Klein's Shock Doctrine

[tequila]

Dayuhan - have you ever read The Economist's Tale? I'd think you'd get a heck of a kick out of it. About a World Bank consultant on the ground in Sierra Leone in the 1980s and his struggle to get the WB to reverse policy on rice subsidies. An outstanding real-world example of dysfunctional aid at work.

The entire book is excellent, but the best passages are about the difficulty of getting good real-world data on how Third World economies actually function, and how bad data (which abounds) can lead to decisions with appalling effects.

[goesh]

I always liked the Peace Corps concept of income generating projects - small, village type projects to boost a bit the standard of living with no dollar amounts ever set in stone, no paper trail, no real government involvement except for a bit of seed money here and there, no real expectations except perhaps a bit of success here and there, nobody to blame for failure but themselves, nobody to take any money they made. In the real bush country of the world, the only way to ever get economies boosted is to infuse them with solar cooking devices, thus freeing up immense amounts of time that can be devoted to more gardening, more crafts and goods and animal production, farming, etc. We've got a big hunk of the bush population, the women, spending maybe 1/4th of their time scrounging wood, hanging around fires cooking and minding the damn pots and pans.

[J Wolfsberger]

I always liked the Peace Corps concept of income generating projects - small, village type projects to boost a bit the standard of living with no dollar amounts ever set in stone, no paper trail, no real government involvement except for a bit of seed money here and there, no real expectations except perhaps a bit of success here and there, nobody to blame for failure but themselves, nobody to take any money they made. In the real bush country of the world, the only way to ever get economies boosted is to infuse them with solar cooking devices, thus freeing up immense amounts of time that can be devoted to more gardening, more crafts and goods and animal production, farming, etc. We've got a big hunk of the bush population, the women, spending maybe 1/4th of their time scrounging wood, hanging around fires cooking and minding the damn pots and pans.

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.

[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.

[William F. Owen]

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.

[Dayuhan]

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...

[Surferbeetle]

From the blog Registan by Joshua Foust Opium Season, by Joel Hafvenstein

Probably 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.

From the blog Registan by Joshua Foust Learning from PRTs

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.)

For 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.

From the blog Registan by Joshua Foust The Problem with PRTs

When Medicins Sans Frontières 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.

[Dayuhan]

I always liked the Peace Corps concept of income generating projects - small, village type projects to boost a bit the standard of living with no dollar amounts ever set in stone, no paper trail, no real government involvement except for a bit of seed money here and there, no real expectations except perhaps a bit of success here and there, nobody to blame for failure but themselves, nobody to take any money they made.

Having been a Peace Corps volunteer and having observed many at close range, I have to comment that while the concept may be lovely, the reality generally falls far short. Volunteers are often very young and have little practical experience; by the time they get half a clue they are generally gone. The practice of bringing in recent graduates with little or no field experience doesn't help: I'd gladly trade one real live farmer for a dozen recent graduates of agricultural schools.

Many volunteers have life-changing experience. Very few leave any tangible difference in their host communities.

The idea of small projects is wonderful, but the real-world challenges of tailoring projects to community needs and avoiding often-hidden constraints are extremely difficult to overcome. Very often projects that are alleged to be community-driven are in fact donor-driven (NGOs push the projects they can sell to their funders). Every once in a while you get a gem, sometimes you see a few that work... most come and go like the tide on the beach.

There's a place for large projects and a place for small ones... but in both fields the return on investment is frighteningly small. In many cases both small and large projects fail because they fail to acknowledge constraints on development imposed by local political and security conditions.

In the real bush country of the world, the only way to ever get economies boosted is to infuse them with solar cooking devices, thus freeing up immense amounts of time that can be devoted to more gardening, more crafts and goods and animal production, farming, etc. We've got a big hunk of the bush population, the women, spending maybe 1/4th of their time scrounging wood, hanging around fires cooking and minding the damn pots and pans.

I once listened to a bright-eyed volunteer give an enormously enthusiastic presentation on solar cookers to a group of women, who politely nodded and professed keen interest. After he left the consensus opinion emerged: there's no way we're going to cook standing in the sun, it's too hot. We want to cook in the coolest, shadiest place we can find, just like we always have.

It sounds like you're assuming that the key limiting factor on productivity in "the bush country" is time. In many places I think you'd find that assumption to be invalid. I also think you'd find that those women "hanging around the fires" may be performing other less visible functions as well, notably keeping half an eye on an array of children, including those whose parents are out in the fields being productive.

I'm not saying that solar cookers are useless... in many places they are very useful indeed. In other places they may just gather dust or be diverted to other original purposes (the day after the family planning roadshow comes to town every kid in the village is playing with balloons made from inflated condoms). In order to know the difference somebody has to spend a long time in that village, win the trust of its people, and get a real sense for the needs and the constraints... and there aren't that many people who have the time or the will to do that.

[Rex Brynen]

Dayuhan - have you ever read The Economist's Tale? I'd think you'd get a heck of a kick out of it. About a World Bank consultant on the ground in Sierra Leone in the 1980s and his struggle to get the WB to reverse policy on rice subsidies. An outstanding real-world example of dysfunctional aid at work.

The entire book is excellent, but the best passages are about the difficulty of getting good real-world data on how Third World economies actually function, and how bad data (which abounds) can lead to decisions with appalling effects.

I agree, Tequila--it is a great book.. I set it as a reading in my intro development course when it came out.

Dayuhan: 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

[Dayuhan]

Dayuhan - have you ever read The Economist's Tale? I'd think you'd get a heck of a kick out of it. About a World Bank consultant on the ground in Sierra Leone in the 1980s and his struggle to get the WB to reverse policy on rice subsidies. An outstanding real-world example of dysfunctional aid at work.

The entire book is excellent, but the best passages are about the difficulty of getting good real-world data on how Third World economies actually function, and how bad data (which abounds) can lead to decisions with appalling effects.

I haven't read it, but I suspect that I've lived it a few times. In fairness I'd have to say that NGOs can be every bit as obtuse as the big multilateral agencies, sometimes more so. They do less damage, having less capacity, but every bit as obtuse.

I'll look for the book... and maybe tell a story or two; after 30 years in SE Asia I've got quite the litany!