training applied workers

In my new position at Worcester Polytechnic Institute I have the privilege, and I mean this seriously and without irony, bright and hard-working undergraduates in developing skills to undertake applied work in various locations. The group I have this semester are focused on working with (mainly) Native American communities outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The projects are requested by local stakeholders and they all are interesting. The students submit to the work in good faith. But working with them reminds me how hard working in team-based situations can be when no one is clearly in charge, not to mention the difficulties of working across cultures. My answer, like much of my coaching, is to turn the question or issue back to the class to see how they would deal with a situation. I am reminded how exciting field work, especially when dedicated to making a difference, can be and how daunting at the same time. As I progress in my career I won't say I have learned that I know less, I think that is a cop out, but I have learned that that terrible unsatisfying phrase "it depends" is often the most meaningful thing you can say; well, that depends.

"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?