountability, Table 2 suggests that the two concepts do indeed overlap.
Clear transparency can be understood as a form of soft accountability. This distinction allows us to identify both the limits and the possibilities of transparency, which at minimum should help to calibrate realistic expectations. One
should not expect answerability from opaque transparency, and one should
not expect hard accountability from answerability. To take the next step and
address hard accountability would involve going beyond the limits of transparency and dealing with both the nature of the governing regime and civil
societys capacity to encourage the institutions of public accountability to do
their job.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
253
See, among others, Fox and Brown (1998) and Clark et al. (2003). On
recent campaigns, see www. bicusa.org/.
Regarding the mobilisation of shame, above all by human-rights defenders, see Drinan (2001), among others.
For exceptionally comprehensive works, see Florini (2003), Graham
(2002), Hood and Heald (2006), Monsivis (2005), Roberts (2006), and
Oliver (2004). For analyses of the Mexican experience by civil society, see
Fox (2008b).
See, for example, Ackerman (2008), Behn (2001), Bovens (1998), Fox et
al. (2007), Isunza Vera and Olvera (2006), Mainwaring and Welna (2003),
ODonnell (1999), and Schedler (1999).
On horizontal accountability, see ODonnell (1999, 2003). On truth commissions, see Rotberg and Thompson (2000) and Gibson (2005), among
others.
Recall, for example, the distinction between policy inputs (such as budget
appropriations and contracts for building schools), results (whether or not
the schools were actually built and staffed, student attendance rates), and
impacts (to what degree did the students learn). Though third-party evaluations are now very much in vogue, and their focus on measuring impacts
is welcome, they run the risk of assuming the reliability of official data
regarding the inputs that are then correlated with outputs.
Long before low-ranking soldiers took all of the official blame for torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, classic cases would include the 1968 My Lai
massacre in Vietnam, in which a low-ranking officer was found guilty of
ordering the mass murder of 500 civilians. In a rare conviction, he was
first sentenced to life imprisonment and ended up serving three and a
half years of house arrest on a military base. He claimed that he was
following orders, and indeed he was carrying out a counter-insurgency
strategy that was the result of decisions made at the highest levels of the
US government.
For an overview of fair trade, see Nichols and Opal (2004). On voluntary
certification in the timber case, see Cashore et al. (2004).
See, among others, Esbenshade (2004), Richter (2001), and RodrguezGaravito (2005).
See, for example, the tools at www.scorecard.org/.
On the latter experience, see Clark et al. (2003) and World Bank (2003).
References
Ackerman, John Mill (ed.) (2008) Ms all del Acceso a la Informacin: Transparencia, Rendicin de Cuentas y Estado de Derecho, Mexico, DF: Instituto de
Acceso a la Informacin Pblica (IFAI)-Instituto de Investigaciones Jurdicas
UNAM.
Banisar, David, (2006) Freedom of Information Around the World 2006: A
Global Survey of Access to Government Information Laws, London: Privacy
International.
Becker, Elizabeth (2002) Web site helped change farm policy, New York Times,
24 February.
255
Gibson, James L. (2005) The truth about truth and reconciliation in South
Africa, International Political Science Review, 26(4): 34161.
Graham, Mary (2002) Democracy by Disclosure: The Rise of Technopopulism,
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Hood, Christopher and David Heald (eds.) (2006) Transparency: The Key to
Better Governance? Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press.
Isunza Vera, Ernesto and Alberto Olvera (eds.) (2006) Democratizacin, Rendicin
de Cuentas y Sociedad Civil: Participacin Ciudadana y Control Social, Mexico
DF: CIESAS, Universidad Veracruzana/ Ed. Miguel Angel Porrua.
Konar, Shameek and Mark A. Cohen (1997) Information as regulation: the
effect of community right to know laws on toxic emissions, Journal of
Environmental Economics and Management 32(1): 10924.
Mainwaring, Scott and Christopher Welna (eds.) (2003) Democratic Accountability in Latin America, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Monsivis, Alejandro (ed.) (2005) Polticas de transparencia: Ciudadana y rendicin
de cuentas, Mexico, DF: Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Informacin Publica/
Centro Mexicano para la Filantropa, pp. 1730.
Nicholls, Alex and Charlotte Opal (2004) Fair Trade: Market-Driven Ethical
Consumption, London: Sage.
ODonnell, Guillermo (1999) Horizontal accountability in new democracies,
in Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner (eds.) The SelfRestraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, Boulder, CO:
Lynne Reinner, pp. 2951.
ODonnell, Guillermo (2003) Horizontal accountability: the legal institutionalization of mistrust, in Mainwaring and Welna (eds.), pp. 3454.
Oliver, Richard (2004) What is Transparency?, New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Richter, Judith (2001) Holding Corporations Accountable: Corporate Conduct,
International Codes and Citizen Action, London: Zed Books.
Roberts, Alasdair (2006) Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rodrguez-Garavito, Csar (2005) Global governance and labor rights: Codes
of Conduct and anti-sweatshop struggles in global apparel factories in
Mexico and Guatemala, Politics and Society 33(2): 20333.
Rotberg, Robert and Dennis Thompson (eds.) (2000) Truth v. Justice: The
Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schedler, Andreas (1999) Conceptualizing accountability, in Andreas
Schedler, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (eds.) The Self-Restraining
State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, Boulder, CO: Lynne
Reinner, pp. 1328
Sobel, David, Bethany A. Davis Noll, Benjamin Fernndez Bogado, TCC Group,
Monroe Price (2006) The Federal Institute for Access to Public Information
in Mexico and a Culture of Transparency, Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication, Project for Global
Communication Studies.
Stephan, Mark (2002) Environmental information disclosure programs: they
work, but why? Social Science Quarterly 83(1): 190205.
Thompson, Dennis (1987) Political Ethics and Public Office, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Warren, Samuel and Louis D. Brandeis (1980) The right to privacy, Harvard
Law Review 4(5), 15 December.
World Bank (2003) Accountability at the World Bank: The Inspection Panel 10
Years On, Washington, DC: World Bank.
CHAPTER 25
Corruption
Elizabeth Harrison
This chapter engages with the ways in which corruption has taken centre stage
in much development policy making and rhetoric. It argues that there is a need
to destabilise taken for granted assumptions about what corruption is and how
it operates. This means generating an understanding of how meanings of corruption vary, and how this variation is determined by the social characteristics of
those engaged in corruption talk. It also means examination of how discourses of
corruption and anti-corruption are translated from international to national and
local stages from the anti-corruption establishment to the realities of bureaucratic encounters in diverse contexts.
What is the value in dissecting the use of the word corruption in development rhetoric? Like most of the expressions examined in this volume, corruption is frequently used sloppily, and its use may disguise political agendas, or
further the interests of the powerful. Corruption is unlike some of the more
bland development buzzwords (social protection, harmonisation, country ownership), in that they primarily describe fashionable ways of getting development
done. There is more to it than this, perhaps because corruption describes not
so much how to get things done, but something that is perceived to be hampering those efforts. Corruption is also similar to poverty, in that it attempts
to describe something, however inadequately, which exists in the real world
and can make peoples lives miserable.
When it comes to corruption, destabilising its taken for granted quality might help us to better identify where corruption hurts, and whom. This
means understanding what corruption means for different people, who is
able to define an act as corrupt or not, and who is included in or excluded
from discourses of corruption. This is not to present a relativistic position
where, for example, corruption is re-labelled as gift giving and thus excused
as culturally acceptable. Rather it is about understanding the social characteristics which influence corruption talk: gender, age, religion, ethnicity, and
so on may all play a role, as will differential engagement with international
anti-corruption discourses themselves.
CORRUPTION
259
educated, articulate, and share a particular worldview and set of values about
the negative effects of corruption.
To be fair, the CPI has been criticised recently, most strongly by one of its
originators, Fredrik Galtung, who has left TI to be part of a new anti-corruption network, Tiri (www.tiri.org). Galtung (2005) has argued that the CPI has
a number of significant failings. These include the fact that it relies on an
imprecise, yet narrow, definition of corruption, focuses only on the takers
and not the givers, and draws its information from often ignorant sources.
To respond to criticism, TI now also produces a Bribe-Payers Index (BPI) and
the Global Corruption Barometer (GCB). The GCB polled 55,000 people in 69
countries in 2005 to hear their perceptions about corruption. According to
TI, it takes the temperature of the people whose lives and views are touched
by corruption (TI 2005). Significantly, however, this is still only a measure of
perceptions.
Research from anthropology suggests that perceptions of corruption may
in fact bear little relationship to its incidence. For example, Parrys (2000) ethnography of a government-run steel plant in Madhya Pradesh, India, indicates
that, while there was a strong perception that it was virtually impossible to get
a job without recourse to an intermediary, in practice very few people actually
paid bribes for employment. Parry argues that this illustrates the internalisation, rather than the rejection, of particular values of bureaucratic practice.
Corruption has seemed to get worse and worse not (only) because it has, but
also because it subverts a set of values to which people are increasingly committed (Parry 2000: 53). Arguably, the very success of anti-corruption rhetoric
may result in more and more people believing that corruption is a problem.
The more there is talk about the problem of corruption, the more widely it is
perceived to be a national blight.
The Global Corruption Barometer is seen as a tool to combat corruption,
but behind its impressive and emotive language, the slipperiness about what
corruption is persists. For the GCB, the focus is bribery, and the argument is
made that corruptions impact on personal and family life is most dramatic
on poor households (TI 2005). But petty bribery, the kind that makes a young
mother lose hope for the future because she believes that securing her childs
health requires a hand under the table, is not the same as the kind of grand
corruption that much anti-corruption rhetoric focuses upon. Some might say
it is worse, or that it is what really matters. Others might stress how single acts
of grand corruption do much more harm. The differences between different
practices which are all lumped together as corruption lie in the different conceptions of what kind of moral boundary line has been crossed in particular
instances. This is something that is not part of the moral certainty that drives
anti-corruption rhetoric. But, in classifying corruption as a simple phenomenon, the diverse ways in which people engage with morality are overlooked.
Comprehension of how opportunities are shaped, both to engage in and to
escape from corruption, is important. It seldom occurs.
CORRUPTION
261
economists. Arguably, the way that the Bank has defined and used the concept
of corruption is influenced by this.
Corruption becomes something that it is legitimate for the Bank to pronounce upon, precisely because it becomes defined as an economic concept.
For example, the formula developed by Klitgaard Corruption may be represented as following a simple formula: C = M + D A. Corruption equals Monopoly
plus Discretion minus Accountability (Klitgaard 1998: 4) is widely quoted.
There are parallels with the arguments that Ben Fine (2001; see also his
contribution to this volume) has made with regard to the concept of social
capital: that economics has succeeded in colonising the other social sciences,
by applying its methods to non-market and non-economic relations and treating them as if they were all economic. In this way, the world is characterised
as more predictable and controllable than it actually is.
CORRUPTION
263
Conclusion
Corruption, but more particularly the anti-corruption lobby that has expanded so dramatically in recent years, needs closer examination. Riding on a wave
of righteous virtue, anti-corruption talk comes from diverse quarters and, for
many, is unquestionable. Indeed, to do so is slightly heretical; corruption is
so obviously harmful that querying this is equivalent to excusing immorality.
As I have discussed, there are good reasons to have some sympathy with this
position. However, in lumping together all corruption under the same heading, the anti-corruption lobby underplays the very different meanings that
are attached to diverse transactions. More significantly, it also provides a neat
explanation for the ills of both countries and continents that leaves moral
culpability entirely with the supposedly corrupt. Ethnographic engagement
with practices that are seen as corrupt may be valuable. Equally, though, such
engagement needs to extend to questions of how, and why, anti-corruption
has risen to its current prominence.
Notes
1.
2.
CORIS is Transparency Internationals anti-corruption information service; ANCORR is the OECDs anti-corruption website.
The text of his speech includes the following: We never expected corruption to be vanquished overnight. We all implicitly recognised that
some would be carried over to the new era. We hoped that it would not
be rammed in our faces. But it has: evidently the practitioners now in
government have the arrogance, greed and perhaps a desperate sense of
panic to lead them to eat like gluttons. They may expect we shall not see,
or notice, or will forgive them a bit of gluttony because they profess to
like Oxfam lunches. But they can hardly expect us not to care when their
gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes; available at http://bbc.
co.uk, (retrieved 3 August 2004).
References
Brown, E. and J. Cloke (2004) Neoliberal reform, governance and corruption
in the South: assessing the international anti-corruption crusade, Antipode
36(2): 27294.
Evans, P. and J. Rauch (2004) Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross National Analysis of the Effects of Weberian State Structures on Economic Growth, http://
sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/evans/burperf.html (retrieved 6 December
2006).
Fine, B., C. Lapavitas, and J. Pincus (eds.) (2001) Development Policy in the 21st
Century, London: Routledge.
Galtung, F. (2005) Measuring the immeasurable: boundaries and functions of
(macro) corruption indices in F. Galtung and C. Sampford (eds.) Measuring
Corruption, London: Ashgate.
CHAPTER 26
that of the LTPS could no longer evade these issues. These collaborators
greatly strengthened that ability of the LTPS to address, if not authoritatively, at least in a well-informed manner, the deep-seated concerns
that ultimately shape and direct the course of economic growth and
development. The ten papers presented in this third volume of the LTPS
Background Papers contain some of those invaluable contributions.
The general understanding within African intellectual circles then was that
the main challenge of development was the establishment of statesociety
relations that are (a) developmental, in the sense that they allow the management of the economy in a manner that maximises economic growth, induces
structural change, and uses all available resources in a responsible and sustainable manner in highly competitive global conditions; (b) democratic and respectful of citizens rights; and (c) socially inclusive, providing all citizens with
a decent living and full participation in national affairs. Good governance
should therefore be judged by how well it sustains this triad. The urgency of
the democratic aspect of good governance was highlighted by the clamour for
democracy by social groups that had opposed misgovernment and the imposition of policies by unelected institutions national or foreign.
GOOD GOVERNANCE
267
A few years later, however, with African economies showing signs of recovery, there was an orchestrated campaign by the Washington-based financial
institutions to highlight the turnaround in policy adoption in Africa. These
institutions attributed the turnaround to their own persistence with their own
policies, and to the emergence of African leaders with a new awareness of the
demands of globalisation. A major World Bank report on Africa, published in
2000, stated that many countries have made major gains in macroeconomic
stabilization, particularly since 1994; and that there had been a turnaround
because of on-going structural adjustment throughout the region which has
opened markets and has had a major impact on productivity, exports, and
investment. There had indeed been a sea-change in the African policy landscape and, as a result, arguments that African countries had refused or been
slow to adjust, or that enough time had not passed, became less credible.
However, as had happened many times before, these reforms did not lead
to the expected outcomes, and celebration of recovery proved premature.
Considerable evidence including some from within the Bank itself suggested
that adoption of the prescribed policies had not worked. Much of the recovery
could be explained by so-called exogenous factors weather, terms of trade,
plain good luck, and end of conflicts rather than adjustment.
Thus came the question: Why is it that even when the recommended policies were implemented (often under the aegis of and conditionalities from the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), the results hoped for did
not materialise? The answer was institutional weakness or bad governance.
The new proponents of good governance argued that the policies themselves
were sound, and that good governance must also mean implementing orthodox
economic policy. Good governance thus simply became one more instrument
for ensuring the implementation of adjustment programmes. Because macroeconomic policies were sacrosanct, it was important that the democratic institutions that might come with good governance were not used to undermine
economic policy. This was ensured by introducing institutional reforms that
effectively compromised the authority of elected bodies through the insulation
of policy technocrats and the creation of autonomous authorities.
As a consequence, the current use of governance is still very much business
as usual. Thus although the IMF took on good governance, it also insisted that
the many reforms (fiscal, financial, etc.) in which it had been involved were indeed core components of good governance. Many other donors have followed
suit, simply re-labelling various divisions from one thing to governance.
The approach to good governance and economic policy that finally became dominant differed radically from that of the African contributors
who were strongly opposed to adjustment policies because not only were
they deflationary and thus not developmental, but also because they were
externally imposed, weakened the state, and undermined many of the postcolonial social contracts. For the African contributors, good governance
related to the larger issues of statesociety relations and not just to the technocratic transparency-accountability mode that it eventually assumed in the
References
World Bank (1989) Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth: A
Long-Term Perspective Study, Washington, DC: World Bank.
World Bank (1994) Adjustment in Africa: Reforms, Results and the Road Ahead,
Washington, DC: World Bank.
World Bank (2000) Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?, Washington, DC: World
Bank.
CHAPTER 27
The global shifts which brought security into development discourse are
complex, and will not be discussed in detail here. They have given birth to
the perception that development is being securitised and subordinated to the
security priorities of the major global players, including the war on terror.
Even more than development, security is a contested concept, with multiple layers of history and meaning, containing dark corners in which demons
hide. Yet most people who talk security do so as if they know what security
is, and for the most part they treat it as unproblematic. Security is used as
an abstract noun, describing a desirable existential state. But what security?
Whose security? How achieved? And from what? There are no easy answers to
any of these questions.
Insecurity is seemingly easier to define. Fear and violence are all around us.
They are tangible realities for enormous numbers of people, and (to an extent)
can be measured. Commonsense notions of security indeed characterise it in
terms of personal safety, or freedom from fear in the words of the 2004 UN
Report cited above. The links between freedom from fear and other existential risks, like freedom from want are at the core of the concept of human
security. They resonate within a wider family of meanings, such as social
security, food security, and, in the context of capitalist property relations,
security of tenure.
However, even in these relatively benign senses security cannot be used
without a safety warning. From the time of Thomas Hobbes, security has been
embedded in the theory and practice of modern statehood. It has been a discourse of the powerful, even more than of the insecure and weak. Writing in
1651 soon after the English Civil War, Hobbes argued that the peoples safety
was the business of the great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State. For
without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition
which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.
There was an implied social contract, by which the state delivered peace
and security, and citizens consented to its sovereign authority. This contract
was backed the states right to use force, for covenants without the sword,
are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. State sovereignty
was absolute, and loyalty unconditional, for to resist the sword of the Commonwealth no man hath liberty; because such liberty takes away from the
sovereign the means of protecting us, and is therefore destructive of the very
essence of government. Even so, there was an important proviso, namely that
the obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and
no longer than, the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them. Weak
rulers, according to Hobbes, were invariably deprived of the right to govern by
external conquest or internal rebellion.
While Hobbes himself was primarily concerned with the nature of political
obligation, and used the word security sparingly, his thinking still permeates
security analysis in the twenty-first century. Security discourse continues to
frame politics and governance in the language of threat, risk, insecurity, and
violence Hobbes war of All Against All. In contrast to development, whose
271
273
275
Security cannot be provided by citizens acting on their own, or purchasing it on the market.
It is grounded in the Hobbesian social contract between state and
citizen, which implies the states sovereign responsibility to protect.
Legitimate public authority is of the essence, thus implicitly connecting security and democracy.
Security is embedded in public order, the rule of law, and a wellpoliced state.
Security is thus also an aspect of governance: in principle the same
principles of public accountability apply to security institutions as to
other state institutions.
If states fail to exercise their sovereign responsibility to protect, the
international community can and should step in as provider of security to the poor, marginalised, and oppressed.
In practice, security tends to be a very imperfect public good: it is topdown,
unequally distributed, and harnessed to the interests of elites.
277
There are potential conflicts between citizen and human security (e.g. of
refugees and other non-citizens).
Collective action to improve human security tends to be constrained and
distorted by social, political, and economic inequalities.
Ideas about universal and citizens entitlements often become problematic in
identity conflicts, where citizens may be pitted against each other, interpreting group differences as threats.
It is enormously difficult to ensure accountability for failure to provide
human security when states fail or are absent, and individuals suffer exploitation and violence at the hands of non-state armed and criminal groups.
279
Conclusion
This brief summary of the multiple meanings of security prompts three central observations. First, security by itself is too general a word to have much
meaning. It is usually linked to qualifying terms locating it in particular discursive practices: international security, national security, human security,
and so on. Second, although it contains an implicit claim that security is a
value and thus normatively desirable, one should always ask whose security
and from whom or what? This tends to be answered in different ways in varying security discourses. Security is not and cannot be neutral. It is both public
good and private asset. It follows, third, that it is always contested, always
disputed, and shot through with contradictions.
References
DFID (2005) Fighting Poverty to Build a Safer World: A Strategy for Security and
Development, London: Department for International Development.
Duffield, Mark (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of
Development and Security, London: Zed Books.
Independent Commission on International Development Issues (1980) North
South: A Programme for Survival (The Brandt Report), London: Pan Books.
Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (1982)
Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (The Palme Report), New York,
NY: Simon & Schuster.
United Nations (2004) A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report
of the Secretary-Generals High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and
Change (A59/565), presented at the UN General Assembly, New York, 2
December.
CHAPTER 28
Fragile states
Eghosa E. Osaghae
Since the 1990s, states that lack the capacity to discharge their normal functions
and drive forward development have been referred to as fragile states. This chapter focuses on Africa, which not only has the largest concentration of prototypical fragile states, but has been the focus of attention for scholars, international
development agencies, and practitioners. The author reviews competing analyses
of the post-colonial African state and concludes that its characteristics of weak institutions, poverty, social inequalities, corruption, civil strife, armed conflicts, and
civil war are not original conditions, but are rooted in specific historical contexts.
It is essential to understand both the external and internal factors of fragility if
such states are to get the assistance and empowerment that they need not only
for the benefit of their impoverished citizens, but also for the sake of global peace,
prosperity, and security. Ultimately, it is the citizens of the countries concerned
who are responsible for determining when states are no longer fragile not benevolent donors and the international community, whose prime motivation for
interventions supposedly to strengthen the state is to ensure that fragile states find
their rightful places in the hegemonic global order.
has the largest concentration of prototypical fragile states but has also received the greatest attention of scholars, international development agencies,
and practitioners. This is partly because, as Laasko and Olukoshi (1997:8) put
it, it is perhaps in Africa, more than in other parts of the world, that the crisis
of the nation-state project has been most obvious and overwhelming (see also
Davidson 1992; Zartman 1995).
FRAGILE STATES
283
Weak, ineffective, and unstable political institutions and bad governance, conducive to loss of state autonomy, informalisation, privatisation of state, personal and exclusionary rule, neo-patrimonialism, and
prebendal politics.
Inability to exercise effective jurisdiction over its territory, leading to
the recent concept of ungoverned territories.
Legitimacy crisis, occasioned by problematic national cohesion, contested citizenship, violent contestation for state power, perennial challenges to the validity and viability of the state, and massive loss and
exit of citizens through internal displacement, refugee flows, separatist
agitation, civil war and the like.
Unstable and divided population, suffering from a torn social fabric, minimum social control, and pervasive strife that encourage exit
from rather than loyalty to the state. Underdeveloped institutions
of conflict management and resolution, including credible judicial
structures, which pave the way for recourse to conflict-ridden, violent, non-systemic and extra-constitutional ways in which to articulate grievances and seek redress.
Pervasive corruption, poverty, and low levels of economic growth and
development, leading to lack of fiscal capacity to discharge basic functions of statehood, including, most importantly, obligations to citizens
such as protection from diseases like AIDS and guarantees of overall
human security.2
Bank 2006), of which 14 are in sub-Saharan Africa. The other factor is neglect
of the plight of poor states by the international community. The failure of the
United Nations and other key global actors to respond promptly to civil wars
in Rwanda, Liberia, Chad, Cte dIvoire, Somalia, and Sudan (Darfur) contributed in large measure to state collapse and fragility-inducing stress inflicted
on neighbouring countries. Direct foreign investment and flows to distressed
states, especially in Africa, have remained very low, ostensibly because of the
high risk of doing business there. While these reasons can be rationalised in
terms of the competitiveness of the global economy, the point remains that
global peace and security calls for greater will and commitment on the part of
the international development community.
FRAGILE STATES
285
a world order in which the fruits of progress can be held secure for certain
privileged regions of the world. The thesis is as follows:
Certain states, communities and regions...have become an unacceptable
burden on the world economy. These segments are incapable and unwilling to mend their ways. They subsist as parasites on the rest of the
world. To allow their continued existence as parasites...would gravely
endanger the health and future of the world economy. They must be
dispensed with, and left to fend for themselves. (Kothari 1988: 45)
Kothari may have stated the thesis in rather strong terms, but it does reflect the realities of engagement with fragile states in the post-Cold War era.
The pressure is on states to salvage themselves, discharge their obligations
to donors and benefactors, and meet set targets such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) under the guidance of the World Bank, IMF, and
other champions of neo-liberalism or be left out of the active and competitive
global system. Notions of self-inflicted marginalisation, Afro-pessimism, and
basket cases, which African states have worked hard to dispel, tell part of the
story as do the closures of entry to affluent societies to economic migrants
from poor and conflict-torn countries, which make it incumbent on the states
to get their acts together. Unlike the Cold War period, scholars, development
practitioners, and donors no longer seem willing to help fragile states to survive at all costs. This raises the stakes.
Let us now turn to examine the hows and whys of fragility. For this purpose
we must move beyond the mere empirical characterisations and typologies
that have dominated World Bank/IMF perspectives to analyse the bases of fragility. While it is true that fragile states are low-income and poorly governed,
with a high prevalence of corruption, poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition,
and disease, and prone to violent conflict and war, these attributes do not in
and of themselves explain why they are fragile. In other words, state fragility
is a dependent variable and not an independent or original condition. Migdal
et al. (1994: 2) identify society and the socio-economic determinants of politics as key in this regard, because societies affect states as much as, or perhaps
more than, states affect societies. To these we shall add external forces that
have historically shaped state and social formations in the Third World.
1979; Young 1994). The failure to properly graft or adapt the migrated state
structures to the circumstances of the colony and post-colony is said to have
created a disjunctive duality between state and society that left the state suspended above society like a balloon (Hyden 1980).
This was the context within which fragile states evolved. The first set of
problems concerned the nature of the colonial state itself. It remained aloof
from indigenous or native society and enforced its will through violence and
repression, placing emphasis on the rudiments of law and order that were
sufficient to ensure economic exploitation and uphold the standards of
European settlers (Young 1994). A second set of problems arose from the
nature of relations between the state and (native) society, as well as the anomalies of the migration of state structures from Europe. As many scholars have
argued, it became impossible for the natives to appropriate the state, which
they perceived as alien and serving the interests of the coloniser and not those
of the colonised (Ake 1985; Davidson 1992; Osaghae 1989, 1999a). This gave
rise to the endemic legitimacy crisis that marooned the colonial state and its
post-colonial successor.
The overall relevance of the state for the citizens was always a contested
issue (Ihonvbere 1994). This encouraged exit and opposition by alienated,
marginalised, and excluded segments, and the development of shadow state
structures, mainly communal self-help organisations which emerged to fill
the void left by state failure (Osaghae 1999b). For Alavi (1979), the fact that
the social formations of the colony upon which migrated state structures were
imposed were at a lower level of development than in Metropolitan Europe
meant that the state was overdeveloped. Overdevelopment gave the state
the appearance of powerfulness, but its omnipresence did not translate into
omnipotence (Chazan 1988). Young (1994) attributes the crisis of national
cohesion, one of the defining elements of state fragility, to the fact that the
imported state lacked the nationhood that had defined and underpinned its
growth in Europe. This was why nationalism, the avowed ideology of cohesion, overarching loyalty to the central state, and self-determination were unable to salvage the state as had been expected.
Opinions are divided on the significance of colonialism for subsequent
state fragility in Africa. Ake (1985) suggests that what happened at independence was a changing of the guard, rather than a change in the character of
the state which, by the nature of its peripheral formation and integration into
the global system, was an appendage of the dominant centres. Ekeh (1983)
questions the validity of episodic perspectives, which consider the period of
colonialism too limited in Africas long history to have the kinds of epochal effect claimed for it. Post-colonial states have, it has been argued, shown a great
deal of diversity and unevenness in their abilities to cope with the challenges
of development, which suggests that factors other than colonialism have to be
examined in order to explain state fragility. Why, for instance, have the Asian
tigers succeeded and the African states failed? Why has Botswana done well,
and Nigeria and Ghana have not?
FRAGILE STATES
287
Yet others argue that the focus on colonialism distracts attention from autochthonous factors. The argument that then follows is that the pathologies
of the state in the Third World, especially the African species, are partly
and in some cases largely endemic to indigenous formations. Contrary to
the suggestion that the colonial and post-colonial states were artificial, Bayart
(1991: 53) argues that they were built upon their own social foundations.
Similarly, Chabal and Daloz (1999:4) have pointed out that the state in Africa
was never properly institutionalised because it was never significantly emancipated from [indigenous] society. The import of these claims is that corruption, violent politics, bad governance, and other fragile state variables are
products of the appropriation of the state by autochthonous forces. The point
missed by Bayart and others, however, is that the acts of state creation, including the determination of boundaries, were undertaken by European colonisers and were not negotiated with the colonised. It is in this sense that the
states are regarded as artificial. The other point missed by Bayart and others is
that the so-called indigenous social structures that survived under colonialism
were actually transformed indigenous structures, having undergone changes of
epochal magnitude during the colonial encounter. What colonialism did was
to turn society upside down and inside out (Ekeh 1983). The post-colonial
indigenous sector is no different: it is a product of the encounters with powerful forces of globalisation that have created states of disarray (UNRISD 1995;
Osaghae 2005).
Colonialism certainly laid the foundations for externalities and disarticulations that have cumulatively since independence tended to disable rather
than strengthen the state (Bose 2004). The devastating effects of Cold War
interventions linger on. In the post-Cold War period, states in the Third World
have fared much worse. Economic and political reforms, especially structural
adjustment programmes, have demonstrably weakened their economies and
governments, and raised the stakes of what is now popularly known as the
National Question, precipitating authoritarianism, anti-state mobilisations,
armed conflicts and civil war (Gibbon et al. 1992; van de Walle 2001). The
distorted structures and practices of the WTO, as well as the double standards
and barricades erected by the USA and other leading industrialised countries,
have restricted exports, encouraged dumping and smuggling, and slowed
down industrial and economic growth in peripheral formations. Huge foreign
debts have also limited the options available to fragile states.
None of this absolves fragile states of blame. The fact that many states
in the Third World remain afloat and have in fact been effective drivers of
the development process in spite of the common historical trajectories means
that we must also look inwards at internal cultural, social, economic, and
political factors in order to explain the phenomenon of fragile states. Clearly,
problems such as poor resources and the mono-crop nature of economies
which depend on only one agricultural or mineral commodity, weak and fragile institutions, bad governance variables, corruption, politics of the belly,
high unemployment, food insecurity, patrimonialism and tendencies toward
Conclusion
The concept of fragile states is appropriate for characterising problematic and
troublesome states that have potential not only to self-destruct but also to
endanger global peace, prosperity, and security. As an empirical construct, it is
valid and is therefore likely to remain a development buzzword for some time
to come. It does not have the ideological image and baggage of rogue state, for
example, or the finality of the failed or collapsed state, and offers a window of
opportunity for redemption and strengthening if the right diagnosis is made
and appropriate medicines are administered, which is the framework within
which the World Bank/IMF and international development partners ought
to be engaging fragile states. However, this conceptual logic has not been followed through for at least two reasons.
First, fragile states remains a characterisation or typological construct, and
the assumption is that the pathologies of such states are inherent to deviant
FRAGILE STATES
289
statehood. But certainly, weak institutions, poverty, social inequalities, corruption, civil strife, armed conflicts, and civil war cannot be and are not original conditions. Second, the failure to historicise state fragility and to assign
the full weight of externalities and externally induced disarticulations has so
far prepared the ground for wrong therapies. The tendency to ignore the local/
internal conceptions of state fragility and the struggles to redeem them, and
the preference for curtailment or possible elimination of the threat potential
of fragile states (through isolation or military intervention or outright neglect
and indifference, for instance), which is the essence of the dispensability thesis advanced by Kothari and discussed earlier, misses the point about superpower complicity that can only be remedied through composite globallocal
action. The argument in this chapter is that the external and internal factors
of fragility have to be fully interrogated if these countries are to get the kind of
assistance and empowerment that they so clearly deserve at least for the sake
of global peace, prosperity, and security, if not for that of the impoverished
citizens of fragile states. But, ultimately, the responsibility for determining
when states are no longer fragile is that of the citizens of the countries concerned and not that of benevolent donors and the international development community, whose prime motivation for supposed state-strengthening
interventions is to ensure that fragile states take their rightful places in the
hegemonic global order.
Notes
1.
2.
Some of the major publications which marked the entry of fragile states
from a substantially African perspective include the World Banks World
Development Reports (from 1988), Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (1989) and Governance and Development (1992); Migdal (1988),
Wunsch and Olowu (1990), Joseph (1990), Hyden and Bratton (1992) and
Zartman (1995).
Among others, Myrdal (1968) analysed the soft state, which he defined as
a state that is unable to enforce its will, especially in areas which demand
moral rectitude (see also Rothchild 1987); Ekeh (1975) interrogated the
evolution and interactions of the two publics in Africa; Alavi (1979) examined the overdeveloped state. Others have analysed the weak state (Migdal
1988), weak leviathan (Callaghy 1987), neopatrimonial statehood (Bratton
and van de Walle 1994), centralisation and powerlessness (Kohli 1994),
governance and politics (Hyden and Bratton 1992), prebendal politics
(Joseph 1987), and politics of the belly (Bayart 1993).
References
Ake, C. (1985) Political Economy of Nigeria, Lagos: Longman.
Alavi, H. (1979) The state in post-colonial societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh, in H. Goulbourne (ed.), Politics and State in the Third World, London:
Macmillan.
Bayart, J.-F. (1991) Finishing with the idea of the Third World: the concept
of the political trajectory, in J. Manor (ed.) Rethinking Third World Politics,
London: Longman.
Bayart, J.-F. (1993) The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London:
Longman.
Bayart, J.-F., S. Ellis, S. and B. Hibou (1999) Criminalization of the State in Africa,
Oxford: James Currey.
Bose, S. (2004) De-colonization and state building in South Asia, Journal of
International Affairs 58(1): 95113.
Bratton, M. and N. van de Walle (1994) Neopatrimonial regimes and political
transitions in Africa, World Politics 46: 45389.
Callaghy, T. (1987) The state as a lame leviathan: the patrimonial-administrative state in Africa, in Z. Ergas (ed.) African State in Transition, London:
Macmillan.
Chabal, P. and J. Daloz (1999) Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument,
Oxford: James Currey.
Chazan, N. (1988) State and society in Africa: images and challenges, in D.
Rothchild and N. Chazan (eds.) The Precarious Balance: The State and Society
in Africa, Boulder, CO: Westview.
Chua, A. (2004) World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds
Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Davidson, B. (1992) The Black Mans Burden: Africa and the Curse of the NationState, London: James Currey.
Ekeh, P.P. (1975) Colonialism and the two publics in Africa: a theoretical statement, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(1): 91112.
Ekeh, P.P. (1983) Colonialism and Social Structure in Africa: An Inaugural Lecture,
Ibadan: Ibadan University Press.
Ekeh, P.P. (1997) The concept of second liberation and the prospects of
democracy in Africa: a Nigerian context, in P. Beckett and C. Young
(eds.) Dilemmas of Democratization in Nigeria, Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press.
Evans, P., D. Reuschmeyer, and T. Skocpol (eds.) (1985) Bringing the State Back
In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbon, P., Y. Bangura, and A. Ofstad (eds.) (1992) Authoritarianism, Democracy
and Adjustment: The Politics of Economic Reform in Africa, Uppsala: Nordiska
Afrkainstitutet.
Herbst, J. (1996/1997) Responding to state failure in Africa, International
Security 21(4): 120144.
Hyden, G. (1980) Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania, London: Heinemann.
Hyden, G. and M. Bratton (eds.) (1992) Governance and Politics in Africa,
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Ihonvbere, J.O. (1994) The irrelevant state, ethnicity and the quest for
nationhood in Africa, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17(1): 4260.
Jackson, R.H. and C. G. Rosberg (1982) Why Africas weak states persist: the
empirical and the juridical in statehood, World Politics 35(1): 124.
Joseph, R.A. (1987) Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall
of the Second Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joseph. R.A. (1990) African Governance in the 1990s, Atlanta, GA: Carter
Center.
FRAGILE STATES
291
CHAPTER 29
295
Hiring
The structures through which these incentives play out are multiple, and
they begin with hiring biases. While countries of birth and nationality may
lead to a superficial assessment that the staff are international and diverse,
the Bank is far from diverse. Bank staff are overwhelmingly PhD economists.
Boundaries of disciplines in and of themselves set intellectual boundaries,
defining acceptable questions and methods. DEC houses fewer than a handful of non-economist social scientists.
Further concentrating thought, the USA and the UK (and primarily the former) university economics departments supply most of the PhD economists
doing research and writing within DEC (and within the Bank in general). The
Banks generous pay scale and benefits are also part of this incentive structure.
This is what a former Bank economist terms the golden handcuffs. (Unless
buzzwords or otherwise stated, quotes are from my interviews.) While the
Bank claims these are necessary to attract the best and the brightest, what
they actually do is limit dissent by increasing the opportunity cost of any
dissidence.
Promotion
There are a number of ways in which promotion incentives help to shape the
work towards paradigm maintenance.
The overarching goal of any researcher who wants to make a career of the
Bank is to achieve, after five years, regularisation, the Bank equivalent of academic tenure. Along the way, there are annual reviews. It is important to note
that most Bank employees are on short-term contracts. There is substantial
anecdotal evidence that this is distorting incentives away from creative thinking and towards career-path management (Gilbert et al. 2000: 81).
To get good reviews, DEC professionals need to publish, ideally in both
internal Bank publications and externally, especially in academic journals.
Reviews also look at a DEC researchers influence on Bank operations and
policy. The Bank has set up formal structures to try to ensure the transfer of
research knowledge to operations. Most notable is that one-third of a researchers time must be spent doing what is called operational cross-support.
In devising a work programme, the researcher is aware that he/she will need
297
marketability for 1/3 time when she/he is a de facto free agent. In terms of
the characteristics of a marketable DEC researcher, as one Senior Economist
in DEC explains, Operations looks for high-profile folks with resonance.
To paraphrase, if you are in Operations and you are looking to buy the time
of a researcher, you look to add someone who is likely to improve the chances
of your project getting through. You want a Dollar, one interviewee states
bluntly without provocation. Conversely, asks one non-neo-liberal-economist
researcher rhetorically: Why would Operations want me?
debate about neo-liberal economic globalisation, as evidence grows of its negative impacts on economic, environmental, and social development. During
this period, Bank projects and policy-based lending have come under heavy
attack for contributing to these negative impacts. Yet, the Bank has been able
to continue to operate relatively unchecked in its research work.
Take David Dollars work.8 There has been widespread external criticism
of Dollars methodology by non-doctrinaire economists outside the Bank
from Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, Center for Economic and Policy
Research director/economist Mark Weisbrot, London School of Economics Robert Wade, to Cornell professor (and former Bank professional) Ravi
Kanbur, and others (including the present author). Rodrik, for example,
reaches a conclusion opposite to Dollars: The evidence from the 1990s indicated a positive (but statistically insignificant) relationship between tariffs
and economic growth (Rodrik 2001:22).
Yet, the Bank continues to project Dollars work as if it is undisputed fact.
This suggests a certain presumption within the Bank about what the right
answers should be, and a willingness to ignore or discard evidence that complicates the answer. Ignoring the complications or caveats allows for the presentation of subjective and conditional conclusions as objective and scientific
discourse as knowledge. The point, explains a DEC economist, is that one
type of research is encouraged, people know what type it is and they produce
it, while another type is given short-shrift.
299
Yet, Anderson seems to have been one of the few to read the report carefully enough to note this key discrepancy (or falsehood, as she more accurately
phrases it). Indeed, on 9 January 2004, the Washington Post ran a long, lead
editorial on the success of NAFTA, based in part on the World Bank report. Incredibly enough, the Post editorial chastised NAFTA critics who say that wage
growth has been negligible, and instead noted that wage levels that match
those existing before the peso crisis represent an achievement. In other words,
the Bank seems to understand and play to the fact that most people, including
most journalists, will read only the press release and summary. In this case, in
a significant arena for potential policy debate and reform, the Bank fooled a
major newspaper whose editorials are read and used by key policy makers.
External projection
My research also concluded that the Banks External Affairs department functions as a projector of DECs paradigm-maintenance role. Dollar, for instance,
did not only have the backing of DEC. The Banks External Affairs department
stepped in to publicise his work; it is External Affairs that has the money,
media contacts, and incredible clout to fly an author around the world.
External Affairs rise in stature dates from the early Wolfensohn years under
the leadership of Mark Malloch Brown (19941999). (Malloch Brown was later
rewarded, becoming Administrator of UNDP and, in 2005, Chief of Staff to
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.) In Wolfensohns second term, External Affairs budget soared to become, by 20042005, comparable to the full annual
budget of the Heritage Foundation. External Affairs has grown, the present author would hypothesise, at least in part in response to the increasing external
questioning of the Bank and its model. External Affairs has become vital in the
polarised public debate over the Banks role.
Conclusion
These six sets of incentives raise significant questions about the World Banks
own argument that it produces and disseminates work of the utmost quality
and integrity. My research should certainly raise alarm about further concentrating and aggrandising this role of knowledge production and marketing in
the World Bank indeed, alarm about any institution that seeks to monopolise
and manage knowledge.
We also get a further, illuminating insight into World Bank knowledge
management by its reactions to my research. After reading a draft of my original article, a former consultant to the World Bank mused: I wonder what
the reaction will be from the people in the Bank. A deafening silence? An
invitation to participate in a task force to see how to improve things? A witch
hunt to find your informants?10 True to form, the knowledge managers burst
into action. After the original, longer academic article on DEC appeared in a
peer-reviewed academic journal, two gentlemen from the Bank contacted the
Acknowledgement
This chapter includes sections adapted and condensed, with permission, from
Robin Broad (2006) Research, knowledge, and the art of paradigm maintenance: the World Banks Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC),
Review of International Political Economy 13(3): 387419, available at the journals homepage, www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/09692290.asp.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
301
James D. Wolfensohn, Annual Meetings Address, World Bank, Washington, DC, 1 October 1996, retrieved 29 September 2004. See also World
Bank 1999. Another term now used is knowledge sharing, which the
Bank seems to have come to believe has a better buzz than knowledge
management. For more on Wolfensohns Knowledge Bank initiative, see
the work of Diane Stone 2000, 2003 as well as the work of Jeff Powell and
Alex Wilks at the UK-based Bretton Woods Project. See also King (2002),
Ellerman (2002, 2005), Gilbert and Vines (2000), Standing (2000), and
Kapur (2006).
4. See Leveraging Trade for Development: World Bank Role, paraphrased
in Bretton Woods Project, World Bank to Intensify Work on Trade, 4
April 2001. See also Dethier (2005). The then Chief Economist Stern emphasised this in a 2001 meeting with the Financial Times, which reported:
...the chief economist of the World Bank... promised that the bank would
provide intellectual firepower to the World Trade Organization... The
World Trade Organization doesnt have the research capacity the World
Bank does and looks to us to push the trade research agenda, he said. ...
The World Bank is the only organization with the depth of knowledge
at the country level you need to discuss trade issues seriously(Beattie
2001:14).
5. World Bank, Research Advisory Staff (n.d.) Evaluations of World Bank
Research: Research Support Budget Projects, available at www.worldbank.
org/html/rad/evaluation/home.htm, retrieved 22 October 2004.
6. The term paradigm maintenance is taken, with gratitude, from the perceptive article by Robert Wade (1996).
7. My original article (Broad 2006) from which this present chapter is adapted expands upon these six mechanisms, and provides more detail on
DECs structure, role, and impact; and how DEC came to embrace the
neo-liberal globalisation paradigm.
8. A list of Dollars writings is available at http://ideas.repec.org/e/pdo54.
html#works.
9. The sources for this paragraph and the next two are World Bank (2003),
along with the relevant press release dated 17 December 2003; Sarah
Anderson (2003) letter to Fellow NAFTA-watchers, and Sarah Anderson
(2003) email exchange with World Bank economist Daniel Lederman,
1819 December; Daniel Lederman (2003) email exchange with Institute for Policy Studies researcher Sarah Anderson, 1819 December; and
NAFTA at 10 (2004) Washington Post, editorial, 9 January, A16. See also
the response to the Bank report by Bakvis (2003) of the ICFTU.
10. Professor Robert Wade, London School of Economics, email to author, 4
April 2006.
11. The letter is quoted in Susan George, Paradigm Maintenance, or
why we cant trust the World Banks research, available atwww.tni/
org/archives/george/paradigm.htm (retrieved 3 February 2007). George
received the letter of complaint as a member of the journals International Editorial Board. The website cited here includes Georges letter
of response to the Editorial Board of 22 November 2006, as well as an
introduction (dated 24 January 2007) contextualising her letter. See also
References
Bakvis, Peter (2003), Distorted World Bank Report on NAFTA and Labor,
available at www.50years.org/cms/ejn/story/ (retrieved 8 April 2007).
Bannerjee, Abijihit, Angus Deaton (Chair), Nora Lustig, and Ken Rogoff (2006)
An Evaluation of World Bank Research, 19982005, available at siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/84797-1109362238001/7264541164121166494/RESEARCH-EVALUATION-2006-Main-Report.pdf
Beattie, A. (2001) Bright prospects seen for new trade round: the World Economic Forum Chief Economist pledges World Banks intellectual firepower
..., Financial Times, 30 January.
Broad, Robin (2006) Research, knowledge, and the art of paradigm maintenance: the World Banks Development Economics Vice-Presidency (DEC),
Review of International Political Economy 13(3): 387419.
Callan, Eoin (2006) World Bank uses doubtful evidence to push policies,
Financial Times, 22 December, available at www.ft.com/cms/s/a34338129160-11db-b71a-0000779e2340.html
Cummings, Jeffrey (2003) Knowledge Sharing: A Review of the Literature,
Washington, DC: World Bank Operations Evaluation Department.
Dethier, J. (2005) An Overview of Research at the World Bank, presentation at the Conference Research Bank on the World Bank, organised by
the Center for Policy Studies, Central European University, Centre for the
Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick, and
the World Bank European Office, Budapest, 12 April 2005.
Ellerman, David (2002) Should development agencies have Official Views?,
Development in Practice 12(3&4): 28597.
Ellerman, David (2005) Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank
to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance, Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press.
Friedman, Thomas L. (2005) The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First
Century, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gilbert, C. and D. Vines (eds.) (2000) The World Bank: Structures and Policies,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gilbert, Christopher, Andrew Powell and David Vines (2000) Positioning the
World Bank, in C. Gilbert and D. Vines (eds.).
Kapur, Devesh (2006) The Knowledge Bank, in Nancy Birdsall (ed.)
Rescuing the World Bank, Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, pp. 15970.
303
Coda
Thirty-eight thousand development programmes 1
Paradoxically, much of the instrumental value of the conventional vocabulary
of development planning rests in its imprecision of meaning and its authoritative, technical gloss. Advertising executives and businessmen are very familiar
with these Buzzwords words which make a pleasant noise but have little
explicit meaning. One property of these words is that they may be combined
into almost infinite permutations and still mean something. To illustrate this
we list below 56 words which occur frequently in the planners lexicon. These
will generate 38,316 development programmes: since the publisher is unaccountably reluctant to print the necessary 950 additional pages, we must prey
on the readers patience to elaborate it for him or herself. Select one word from
each column at random to compose a four-word phrase: for example, A3, B6,
C9, D12 = Systematically balanced cooperative action. Or A12, B9, C6, D3 =
Comprehensively mobilised rural participation. These may be immediately
recognisable, but what do they mean?2 If two or three people were each to
write a paragraph explaining one of these phrases to the masses, on behalf of
the government of Ruritania, their different interpretations should bear further
witness to the malleability of such language.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Centrally
Rationally
Systematically
Formally
Totally
Strategically
Dynamically
Democratically
Situationally
Moderately
Intensively
Comprehensively
Radically
Optimally
Motivated
Positive
Structured
Controlled
Integrated
Balanced
Functional
Programmed
Mobilised
Limited
Phased
Delegated
Maximised
Consistent
Grassroots
Sectoral
Institutional
Urban
Organisational
Rural
Growth
Development
Cooperative
On-going
Technical
Leadership
Agrarian
Planning
Involvement
Incentive
Participation
Attack
Process
Package
Dialogue
Initiative
Scheme
Approach
Project
Action
Collaboration
Objective
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Notes
1.
2.
Index
accountability 196, 2167, 228,
25862, 278, 282
see also government; horizontal
accountability; mutual
accountability; political; public; transparency
acronyms 29, 65, 157
action planning 6, 155, 1578, 219
ActionAid 145, 149
active policy 5762, 207, 285
advertising 3, 191, 218, 305
advocacy 8, 83, 149, 206, 20910,
220
see also India; people-centred
advocacy; public
Afghanistan 85, 226, 272
Africa 318, 713, 912, 25861,
2657, 2818
agendas 13, 115, 139, 183, 188, 277
see also development; NGOs;
political; sustainability
agencies see aid; Northern
agents 136, 142, 147, 1756, 195, 276
agriculture 19, 30, 367, 156, 159,
165
aid
agencies 76, 114, 136, 206, 211,
278
-dependent 215, 218
effectiveness 29, 40, 2156
organisations 236, 2389
policies 3, 301, 35, 39, 41
terminology 3238
see also bilateral; British; foreign;
international; multilateral
Aidland 8, 215, 2178, 23841
AIDS 130, 141, 189, 225, 275, 283
alternatives 12, 14, 76, 138, 297
Americas 30, 71, 79
angels 3, 45, 50, 241
answerability 247, 2512
anthropology 25960
INDEX
309
INDEX
311
fictitious 234, 56
financial
crisis 729, 127, 2939
insecurity 12, 65, 79
institutions 11, 459, 63, 90,
205, 267
reform 129, 2245, 288, 299
see also IFIs; SAPs
First World 106, 140, 164
food 301, 349, 69, 1568, 185, 195
insecurity 46, 166, 270, 285, 287
foreign
aid 49, 73, 194, 284
investment 20, 74, 284, 2945
fragile states 4, 101, 2819
frameworks see CDF
France 73, 77, 181
see also Paris Declaration
freedom 135, 70, 757, 97, 106,
1823
as development 1689
from fear 26970
of speech 175, 179, 228, 248, 258
free trade 71, 78, 140, 167, 295
see also NAFTA
fundamentalism 835, 118, 188
funding 12, 8, 85, 118, 191200,
262
organisations 13542, 157,
1767, 2101
see also IMF; World Bank
GAD (Gender and Development) 37,
112, 116, 1434, 203
GCB (Global Corruption Barometer)
2601
gender 36, 29, 3240, 94, 210, 257
discourse 1435
equality 846, 1128, 14550,
200
mainstreaming 143, 14750
policy 1489
power 127, 206, 221, 2401
subordination 103, 1123, 196,
277
see also GAD; language
gendered 1157, 147, 198, 238
genealogies 34, 163
geographically 34, 48, 112
health
care 63, 1035, 113, 165, 2089,
262
education 46, 101, 208
see also public
Hegel, Georg 1778, 182
hegemony 15, 79, 94, 98, 1778,
2756
helping 4, 42, 48
hierarchy 103, 1179, 145
higher education 789
Hindu 82, 1189
hiring 195, 293, 296
horizontal accountability 200, 203,
211, 248
household 467, 116, 130, 178, 260
human
capital 125, 205
environment 2068
human rights 90, 1424, 14950,
188, 196, 2739
and development 31, 36, 85,
16373, 266, 2756
movements 11, 817, 106, 135,
2458
violations 172, 248, 251
see also promotion; United
Nations
humanitarian 148, 200, 20711,
273, 2779, 283
intervention 21, 207, 278
hurrah words 2, 176
hyphenation 15, 64, 153
identity 82, 867, 190, 278
ideology 102, 704, 87, 901, 180,
2868
see also counter-ideology; neoliberal
IFIs (international financial institutions) 712, 748, 130, 223,
2278, 238
imagery 5364, 108, 189, 195, 211,
281
imagination 21, 120, 1801, 192
IMF (International Monetary Fund)
57, 719, 127, 193, 2667, 2848
legitimacy 79, 127
programmes 75, 90, 2238
INDEX
313
mass
-based 175, 1857, 1926, 201
media 107, 190, 211, 248
MDGs (Millennium Development
Goals) 45, 49, 94, 1179, 1446,
285
means testing 578, 612
media 104, 115, 18790, 2501, 258,
2756
see also mass; newspapers
message 45, 85, 128, 180, 18992,
232
metaphors 53, 57, 231
Mexico 13542, 204, 2101, 2456,
298
micro-credit 76, 115, 118, 206
microfinance 111, 1189, 147
middle-class 61, 77, 1058, 183, 189,
195
Middle East 83, 194
military 73, 78, 2718
intervention 277, 284, 289
regimes 101, 106, 1758
minimum standards 2278, 246
ministries 301, 34, 114, 117,
21820, 239
minorities 101, 170, 182
mission 49, 156, 294
mobilising 172, 18592, 194, 210
modern state 2715
modernisation 15, 701, 907, 106,
128, 195
monoculture 11, 77
monopoly 178, 262, 271, 274
moral
hazards 51, 601
high ground 6, 165, 1713
imperatives 2, 45, 262
motivation 11, 50, 112, 129, 281,
289
movements see civil society; human
rights; social; women
Mozambique 215, 219, 238
multilateral
aid agencies 49, 113, 89, 165,
176
donors 8, 258
multinational corporations 12, 119,
167, 188, 261
INDEX
Muslim 817
mutual accountability 203, 2112
myths 1, 64, 74
NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) 90, 204, 2989
narrative 7, 10, 2401, 271
national
development 74, 199, 221, 274
security 83, 2715, 279
natural
environment 215, 187, 190
resources 19, 24, 73, 115, 156,
279
needs 4, 3541, 46, 556, 8990,
170
neo-liberal
globalisation 75, 8990, 945,
978, 298
model 7879, 1069, 119,
2978, 300
policy 5, 11, 49, 712, 78, 193
project 1012, 295
states 12, 69, 71, 757, 205, 240
Nepal 23940
networks 79, 124, 1539, 1758,
195, 2757
New Public Management 8, 11, 306
newspapers 1901
NGOs 13542, 193201
agendas 8, 195, 199200, 206,
20910
elites 198200
legitimacy 188, 196201, 210,
276
see also capacity building; development; Northern
Nigeria 90, 286
non-places 4, 235, 2389
normative 172, 226, 240, 247, 262,
282
commitment 67, 160
connotations 2, 14, 23, 155, 183
Northern
agencies 13642
NGOs 209, 212
novelty 4, 14, 156
nutrition 46, 116, 165
315
INDEX
317
shibboleth 2, 22
shifts 2936, 1135, 119, 128, 160,
261
see also global; paradigm
silence 5, 14, 84, 97, 145, 299
slogan 21, 1789, 208
social
assistance 58, 612
benefits 645
bonds 245
capital 3, 67, 14, 12332, 205,
262
dumping 645
exclusion 1015, 125, 205
inclusion 59, 125
insurance 45, 501, 568
movements 5, 8, 134, 1019,
1113, 193201
practices 14, 23, 25, 1035
progress 19, 69, 200
protection 3, 5365, 257
relations 23, 1045, 108, 207
reform 105, 185
safety 50, 57
science 5, 124
security 539, 186, 2701
solidarity 556
see also ESC-rights; globalisation; privatisation; social
change; social justice; World
Bank
social change
and development 95, 1123,
188, 198, 210
socialism
social justice 3, 12, 15, 1920,
81, 1078
strategies 118, 1867
promotion 548, 1123, 155
socio-economic 1, 258, 285
socio-political 113, 155, 158, 185,
1889, 193
solidarity 12, 15, 41, 1078, 187, 212
and self-help 7, 1779
see also social
South, the 7, 23, 74, 13541, 1557,
205
see also global
South Africa 78, 130, 20811
INDEX
319
word
counts 302, 38
frequency 312, 36, 3940, 144
see also catchwords; code words;
hurrah words; keywords; lost
words; status
work
for the poor 31, 378
see also boundary work; development; labour
workfare 58, 623, 65
World Bank
and social capital 123, 12731
economists 57, 2935
funding 63, 719, 210, 215, 220,
2237
governance 167, 1767, 246,
2657
knowledge 205, 2825, 288,
295, 299300
reports 912, 2589, 261, 299
systems 33, 38, 904
see also DEC
WTO (World Trade Organisation)
65, 71, 73, 789, 287
Zimbabwe 226, 245