The Foreign Service Journal - November 2017

56 NOVEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL idea … an open question.” Many critics also look in some detail at the bureaucratic imperatives of planning—the perverse relationship between the need for accountability and the consequent reliance on short-termprojects, the games played in the business of aid contracting, the waste of money, the fact that much of the money stays home instead of going to the intended recipients—and show how these imperatives get in the way of effectiveness. Sogge et al. put it this way: “Agencies must feed their official aid system funding authorities with an increasingly narrow diet of information according to indicators easily digested in bureaucra- cies and in public discourse. Water wells dug and babies jabbed continue to stand for improved child health; proportions of women in training workshops continue to stand for gender balance. Gradually, the production of indicators treating only the very short run pervades the activities themselves: a longer-run perspective, learning based on real impact, the innovative spark and other ‘comparative advantages’ of agencies gets crowded out.” How Development Works Some critiques point to the hubris of foreign aid, the sure sense that we knowwhat’s good for others. Given that every society is a complex and tightly wovenmosaic of political, cultural, social, structural and historically constructed pieces, the appropriate stance is humility. What MIT economist Everett Hagen said in 1962 in On theTheory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins , holds true: “In the countries in which the transition to economic growth has occurred, it has been concomitant with far-reaching change in political organization, social structure and attitudes toward life. The relationship is so striking and so universal that to assume that one of these aspects of basic social change is unrelated to the others is to strain the doctrine of coincidence beyond all warrant.” Yet despite the evident truth of contextual complexity, aid agencies continue to be wedded to preconceived recipes for how to implement development. Speaking in 2003 about the belief in the magic of market economies, World Bank economist William Easterly pointed out that “no recipe exists, only a confusing welter of bottom-up social institutions and norms essential for markets. These evolve slowly on their own from the actions of many agents; the Western outsiders and planners don’t have a clue how to create these norms and institutions.” Easterly concluded: “It is a fantasy to think that the West can change complex societies with very different histories and cultures into some image of itself. The main hope for the poor is for them to be their own searchers, borrowing ideas and technol- ogy from the West when it suits them to do so.” A few critics note the aid industry’s lack of emphasis on time— howmuch of it “developed” countries needed. The United States did not have a widespreadmiddle class until after the Second WorldWar; whole sections of the country lacked indoor plumb- ing and electricity well into the 1930s; we did not have a modern national highway systemuntil the late 1950s. And in his Kicking Away the Ladder , Ha-Joon Chang reminds us, for example, that the road to democracy in the developed countries was a rocky one; in the United States, universal suffrage did not occur until 1965. He points out that what we today lament as developing-world cor- ruption and bad governance existed relatively recently in our own developed world: public offices were sold, there was widespread nepotism, and professionalismwas conspicuously lacking until at least the late 19th century. Chang’s broad conclusion is that we need to face up to the fact that what got us to where we are is not what we tell the developing countries. Still, few of the aid critiques approach the fullness of Bauer’s in 1974. He, too, castigates the foreign aid establishment for ignor- ing history, for its arrogance and paternalism. But he goes on to address the deeper question of how aid relates to development in the first place. In a word, it doesn’t. “Promotion of development and relief of poverty are … altogether different,” Bauer reminds us. Significantly, USAID, the U.S. government’s aid agency, has blurred that distinction in the last few years by emphasizing saving lives and extreme poverty. Its latest mission statement (see USAID.gov) leaves out the word “development” altogether: “We partner to end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity.” Bauer’s blunt conclusion is this: “Foreign aid is patently not necessary to emerge frompoverty.” And he reminds us that the key variables for development lie in the cultural, social and political realms: “If the personal and social conditions of progress (capaci- ties, motivations, mores and institutions) are not present, aid will be ineffective. What holds back many poor countries is the people who live there, including their governments. A society which can- not develop without external gifts is altogether unlikely to do so with them.” We need to face up to the fact that what got us to where we are is not what we tell the developing countries.