Development 'Assistance': Go Away! No, stay!

Last week I wrote a post on 'Is 'Development' a declining industry?'. The comments on that post have raised an important critique: outsiders should not come in and give pre-scripted advice (especially advice with money or guns attached to it if one does not comply) to countries. They suggest that sustainable development means leaving it to the local people to figure it out themselves - 'assistance' should only come when it is asked for.

There are some excellent examples around the world of organisations who do just that - and who get wonderful results for sustainable development. One of my favorites is the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. It has one of the best track records I know - 75 years of advancing development in the USA. It was at the front of the labour movement waaaaaay back in the day, and later became one of the hot houses for the civil rights movement, supporting such change-makers as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Pete Seeger. These days, they continue to work on race relations, mountain top removal, and other pressing issues in the deep south. They have a very strict policy - they will not move into an issue or a community without first being asked to do so by the members of that community. Nor will they tell that community or concern what to do.

Indeed, I don't know very many people who will actively disagree with that idea. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2003 - signed by every OECD country - included an attempt to do that - to insist that country 'ownership' of any development plan was crucial. It was supposed to make ODA demand-led, not supply-driven.

But system has been developed that works a certain way, and all sides have come to at least mostly accept (with complaints) their respective roles - changing it is easier said than done. DfID recently tried to pull out of Brazil much more strongly - and met with strong resistance from their local partners, who knew that if Britain left, many of the programmes they'd been depending on would leave, and they did not trust their government to fill the gap. When DFID says, yes, but if we stay, your government will continue to fail to provide you with these services because we are doing it, they say, we know that, but that will take a long time (if ever) and you are here now. And what about the British tax payer - does she want immediate relief over long term country-ownership?

And who really knows best? Well, of course the people in the country... sometimes. Sometimes outsiders really can see more clearly than insiders - and the insiders might not know enough to know that. As anyone who has had a good therapist or a good doctor knows, it is often a tense and challenging process to figure out whose knowledge counts - and how. People often resist figuring out the answers for themselves - or dont know what is the critical piece of knowledge that they already have that can be used in a given situation. 'Assisting' other people is always more of an art form than a science, and there are precious few individuals- much less organisations - who really have it down. So I agree - sustainable Development Assistance should be demand-led. It should involve more listening than talking, and no blueprints. But doing that - and doing it well - is something we have not, collectively (on all sides), learned to do - nor does the system in which we work support it.