Quote Originally Posted by M-A Lagrange View Post
In the example proposed by Dayuhan the Do No Harm doctrine tells you that you have to take in consideration the effect of the road on security before looking at the apparent economical benefits.
A good approach would have been to look at the consequences (legal, security…) and first propose to the farmer assistance to get legal ownership of their land (immediate access in exchange of the road can be done with "extremely good willing politicians"), then support their production and transformation technique for them to have a better product to sell… Then support transport (not road: trucks) for them to sell their products and once they were more rich (less poor if you want). And then propose to build a road that they would have support because it would be more economically beneficial than security threat.
Guts guess duration: at the best 2 years before getting the idea of a road in the farmer priorities pipe.
I think that gut guess is wrong, and I don't think this program would work. There's an important point being missed. When I said that the farmers were resisting because they knew their land would be taken by people with power and money... who do you think those people were? They were the local political powers, of course, and individuals close to them. As soon as they knew the road project would be funded (and well before it was announced) they were already muscling in, acquiring legal rights to land and positioning themselves to profit from the road. The government would never have allowed those farmers to get legal title to the land in question because the people in charge wanted it for themselves.

When you see a miserable status quo enduring without change, the chances are that it's not enduring because people lack initiative, or lack the right machine, or lack infrastructure, or lack capital. People have natural initiative and they will make a way... it may be slower and less efficient than it would be with more resources, but they will make one. When nobody's making a way and the status quo is dragging on and on, there's a pretty good chance that the status quo is dragging on because somebody wants it to. There's a pretty good chance that the somebody in question has both legal power and armed force, and is willing to use that power to slap down initiatives that threaten his dominance or to derail any initiatives that do not promote his interests.

Sometimes the best way to promote development is not to look for ways to help people move forward, but to identify and help remove the obstacles that are holding them back. Of course that gets political, and can get very complicated... but it's tough to promote development apolitically in an environment where the primary obstacles to development are political.