"The 'girl effect'..." and other development gimmicks

There is a fairly active group of scholars here (at Worcester Polytechnic Institute--WPI, a far more compelling place than its name suggests, maybe more on that later, more than likely not) that are interested in questions of international development. WPI has a very unusual, and very excellent plan that strongly encourages students to go overseas to learn about science, engineering, and social science outside of the classroom. You can read more about this here: https://www.wpi.edu/academics/catalogs/ugrad/wpiplan.html. But I have just digressed too much.
This group of folks at WPI meet periodically to discuss various topics, often (as far as I understand it) based on a newish publication. I went to my first meeting this week (this after a stupefying meeting with my retirement account adviser--I will never force you to hear the details of that) and we discussed a recently published article in Third World Quarterly written by Jason Hickel entitled "The 'girl effect': liberalism, empowerment and the contradictions of development" (here is a link to the article online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2014.946250#.VGbd5vnF98M). The article has merits and demerits and I don't plan on discussing them in this post, read it and draw your own conclusions. But the core goal of the paper is to critically assess "the girl effect (ge from here on out)" in economic development thinking, especially at the level of the World Bank, USAID, DFID, etc. If you don't know what the girl effect is don't worry. I didn't either. Essentially, the GE argues that development efforts should pay special attention to girls and young women and provide them with economic opportunities. It is thought that if women have income and economic power many birds will be killed with a single stone--population growth limits, democracy expansion, sexual violence prevention, dietary needs, etc. You get the picture. Dr. Hickel has plenty of reasons to be critical of these programs and for the most part they make good sense. But one thing that I think needs to be highlighted is the intellectual genealogy of the GE. It stems essentially from the findings that the most economically advanced societies (i.e. those in control, the North Atlantic powers and honorary members like Japan) have low birth rates, high educational attainment by women, high female employment rates, etc. The correlation is right but stops there. What these programs fail to recognize is that those great things that women are able to do in richer places is most likely not the cause, but the effect of wealth. Delayed childbirth, female educational attainment, etc. are the result of wealth, and eventually contribute to its creation. The GE puts the cart in front of the horse by expanding youg women's employment and may in fact challenge household welfare by eliminating other sources of income as new, and very cheap labor is introduced to the market.
Critiques of development are fun, and easy to make. But like Fransisco Toro reminds us (http://boringdevelopment.com/) the very basic goal of programs need to focus on wealth creation if they are to succeed. The GE is great, but without overall wealth increases will most likely fade into the background like countless other examples of catchy, and shallow development efforts.

Four square, five year olds, rules and adaptation

On Monday I had the pleasure of picking my son up from his after school program and was quickly recruited into a hard-charging game of four square. For those of you that don't know the basic structure of the game is four people each standing in one square of a quartered larger square while they bounce the ball to each other and try to make the other miss. For more in depth understanding you can go to youtube.com or http://www.squarefour.org/rules if you really want to soak up your time. Anyhow, while we were playing these five year old boys kept adding rules and wrinkles to how the game should be played. They spent more time discussing, trying to impose, and arguing about the rules instead of playing. This is perfectly normal but a backwards way to learn how to play a sport since there is less play than structure. Institutions are inflexible and multiplicative. In rugby pedagogy these days education insists that players should play and learn from that, adding structure only when it becomes necessary either to learn a new skill or advance understanding. Indeed the International Rugby Board has bought "teaching games for understanding's" ideas (http://www.ausport.gov.au/sportscoachmag/coaching_processes/teaching_games_for_understanding). I have applied these methods and watched them work wonders on players, and some coaches. But as a coach or coach-educator I can pretty much do what I want as long as the players or learners buy in without much threat of long term harm.
This is not the case with national policies. My student, Claudia Monzon is just about to defend her doctoral dissertation and her work addresses exactly this problem--how do states design policies in the national interest that are adapatable, local, specific, and subject to experimentation. She already has an excellent paper published about the problems of fit (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837714000532) between national or super-regional policies and environmental and cultural variation. James Scott's Seeing Like a State (http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300078152) and others' works have shown how governments are driven to impose order to maintain sovereignty and power. But as climate changes, local people strive for more independence, and information is more available challenges State rules. One of the challenges going forward for conservation with development and state policy in general arises in the State learning to allow variation in rules, accept variability and adaptation, while maintaining relevance. It may be that the most important function the State can offer is that of knowledge dissemination, analysis, and evaluation of adaptations tied to funding and increased democratization.

Calling out development; pot-shots, stereotypes, and some truth

My friend, co-coach, and student, David Hanson (cf. his page on academia.edu: http://florida.academia.edu/MaccaHanson) recently sent me the following essay; "What's So Bad About Development?" (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/sep/01/development-ngos-third-world-global-south) from the Guardian, probably my favorite popular and mainstream source for serious discussions of development and conservation issues (of course they have asked me to weigh in so they clearly have impeccable taste). Survival International has a short video in which they outline some of the more common critiques of development (http://www.survivalinternational.org/thereyougo). The story is apocrypha though canonical to development critiques that don't dig too deeply. In the video the authors and narrator suggest that development occurs in spite of local people; many of whom have developed lifeways in tune with their local environment. I would never dispute the brilliance of local people, and indeed many of them find themselves damaged by inclusion in the wider political economy. Where I think we need to start reconsidering critiques of development, however, are not at the extremes of geographically, economically, or culturally separate people but at those folks already drawn into wider systems. Offering a return to some fundamental sustainability is likely impossible and definitely impractical. The Guardian piece successfully suggests that the term "development" may be outmoded, I have no energy to disagree. But, there are poor people and they sometimes need help. Dreams of isolated, sustainable, and happy people are just that except in the rarest of circumstances. Survival International's critique of development as it was imposed in the past are worthwhile but most likely need to be updated.

The Giver, The Iron Heel, Hunger Games, and dot dot dot

I just saw Jeff Bridges and Lois Lowry on the Colbert Report and listened to them talk about the Giver, the cinematic version of Lowry's wildly popular teen book. I read the book when my daughter Delilah did to see what was popular and I thought it was pretty good post-apocalyptic fiction, and WAY better than Hunger Games or Divergent. I tried both of these. Anyhow the theme in the Giver is that emotion, history, controversy and conflict are bio- and socio-engineered out of existence to ensure harmonious human life. Fair dinkum in terms of sci-fi themes and one of the better presented ones. But the issue I have with these works, and I love this genre, most likely more than any, just have a look at my early 20th century pre-post-ex-whatever-apocalyptic collection, is that they are so heavy handed to miss the truth about what is really going on with mind-numbing media and the current future we are living in. You don't think we are living in the future? Take a look at Star Trek, check out what the communicators are capable of, and recognize that we are post Star Trek. Anyhow, this relates to development and conservation in that so much of our conditioning is to look for the apocalyptic, dramatic examples of disaster and dysfunctionality (sorry, I hate to use "-isms, -ities", etc. but I am too lazy right now to avoid it). The Giver, Hunger Games, etc. are overly dramatic...ebola, drought, resource based conflict (cf. the Middle East), are enough examples of the future that we are starting to encounter. Get involved where you think you can make the change. As bad as you may think things can be, they can also be tremendously better, take a look at this: http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/african-successes-listing-the-success-stories 

Poverty reduction and bending the truth in development

My co-alumni and frequent social media user Zhe Yu Lee (https://www.facebook.com/zheyu.lee?fref=nf) has posted a very interesting article/essay/opinion piece from Al Jazeera (still one of the most interesting news and opinion sites out there) entitled Exposing the great 'poverty reduction' lie (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html) written by Jason Hickel  (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/profile/jason-hickel.html). (Apologies for font and size issues, this is still a new endeavor for me and I wanted to get this stuff down before tech issues overwhelmed me). Hickel's piece is incisive, factual, and damning of the BINGO and UN score keeping shenanigans that continue to serve those giving aid rather than those needing it. But what I really liked about the piece is that it reminded me that many metrics of development, poverty, aid, etc. are arbitrary, and beyond that, serve the interests of donors. I was also reminded how difficult it was for me to internalize 'happiness' metrics over consumption metrics as measures of development and well-being. But it is truly a marker of how blind our big brains can make us that I could not then, and have only recently begun to recognize, that development and its quantitative measures fall way short of human desires and needs. Zoh Laguna community members in southeastern Mexico measured happiness in family, health, and well-being. Material goods were appreciated but peripheral for most to personal achievement. It may be our burden to come up with mobile, and meaningful development measures to avoid arithmetic critiques of the UN in the future.

Why elephants now

The BBC published a factual and predictive article on elephant hunting and its future in Africa (http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28842965). There are good figures provided and a compelling case has been made for the eventual eradication of elephant if current trends continue (~7% or Africa's elephants killed annually--above the replacement level) or intensify. The usual suspects, the Chinese are blamed, though the article points out that this is a global problem. It also recognizes, unlike many of the other pieces written, that pachyderm populations vary across the African landscape with the south holding sufficient numbers and other parts (the east, central, etc.) at risk of elephant extirpation. I cannot argue with any of the main points made and have made feeble attempts earlier to contextualize elephant hunting in southern Africa (http://erickeys.blogspot.com/2014/08/from-huffington-post-nra-wants-to-kill.html). I don't see a need to rehash these arguments made earlier by more articulate colleagues (cf. William Moseley at Macalester College-http://www.macalester.edu/academics/geography/facultystaff/billmoseley/).
What interests me now is how elephants have made their way back into the mainstream media (not front page stuff but still present (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/100000-elephants-killed-across-africa-in-two-years-study-finds/; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/candace-calloway-whiting/tiny-baby-elephant-rescue_b_5689500.html; and plenty more on this topic). If we can look at news of Syria, Ferguson, South Sudan, or Los Angeles, shake our heads and move on what hope does the conservation of charismatic species have? Plenty, and here is where I become opinionated...I think that the prospect for elephants is probably better than that of their human relatives because the problem has a solution: eliminate poaching and manage herds responsibly, shame a villain (China and poor Africans involved in the ivory trade), and donate money to what seems to be a non-partisan and non-risky proposition. While elephants will disappear from the headlines in a few days or weeks (and will come back again, they always do) the pathway to their preservation is mostly clear and mostly painless for the West and partners and painful for the Chinese. A win-win all around?

From Huffington Post: NRA Wants to Kill Elephants

Childhood images of Dumbo and family afford elephants an iconic status in the United States and much of the west and their size and apparent human like emotions and characteristics make them ideal charismatic species. In certain parts of Africa elephants are at severe risk of extirpation (for a very thorough discussion of elephant issues check out WWF--   http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/endangered_species/elephants/african_elephants/).

 I was reading the news/opinion pages yesterday and came across this piece:
The NRA Is Quietly Fighting For Your Right To Kill Elephants For Their Ivory ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/12/nra-ivory-elephant-hunting_n_5671332.html?utm_hp_ref=miami&ir=Miami). The article is mainly a cheap shot at the NRA (and I am no defender, just think that the article could make a more important point) but points out the difficulty of regulating the trade in a product that is illegal to harvest in one place and legal in another. 

Ivory, taken legally (in Southern Africa for example) or illegally (in the East for example) ends up in the hands of hunters and traders. Because ivory is ivory and figuring out where it comes from is difficult poached ivory leaves the continent often through apparently legit means. This means that many conservation organizations oppose all legalized elephant hunting in Africa, and they have some very strong arguments to support their view. Unfortunately many poor communities in Southern Africa benefit from legal elephant hunts and use the income from the hunts to improve welfare. Total bans harm these folks, but partial bans encourage poaching. These are the type of sticky problems that conservation-with-development proponents encounter these days and it seems as though the solutions rely less on science and logic and more on ethics and values. As long as we have competing values--conservation and hunting ban; welfare and elephant hunting--we will be challenged as above. 

Charity, responsibility, and AID

I have not had the chance to write in a few days, life, as per usual, got in the way of best intentions. I had the chance to see an old friend in the Twin Cities (one who grew up in Central America, travels extensively, and has a great blue collar head on his shoulders) and meet a new friend. While in the cities the president of Somalia was in town to discuss plans for that country with the thousands of Somalis and other interested folks. While I did not go to the meetings or hear the address by the Somali president I did have the chance to listen to people think out loud about how Somalia, the homeless in America, and other sundry surprisingly related issues were vexing.
One of the most interesting aspects of these discussions revolved around the international development aid movement (for any number of reasons--guilt, soft power, NGO reproduction) and the continuing problem of money being used for unintended causes (e.g. corruption, warlord enrichment, ...). One side of the table (metaphorically speaking, it was actually at a bar) argued that aid fueled corruption and should be re-examined. The other side thought that aid organizations could not control uses of money and that processes internal in the receiving country had to rectify bad uses of good money.
This theme was repeated with the issue of homeless people in St. Paul. The Dorothy Day Center (the local well known center for homeless assistance) was seen as a magnet for the homeless who used the precious resources for drugs, alcohol, or for all I know Pokemon cards. A similar argument to the international aid argument was offered, that money should be withheld rather than be misspent.
These discussions/arguments arise frequently in the development-conservation-aid world and are most likely no closer to being solved than they were when they began, and indeed when they began prior to our current conceptions of aid (see Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm) for a scathing satire over this very issue from 1729) were formed.
Francisco Toro's outstanding blogs (http://boringdevelopment.com/ and http://850calories.com/) offer insight into the at times apparent futility of development work and I have mentioned Ed Carr's (http://www.edwardrcarr.com/opentheechochamber/) site as well. What these authors, and I guess I, have arrived at is that the key to interventions that work is helping folks achieve what they want and need. Funds may be misused or misappropriated because the intended use did not matter than much in the first place to the targeted groups or missed the mark. Your thoughts are welcome, it is late and I know I need to revisit this one.

Ebola, Africa, Ignorance

People are afraid of Africa. My friend Ed Carr pointed this out recently in a post on social media when he described his frustration that Americans believe that Ebola Fever is coming for them (http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/we-still-dont-know-how-deadly-the-ebola-outbreak-in-west-africa-will-be/). Spoiler alert: it isn't. I am not shushing anyone or stepping up on a pedestal. Africa, and the 2/3rds world are very, very different from the United States and from Western Europe (and honorary places like Japan/Aus/NZ...). Traffic sucks, people look different, sanitation is unusual from these perspectives. Seasoned workers and travelers get it and don't mind it, at least don't admit to minding it. But really what I just wrote speaks to folks who travel to the have not world; not those who see it only vis-a-vis the media.
If you learn about Africa and other scary places on tv, the internet, in books, in conversation you have every right to be terrified of ebola, boko haram, aids/hiv, hippos/buffalo, you name it. What good do we know about Africa except Paul Simon found some folks to play nice music for what should be in everyone's top ten albums of all time (for the unwashed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhyrIsvAp0A).  My friend and former student, Ryan Good (http://plaza.ufl.edu/ryangood/uf/home.html) wrote a  really compelling paper about how Africa appears in video games that needs to get more air time. BIG SPOILER--it ain't good but essentially the games repeat and highlight every scary thing you ever could of thought of and make it all in Africa.
My exegesis of public media of Africa and the developing world is easy and I am not the first, and definitely not the best to do it. But here is the kicker--YOU THINK AFRICA AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD SUCK BECAUSE POWERFUL PEOPLE WANT YOU TO THINK SO. Why would those in power want us to believe that the developing world doesn't work...  ...(for emphasis)--because there are very valuable resources in the developing world including, but not limited to minerals, wood, food, animals, people, labor, soccer players, ruggers, fish, plants, and on and on. If we are continually reminded that folks in the 2/3rds world cannot manage than how can we justify being opposed to pro-western dictators as long as they provide order? The current story about China's grab for Africa as horror? Who should be grabbing it?
Good information is hard to come by and causes for concern far outweigh causes for hope. But think of this, as horrible as 700 plus people dying of Ebola is, as horrible as what Boko Haram has done and will continue to do, most of the 800 MILLION PEOPLE (soon to crest a billion if the UN has any skill at prediction) in Africa, and more than 3 BILLION in the rest of the developing world raise families, live well, and have the same cares and concerns as you do. Don't be fatalistic but don't be complacent either.

Sports and underdevelopment

I love sports, playing them, watching them, arguing about them. I would watch the world cup of nearly anything because I like to watch national teams play against each other. After all, how often can we see a nation of three or four million dominate one of 1 billion, or in the case of the US 330 million (depending on what figure you want to use)? But the latest out of Qatar (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jul/28/qatar-world-cup-migrants-not-paid-building-office) and other reports from Sochi, Brazil, and South Africa make it clear that international sporting events do not foster development, especially in the case of nation-states somewhere on the development spectrum (this is worthy of probably 1,000 blog posts if not more alone). This issue, the high costs of international sporting events in financial, social, and environmental measures is well known so I am not breaking any ground there (eg. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brazil-world-cup-fails-to-score-environmental-goals/). What I still don't understand, and I have tried, is why states think that hosting these events indicates some amorphous development goal. In essence Brazil or Russia or Qatar host these events to 1. line the pockets of builders, etc. who are friends with the bidders but more importantly 2. TO ANNOUNCE TO THE WORLD THAT THEY HAVE ARRIVED. This type of thinking, essentially a middle school sensibility, is akin to the 13 year old who needs the newest athletic shoe, video game, and whatever else. Hosting these events embraces old, and hopefully soon outmoded, concepts of state legitimacy. As long as "developing/global south/you get the idea) states are compelled to arrive via developed world measures they will be behind. And actually, does anyone view S. Africa or Brazil differently after they hosted the World Cup without any major disasters (which is pretty much all we are evaluating)?
New models of nation-state achievement can look to the 1960s and 1970s non-aligned movement for cues and clues.

Ed Carr, livelihood approaches, and recognizing local conditions

During my career I have carried out research in the have and the have not world, and spaces in between. A lot of this work employed traditional asset or income based approaches, and a lot of it has been published. During all of these research experiences, however, it was clear that land users, resource exploiters (in the most literal sense of word--"users", just did not want to repeat myself), and others rarely pointed to material gain as their goal. Keeping score vis a vis stuff seems to be mainly a conceit of the have world. Householders mentioned creating a future for their newly educated children (Mexico for example), being left largely alone by the government (Guatemala), or decreasing life on the edge of subsistence (Botswana and Namibia) as their aspirations. Income, and assets were seen as vehicles to travel to these goals, not the goals themselves.

My friend and colleague Ed Carr (go here for his thoughtful blog and resource: http://www.edwardrcarr.com/opentheechochamber/) has just published a theory and practice article on using a livelihoods approach in economic development, resilience, and vulnerability reduction (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622814000824) (Carr, E. 2014. From Description to Explanantion: Using the Livelihoods as Intimate Governance (LIG) Approach. Applied Geography. 52: 110-122). I recommend the article to folks interested in development, fieldwork, and research methods and to open methods and expectations more generally. It is a great example of how critical reflection can lead to improved techniques and outcomes.

One of the strongest contributions of the livelihood as intimate governance approach as Ed presents it comes from the EXPLICIT recognition that local conditions, and household aspirations are central to fostering meaningful development and resilience enhancement. Another reminder and breath of freshened air into this discussion is Carr's key point that within households, aspirations may compete or align and that even when aligned, with alignment methods for achieving the aspirations may differ. This is like many other situations that many of us encounter in research, teaching, coaching, etc. We need to understand what is important to a community, a research project, a field team, or a team on the field. The LIG approach demands work upfront but can result in improved results for the most important stakeholders and ultimately for those who support development.

Inauguration: Hi, thanks for taking a second to read my wandering thoughts. I started this blog to keep track of my thoughts, and those of others, on topics of interest to me--economic development and conservation, coaching and teaching, and learning from experience. Thinking back to the start of my career as a geographer, teacher, coach, and parent I am amazed at how right I was. That is...how right I thought I was. The most remarkable revolution I have seen in research methods, writing, economic development and conservation, and coaching over the last 20 years is the embrace many of us now have of the partial view, the mistake, and the ability to learn from past experiences. In development circles we call this monitoring, evaluation, and learning or impact assessment. In coaching and teaching we refer to learning outcome assessments or facilitated feedback. In parenting I guess we refer to it as try, try again, try something different.
I will be commenting on news items, personal experiences, and things I learn from others from time to time and hope to hear from you. If you have a suggestion please let me hear it.