So, this is new. For me. I enjoy writing. I have spent the best part of the last generation writing research papers, masters and doctoral theses, advisory reports, academic journal articles, one book, and a bunch of other stuff. The closest I have been to blogging has, so far, been on Facebook nearly a decade ago, when one was younger and had more energy. So this Substack thing is new for me. Maybe late, even. But let’s have a go, why don’t we? What’s the worst that could happen?
I worked in the international development world for just over a decade and I learnt a lot about the applied part of my discipline (economics), a lot about politics, a lot about policy, and, more importantly in my view, a lot about cynicism. There is a fair bit about the business of development economics that shows you a number of things. I’d like to introduce my Substack page with my top five of these things. I intend to centre my future notes around these five themes.
First, the delta between advice and reality. It is one thing to load your advisory report with recommendations about asking a low income country to pursue renewable energy. It is another thing to recognise that the reality of this particular country shows heavy fuel oil or even coal as cheaper feedstock for them to generate power; the power that will enable hospitals run, enable schools teach kids better, enable perishable foods last longer, and so on. This gap between ideal and practical always leaves some awkward questions such as the “how”, such as “who will pay for the trade-offs?”, and such as “is this a fair expectation of these people?”. There is something quite academic about this dynamic that I find often shifts responsibility for tackling this question to the ether.
Second, the factory. Here I refer to the machine that is the international development organisation, from international finance institutions (IFIs) to technical assistance bodies, to charity initiatives, to think tanks, to multilateral organisations, and so on. More specifically, I refer to the administrative stuff that sometimes makes one wonder if the primary aim of the organisation is just existential. Budgets. How projects are selected. Who decides which issue takes higher priority. How performance is evaluated, rewarded and sanctioned. How consultants are hired. And so on. I found that these things, at different times and under different circumstances, sometimes create incentives for actions that might not necessarily be consistent with the original mission. Also awkward.
Third, the angel in us advisers. We might not openly admit it, and we might even genuinely dispute it, but there is an air of nobility about the work. There is an air of knighthood, or rescue soldier, that comes with knowing you are being looked to for advice that will shape policy. Mostly elite, masters-and-upwards degree holders with the confidence of our analytical framework to assure us that this policy recommendation, this new piece of legislation, or this loan pre-condition, is superior to anything the recipient government official had experienced prior to encountering us. Is this a harsh assessment? I will argue in future notes that it isn’t. I will touch on how easy it is to move from this angelic view to considering humans at the end of our policy recommendations like “inert blocks of wood” (to borrow words from Thomas Sowell) that can be shifted around and made to change behaviour without pain included in the consequence. The man of system, perhaps, as Adam Smith wrote about in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Fourth, the cynical minority in the platoon. I still remember when one of my colleagues gave me William Easterly's book, “The Tyranny of Experts”. It had just been published and I was already one you could consider as quite cynical about the sincerity of a lot of the development game. There was a fair bit of preaching to the choir about it as I read it. But it reminded (or maybe even reassured) me that there were advisers like me who, for want of a better expression, came to rely on instinctive doses of cynicism as counter weights whenever we felt the urge to elevate the importance of our interventions. You might think you have just prepared a killer set of health and safety regulations, but the Minister you’ve prepared them for is going to table it at a cabinet that maybe has him in a vice grip on another matter that requires him to bin your work for now or forever. Said minister might, in fact, not even care. You might have written a fantastic working paper on an element of economic resilience for small island developing states, but the download count after 18 months of its publication could still be less than 20. And half of them were from work colleagues.
Fifth, the outcomes. What ever became of the intervention you and your colleagues delivered three, five, 10 years ago? If, at the time of intervention, you defined what success would look like, how has the outcome stacked up against it? Did it work out the way you envisaged? Was there a slight or unrecognisably wild deviation from your expectation? Was this deviation a result of failure on the part of the recipient to implement, or could it have been due to factors you did not account for in your intervention? Could you have accounted for such factors? Have you honestly stopped to check any of this? Do you have the time to check any of this? Is your factory designed to actively and honestly check any of this? My experience has been that this exercise isn't huge in the development game. We say it is. We have reports and an entire field of discipline (monitoring and evaluation) that say it is. The outcomes, though, mostly say otherwise. I’ll also be writing about this.
So, there. That’s my intro. Let's now explore whether I can make compelling enough arguments for readers to part with their time and continue reading my notes.
Thank you for sharing. I'm looking forward to learning more from your wealth of experience, particularly what "laymen" can do to contribute towards development in developing nations.
This is beautiful