Last edited by J Wolfsberger; 07-06-2009 at 07:29 PM. Reason: Clarification
John Wolfsberger, Jr.
An unruffled person with some useful skills.
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.
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.
Sorry to drop a downer in here, but it has always been my understanding that "aid is the continuation of politics by other means," to paraphrase the Prussian.
All Aid organisations and NGOs are progressing political agendas, to a greater or lesser degree. Some work very hard to disguise it, but the "I'm just here to help," is essentially dishonest to in all practical terms.
I am well aware that this is an unpopular opinion, but until the context that brings is held up to the light, the real issues don't surface.
Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"
- The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
- If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition
Certainly aid is driven by interests, agendas, and ideologies, though these may at times be obscure and subject to accidental or deliberate misinterpretation - often by people driven by interests, agendas, and ideologies of their own.
The aid industry also has its own arcane internal politics, and competition for funds is intense, a reality that underlies much of the noble-sounding discourse surrounding aid.
There are also many misconceptions surrounding aid: I'm eternally amazed at how routinely relief/humanitarian aid and development aid, two entirely different animals, get treated as similar or even identical problems...
From the blog Registan by Joshua Foust Opium Season, by Joel Hafvenstein
From the blog Registan by Joshua Foust Learning from PRTsProbably the most interesting portion of the beginning passages of the book, aside from the sinking feeling that accompanies the “I was clueless but willing, so they sent me” meme, is Hafvenstein’s discussion of how USAID and their contractors operate. It is a realm measured not by sustainable development projects, but by how much money gets churned through these companies. The project he is to lead in Lashkar Gah is not meant to be a sustainable development program, but merely a crash course in flooding the local markets with cash in the hopes that it is enough to keep people out of the poppy fields long enough for the eradication teams to bulldoze them out of existence. Buried into this, and it is not unique to his company Chemonics by any stretch, is the silly arrogance of all-purpose consulting firms. Chemonics can throw together a proposal to: “clean up air pollution in Cairo, train Russian judges, help Ugandans export cut flowers,” and so on, all on a few hours’ notice. The defense industry is much the same way: companies bid on so many things they couldn’t possibly be qualified for, merely because they have the resources to hire (one hopes) the right people for the job.
In my last look at Provincial Reconstruction Teams, I made a plea of sorts to critically examine the effectiveness of PRTs (which has indeed been oversold), but not to abandon the concept entirely. The relative paucity of research on PRT methods, effectiveness, and theory is rather surprising, given that the military is in the midst of a vast transformation toward a civilian-positive focused model of warfighting (for lack of a better phrase), and the PRTs constitute a major component of this. (The recent SWJ post by Dave Kilcullen on road building in Afghanistan is a perfect example: the PRT in Kunar is coordinating, funding, and sometimes directly constructing the roads there.)From the blog Registan by Joshua Foust The Problem with PRTsFor perhaps understandable reasons, very little comes from PRTs in the public sphere, save press release-style reports about how wonderful they are. Better interfacing with both civilian aid agencies, as well as analysts and reporters who cover the area and may have a much deeper knowledge of local and regional events and problems, could pay tremendous dividends in PRT effectiveness. The CSIS report mentions a much more liberal attitude toward freeing information and generating community than the PRTs have seen in either theatre—these, too, could be effective ways of adding multipliers to the PRTs’ efforts.
Despite these many challenges, there remains a tremendous value to the PRTs in Afghanistan. In many places, they are one of the only agencies there to fund large scale development projects, such as roads, micro hydro power plants, and government building construction. These criticisms and suggestions should be seen in that context—taking a generally good idea and increasing its potential to sow good.
When Medicins Sans Frontičres abandoned Afghanistan in 2004, its primary complaint was that the U.S. had, in effect, “militarized” aid by embedding aid workers in military units—the Provincial Reconstruction Teams—and ruining the supposed neutrality of purely civilian aid groups. After five of their workers were murdered, the group declared the situation had become intolerable and closed up shop.
Sapere Aude
Before Naomi Klein wrote Shock Doctrine, there was Economic Shock Therapy:
Shock therapy traces its roots from the economic liberalization program undertaken by post-war West Germany in the late 1940s. During 1947 and 1948, price controls and government support were withdrawn over a very short period. These reforms had the effect of kick starting the West German economy resulting in the Wirtschaftswunder. Germany had previously had a highly authoritarian and economic interventionist fascist government; overnight, shock therapy seemed to throw off these restrictions and allow Germany to rapidly become a developed market economy.
Sapere Aude
A lot has been left out here. Any economy that shifts production from primarily war production to living production will make great gains in a short period. Military economies are very destructive as focus on things that do not support life. You cannot eat Tanks, Fighters and Submarines.
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