In mid-November, Paul Currion wrote a pointed blog post asking why we see so few interesting thinkers in the aid sector. I tracked him down on skype to talk about it a little more. It turns out we were on slightly different tracks in thinking about this, and it was a useful conversation for me (and I hope Paul). Here’s a recap:
Alanna: The system as a whole doesn’t reward individuals with interesting or innovative ideas. If you think in an unusual way, you’re not perceived as a visionary or a useful contributor. You’re seen as wacky or a complainer. Not a team player. Since we all have to be aware of our next job, we can’t afford to be visionary. And you don’t get to be the kind of senior person who’s allowed to have big ideas by being an interesting thinker. You get to that level by being a good team player.
Paul: The aid bureaucracy is fundamentally a mechanism of control. A civil service mentality. hence the layers upon layers of task forces, working groups, etc. Which doesn’t leave us in a good place, at a time when the sector is really struggling with a massively changed external environment. It’s not just that people don’t care, it’s just that the lack of vision runs so deep that most people don’t even realize it’s a problem.
Alanna: Based on my interactions with people at senior levels in aid, that does tend to be true. I know plenty of front line aid workers who know we have a problem, but they aren’t able to affect things. And the people who can, don’t see a problem.
Paul: The next question is, what do we do?
Alanna: I think the problem at heart comes from the menage a trois, as J put it. The donor’s the customer, and as long as your donor is happy, there is no real drive for change, no matter how much the beneficiary is getting screwed. Which is actually what happens with civil servants, too. And I don’t know how you upset that triangle. For development you can talk about moving away from an aid model, but relief’s pretty much got to be aid.
Paul: It doesn’t seem to me that this is the only problem, or even a substantial problem if other things were fixed. But we can assume that those “other things” won’t get fixed. My argument in the blog post was not so much that the beneficiary is getting screwed but that the sector is just being overtaken by events, and everybody is standing around going “humanitarian reform blah blah blah” without realising that they aren’t wearing any pants.
Alanna: If it’s being overtaken by events, what happens next? Answering my own question: dyncorp, maybe.
Paul: The good news: newly empowered and middle class affected communities. The bad news: military and private contractors. The mixed news: diaspora communities and local political interests. Or maybe nothing happens next, and aid organisations just become increasingly irrelevant because they’re simply failing to meet the challenge.
Alanna: And no one responds to crisis?
Paul: Not in the way that we’re used to seeing. Imagine if there had been a third megadisaster after Haiti and Pakistan. We simply wouldn’t have been able to mount a response. You could see a “hollow” humanitarian sector in the same way as you see hollow states. Activity at the core that makes it look like things are happening, but increasingly little capability outside the core.
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It was a thought-provoking conversation, and it’s been on my mind ever since. Two things really stick out for me.
The first is the role of local political interests in providing aid after disasters. We’ve seen that many times – Hizbullah providing aid in Lebanon, Islamic groups in Turkey after the Van earthquake last year. There are plenty of non-altruistic reasons to provide aid, and those will not go away if the humanitarian sector as we know it hollows out. It will mean a very different – older – model of aid comes back into practice, though.
The second is the fact that aid bloggers aren’t really addressing the failure to think in an interesting way. We’re not doing the interesting thinking, and we’re not calling people out. I think it’s because most of us are part of the aid establishment, and we all have our next job to think of. We don’t want to be known as wacky troublemakers any more than the next aid worker does. What we really need then is aid journalists. Outsiders, with no vested interested in the system. Tom Paulson can go to the Pacific Health Summit and bug people all he wants. That’s what he’s supposed to do. J from Tales from the Hood can’t do that. J can’t even comfortably tell the truth and use his/her own name.
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Some questions to end this post. Is Paul right about the lack of interesting thinkers? Can you recommend some? For me, Ben Ramalingan and Edward Carr come to mind. And some of the most interesting thinkers that are relevant to aid don’t actually write about aid – now I am thinking of Dave Snowden, JP Rangaswami, and Tyler Cowen.
And, finally, an administrative notice. My housing for SXSWi seems to have fallen through. Does anyone need a roommate?
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As a current job seeker, I’d just like to add in the perspective of a younger person with some experience trying to get into the field. The number one attribute, as far as HR staff go, that people like myself lack, is experience. We may be innovative fresh thinkers who have brought about change in previous roles, but if those roles differed from the one being advertised it seems to matter little. In fact, I have had an email in response to a failed job application that said: “We couldn’t pick you because we found somebody who had been doing the exact same job already.” All other things being equal (and of course they’re not), I see this attitude as one which stifles innovation and new ways of looking at things. I believe (and of course I am going to say this given my current experiences!) that an over-reliance on experience and repeating the same job over and over doesn’t encourage fresh approaches. As Alanna says, the system is not set up for innovation. It’s set up for repetition.
I went into aid & development as logistician in 2004 just before the Indian Ocean Tsunami, I saw a lot of inefficiency and bureaucracy but I also saw a lot of lives rebuilt too. I have spent the last 8 years working between the field, headquarters and the commercial world to look at the problem and options for solutions from all sides.
My contribution to the solution to the problem is The Logistics Project. We are a company and not a charity, we consult for aid agencies, not for profit business and corporate social responsibility departments on operational best practice. The money we make from this goes to fund a high readiness team of logisticians to support relief agencies in this specialist area without burdening them with the overhead of a logistician.
The trend I see breaking out in innovation is “boutique” agencies springing up and doing their own thing such as JPHRO. The system may not be set up for innovation but you can innovate outside it as long as you don’t want a pay packet from it or a pension. Too many well meaning aid-workers catch themselves in the pay/pension trap and then tow the line. If you have a vision that is strong, well thought out and world leading people will follow, maybe in small numbers at first but in increasing numbers with proof that you can apply that vision in the field.
Our little contribution at The Logistics Project is to make sure such visionaries don’t get caught up in the administration of materiel management and can concentrate on their front-line effort. The interesting thinkers are out there and are doing stuff, honing their art not just in the aid field but cross pollinating with business and industry and as the years go on we will see them emerge the system will change because it has to to regain some say in how the process works.
Keep looking Alanna, the thinker (like the truth) is out there.
I think you have touched upon something important on the difficulties aid industry insiders have in coming up with or promoting original ideas to reform the system due in large part to the incentives within the system itself.
The discussion with Paul seems to focus more on “humanitarian” aid than “development” aid though and I think the situation is slightly better on the development side of things in that there are a number of innovative thinkers (Examples such as Owen Barder, Esther Duflo and Jacqueline Novogratz come to mind) and a larger number of innovative researchers and practitioners who are doing interesting, innovative things though perhaps without having clearly articulated frameworks for aid agency reform.
The challenge is that although the thinkers and ideas exist, I’m less sure of whether the development organizations and the government and private donors that support them are willing to take on and try out these ideas.
Your argument that you care more about your current and future paycheques than sharing your interesting thoughts doesn’t hold only for development workers. One could fill in any field into your statement: “I think it’s because most of us are part of the establishment, and we all have our next job to think of. We don’t want to be known as wacky troublemakers any more than the next worker does.” Iis the lack of moral courage unique to development workers?
A piece from Pritchett, Woolcock and Andrews’ Working Paper Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure comes to mind:
In the last four decades a fundamental paradox has emerged at the heart of development theory and practice. The paradox: everyone still believes in modernization and no one still believes in modernization.
If you haven’t already, take the time to read the paper. It’s worth it.
I’m otherwise tempted to say It’s the political economy stupid.
But I think, just like I believe you’re pointing towards, that the fact that the driver of ‘development assistance’ is at least as much about geo-political interests and remittal, as it is about anything else is a very good point. And lets not forget the complexities involved. For one, you could say that we don’t even agree on what the end goal is.
But thanks for your post. It has got me thinking.
I can’t promise that the thinking will be interesting to others though. 🙂
D.E. – I’ve heard this argument before and I think it’s an easy way of blaming individuals instead of the system. Wanting to continue earning a salary and doing the most meaningful work available to us is not solely cowardice and characterizing it that way is unproductive.
Al: “Too many well meaning aid-workers catch themselves in the pay/pension trap and then tow the line. If you have a vision that is strong, well thought out and world leading people will follow, maybe in small numbers at first but in increasing numbers with proof that you can apply that vision in the field.” Please – the so-called new visionaries (and the fact that you include JPHRO makes me simultaneously gag and giggle) are no different from the so-called establishment of household charities. They are absolutely as intolerant of diverse thinking as the UN and INGOs they accuse of the same. They are incapable of thinking outside the box because they can’t even find the box. And if they manage to exist for more than a few years, they invariably become fully entrenched in the system they vehemently claim to be different from now. As we learned from the Soviet experiment, today’s radical vision is tomorrow’s dogma.
Another NGO or humanitarian for-profit venture – even one with a really cool mission statement – is not visionary. Period.
Dev Elopment: I don’t agree that choosing prudently which hills to die on in order to sustain one’s own livelihood counts as moral cowardice.
I’ll try to write a follow-up post, but I wanted to address a few of the interesting points raised in the comments here. Please bear in mind that I am talking specifically from the point of view of humanitarian response, and not longer-term development.
@ Weh Yeoh: The HR staff are absolutely right to place experience as the number one attribute, and I thought the same thing even when I was in your position myself. Being inexperienced does not mean that one is automatically innovative – god knows I wasn’t – but it does mean that you’re more likely to think that you’re innovative simply because you’re not as aware of what has gone before. (This is what I call the Year Zero mentality.) We need a balance of experience and inexperience in the sector, but more importantly we need better mechanisms for balancing experience and inexperience.
@ Al of the Logistics Project: I agree that we’re going to see more start-up operations like yours but, once again, don’t be fooled into thinking that this is fundamentally different. All NGOs started off small, and many people have started up companies rather than NGOs (including me). One trend that is on the rise is collaboration and consortium approaches, which I think are also a good way to encourage innovation. Where I do disagree with you is that the “interesting thinkers” (as I originally defined them) are out there; but if you have specific examples, I’d love to hear them. Good luck with your company!
@Ian: You’re right on target about the role that incentives play within the industry, but I still have to disagree that the interesting thinkers are there, but just not supported by their organisations. At the HIF we get a lot of proposals across the table, and I assume that interesting thinkers would be aware of the HIF (since a key part of being an interesting thinker is being well-informed about current trends) – yet we simply don’t see much in the way of innovation. This is a poor metric, but it’s one of the few that I’ve got, and it’s not promising.
@ Dev Elopement: I don’t think moral courage has anything to do with it: thinking in systems, the problem is primarily with the institutional infrastructure, not the individuals working within it.
@ Soren: Thanks for the reference, I will devour: political economy is something that the humanitarian sector is alarmingly ignorant of.
@ J.: JPHRO! JPHRO! JPHRO! If I say it often enough, will you fall on the floor in nauseous laughter?
One last comment: being innovative does not make one an interesting thinker, although interesting thinkers are necessarily innovative (in thought, if not in deed).
Hi Alanna,
Super-cool post. You too, Paul. A few comments:
1) I am a blogger, but not an interesting one.
2) What do you and Paul mean by “aid blogger”? I can think of plenty of solid aid/dev bloggers — Evan Lieberman, Duncan Green, Laura Seay, the whole team at CGDev, lots of World Bank bloggers, Chris Blattman, Dennis Whittle, Lee Crawfurd is also pretty cool, Owen Barder of course, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, etc. — but I don’t know if you and Paul would count them as “aid bloggers,” or just “development” bloggers, or something else. What’s an “aid blogger” exactly? Do they have to work in the humanitarian/relief aid industry? Does development aid count? What about things like human rights, the ICC, etc. — do Kate, Amanda, and Chris over at wronging rights count as aid bloggers, or is human rights too tangental? What fields count as “aid”?
3) Plenty of the folks I just named are “interesting,” but maybe not “visionary,” “innovative,” or even “useful.” Some of the language you and Paul have used here to describe the type of aid blogger you say is lacking suggests that you are both setting a really high bar… maybe there are just not many “visionary” bloggers in any field, and aid is typical in that respect. It’s tough to be “visionary.”
4) I have a half-baked answer to the question “what do we do?” If more aid organizations, think tanks, governments, universities, and media outfits were to recognize, support, hire, and celebrate “interesting” thinking, maybe you’d see more interesting aid bloggers. Bill Easterly is pretty much my only example: he went against his own interest as an aid insider at the World Bank by writing “The Elusive Question for Growth,” and paid for it with his job (after working for the Bank for 14 years!). But in the end he was OK, because CGDev (and later NYU) were still willing to hire him, and maybe even reward his courage, even though he was, as he put it, “persona non grata to the rest of the development establishment.” He described Nancy Birdsall’s decision to hire him “courageous.” If more aid orgs, universities, etc. were as courageous as Nancy Birdsall, maybe you’d see more courageous aid bloggers like Bill. (here: http://aidwatchers.com/2010/10/tribute-to-center-for-global-development-cgd/)
@ Jacob: I didn’t use the term aid blogger in this discussion, because not all interesting thinkers are bloggers. When I write, I am always talking about the humanitarian sector, because that’s where I work, and I have almost no interest in development aid. (That’s not quite true – I read about it all the time, but mainly to test my belief that the development sector is a waste of everybody’s time, largely speaking.)
I am definitely setting the bar high when I say “interesting thinker”, because I don’t mean it in the generic sense that somebody has an interesting blog – I am specifically talking about individuals who bring together a wider variety of perspectives than a tight focus on aid (I cited Ben Ramalingam in my original blog post, for example). All the blogs you mention are interesting in the generic sense, but not necessarily in the way that I’m talking about – although I think I would include Bill Easterley, Owen Barder, occasionally Duncan Green, in the category of “interesting thinker”.
Do you know who would be an interesting thinker? Somebody who pointed out that the consensus around RCTs as the tool which is finally going to make “development” a meaningful project is reducing “development” to a technocratic exercise which obscures the fact that development was conceived as and continues to be a fundamentally political project. Now I’m not sure that the solution is for the organisations that you list to support “interesting thinkers”, because organisations have a tendency to co-opt the people they employ. The problem is the system, not merely the individual and institutional actors within that system; which I guess is another way saying that for me, really interesting thinking is systems thinking.
Just to avoid being a complete negative nelly: “interesting thinkers” in development for me would include Robert Chambers, Herman Daly, and Hernando de Soto. Anybody want to add some names to that list?
I know next to nothing about relief, so ….
With regard to ‘Development’ and research I know of, however, I would have to say that the people at ODI’s African Power and Politics Programme are doing some of the most interesting research, which is both critical to the bone AND constructive.
If moral courage has nothing to do with innovative thinking, then why does the only ‘solution’ proposed involve one person who has clearly exhibited courage: Bill Easterly?
@ Louis Ianna: I also cited Robert Chambers, Herman Daly, and Hernando de Soto as interesting thinkers, so I don’t understand why you think the only solution proposed is Bill Easterley; and Bill Easterley’s ‘interestingness’ isn’t based on the fact that he clearly exhibited courage.
@Paul
Sorry for confusing aid blogger with aid thinker — my mistake. This is clearly a sign that I over-use Google Reader.
I share your views about what makes an “interesting thinker.” Your last point @Louis Ianna is particularly instructive — it’s not merely courage. It’s tying in multiple disciplines, thinking outside the box, where “the box” is the humanitarian sector.
It’s a high bar, but if that’s where you set it then yeah, it’s hard to think of many interesting thinkers in humanitarian aid. I look at someone like Josette Sheeran for example and think yes, I agree with you 80% of the time, and yes, you’re interesting, but thoroughly in the box.
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@ Soren: Very cool, will have to check that out.
@Louis
I think it’s probably easier to be courageous after 14 years at the bank, with all the contacts, finance, rep and so forth that brings, than it is for most people in the industry.
I think it may be more about moral courage — but in a different form than “I’m getting paid and therefore I’m a wuss.”
I think its more that real, impactful change is super hard. And then in the field, you rarely have the luxury of stuff like being innovative. I feel sometimes I (and perhaps others?) may want to be innovative, but we’ve got business with deep, dark, corrupt countries — or complicated lives and more complicated excuses that don’t permit the time to ask the question. “Is my work of any real benefit to anyone” — or at least without wanting to jump into the nearest piranha infested pool.
Sure, I can blame external forces — the country is corrupt, the work is hard, ideas around gender are hard to talk about in the local language — but in the end it is about my moral compass, and not only the strength to hold my own in the unique situations, but to be able to challenge ourselves, in order to softly challenge, through non-conflict questioning, the folks we are in contact with in these environments? And that’s a personal challenge. It takes moral courage to not be that wuss, and a bit of training and practice with those conversations to do them automatically.
Note: This is a post from someone pretty new to aid discussion.
By reading just the first Chapter of Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, I feel that even I understand the monotony of the majority of aid attempts. His “Planners” are so clearly the influential individuals/organizations we constantly see involved in aid. Sadly, as Easterly explains and is quite obvious, they haven’t helped.
But why hasn’t anyone stepped in to make changes? Alanna—I think you’re right that “the system as a whole doesn’t reward individuals with interesting or innovative ideas.” I think that Paul’s response to this statement illustrates my thoughts on our current aid situation—“the aid bureaucracy is fundamentally a mechanism of control.” It’s not that there aren’t people out there with visionary ideas. It’s that the major efforts dominate the thinking of many others, which leads the general public to believing that dumping unwanted goods in underdeveloped communities will help, that we have to sacrifice to help them, that we have the answers.
Your “non-altruistic” reasons to provide aid are the key to improving aid, in my point of view. It’s easy to make some sort of effort to help the less fortunate but when the basis—funds, workers, purpose—involves making that effort in order to feel good about helping out, there isn’t any real incentive to improve aid. “It’s the thought that counts” thinking makes analyzing aid secondary to amounts donated/time volunteered. The interesting ideas would arise if donating groups actually had to compete for the opportunity to provide aid to an area. They would have to convince the recipients that their aid would be more beneficial than that of others. The “good feeling” would only arise if the aid proved effective (profit was made or results obtained) because if it didn’t, the donating group would be forced to rethink its strategy.
Thus, my uneducated conclusion is that aid should work like any other industry—it should rely on competition, markets, and outcomes. Innovation is a necessary part of success in market-led economies. Competitive aid wouldn’t interfere with “interesting ideas” and no one would have to be afraid of losing their job for voicing such ideas. We wouldn’t have to argue over whether or not our “moral compasses” are involved in the silencing of innovation in order to keep a job. Silencing our ideas would be a thing of the past.
Does anyone have an opinion on my proposed free-market aid?
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