Klein's Shock Doctrine

[Dayuhan]

I think you've hit the nail on the head. But, the projects you describe, or others such as "Oral re-hydration therapy" or distribution of "LifeStraw" that save a life for a couple of dollars don't pack the glamor of billion dollar projects.

Actually there's quite a bit of glamor in projects involving "giving"... movie stars and politicians love 'em, especially when they can claim credit. There's a place for that too, especially in areas where the dominant concern is relief from the worst impacts of underdevelopment.

The problem of course is that everything you give has a lifespan. You give away 10,000 packets of ORS, eventually they're gone, and the water is still dirty. In two years every mosquito net you give out today will have holes in it.

The giving is important... but it has to be followed up by programs aimed at creating or enabling sustainable economic activity. This is a whole lot more difficult than giving stuff away, often because local elites have powerful vested interests in maintaining existing economic structures - they may be dysfunctional for the society, but they are often very congenial for the local elites. Very often resources are poured into efforts to create livelihood while no effort is made to free indigenous entreprenurial impulses from crushing (and sometimes life-threatening) constraints. There are quite a few places out there where people see opportunities, but don't take them because they know that if they begin to generate prosperity they are likely to get hit on the head - or shot - by someone who wants what they've got.

While I don't want to get too bogged down in semantics, I think the term neoliberal has had more traction--for good and for ill--than you suggest. It is a staple phrase of much the NGO community (that is to say, the folks who in many sectors actually deliver the bulk of ODA), and one of the chief critic of past "neoliberalism" has been former World Bank chief economist/senior VP Joseph Stiglitz--hardly just a marginal leftist academic. Of course, Stiglitz won his Nobel Prize in economics for highlighting the potential shortcomings and limits of market mechanisms, so that's not a surprise

Probably true, though I personally feel that NGOs have far more impact on the development discourse than they have in the field. In any event, I dislike the term and its overwhelmingly negative connotation because it is most often used (it seems to me) to obstruct and abort discussion: branding a policy "neoliberal", in the communities where the term is in vogue, is pretty close to branding a concept "satanic" among born-again Christians.

Certainly market mechanisms have their limits and their problems, and I think you'd find that very few of those who are dismissed as "neoliberals" would deny this. I think you'd also find that many, if not most, of the cases where market mechanisms are deliberately disregarded - even those couched in populist terms - are actually intended to serve quite narrow interests, and that their long-term results are frequently catastrophic.