Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
I have my doubts. I don't see any standard actions that are universally or even widely applicable even within these "boxes", and based on return on aid invested to date I've no particular trust in "best practices" coming out of the aid industry. Emergency relief situations, I agree we have a clue there, simply because the objectives are limited and clear. Moving to the development side, I don't think "best practice" has accomplished much.

All too often the principal constraints on development are not the technological or financial ones addressed by development aid, but direct resistance to and subversion of development efforts by a nexus of local and national elites and military forces that have a powerful vested interest in the status quo and see their interests and even their lives threatened by what we would call development. The people who have built their fortunes and their power on the status quo are not going to simply give up and walk away, and for development to progress these forces have to be challenged and defeated. Sometimes this requires insurgency, and this is why we need to stop seeing insurgency as something that must reflexively be countered.
Absolutely agreed. Indeed, I've often that we should spend far less time on "best practices," with all of the potentially dangerous baggage of external omniscience that it sometimes carries with it, and spend a little more time trying to understand "worst practices"--that is, how well-intentioned efforts can go awry, and what can be done to to mitigate those risks (or, at the very least, what questions ought to have been asked).