This piece of a post was inspired by a post on the Humanosphere blog and some insightful comments on twitter from Brett Keller. The first time I started the draft, I tried to recap everything and it was boring. So follow the links if you like, but they’re not strictly necessary.
One of the hardest things about development work is that it exists permanently in a shade of grey. All projects do harm. My own belief is that we address that by making sure the good we do outweighs it, but it’s not like that’s easy. And it means you start in the grey.
Every choice we make after that is grey, too. Economists, as Brett pointed out, expect that people will consistently make the best, most profitable choices. Public health professionals tend to roll the other way, assuming people will make destructive, short-sighted choices. Development people live in the mushy middle, with people who make good choices and bad choices for reasons you never quite understand.
Does aid work? Who knows. It’s the wrong question. Can aid work? Yes. That one I can answer. Aid can fail, too. At any given moment, do you know if your intervention is succeeding or failing? Maybe. Your monitoring and evaluation data helps a little. But it’s going to take years to see if your project has actual long-term impact. Last quarter’s M&E results won’t help with that.
It’s a frustrating slog, and you spend your career doing it.
…and that’s as far as I got, folks. Anyone have any idea what should come next?
“but it beats not even trying” ?
Dear Alanna,
A Nice start.
I would make the link now to the complex systems approach, as it is promoted by “Aid on the Edge”. The point I would make is that this murky state of development is not a temporary state, waiting for science to evolve to take all insecurity away. The Murky state is here to stay, what is special about development is that honest practitioners know it.
Development is not the only field living the grey. I fear it is part of the human condition. All policy has effects we cannot imagine when applying them. All agricultural innovations, all human interaction. With hindsight it is easy to see what cause and effect was. But prediction is never as easy.
Sam
“It’s a frustrating slog, and you spend your career doing it. But the times when you go home and catch up with old friends — whose entire professional lives are spent in the unedifying grind to create shareholder profits for the unknown and unknowable wealthy, and whose private lives seem to involve no decision more weighty than ‘paper or plastic’ at the checkout — at those times, you’ll know that it is your struggle that sustains you.”
[…] Shaikh took a few thing I said on Twitter and expanded them into this blog post. Basically I was noting — and she in turn highlighted — that on matters of paternalism […]
“But it’s going to take yrs to see if your project has actual long-term impact.” On development, & being in the middle: http://t.co/FkZa8QJp