Helping, Challenging, or USING Others?
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Helping, Challenging or Using Others?
Tony Klouda (December 2004)
In the manner of the comforting Victorian homilies that were embroidered as samplers and placed on a wall in the family home, offices of development workers throughout the world have the following little homily printed out or postered to their walls:
Go to the people. Learn from them. Live with them. Love them.
Start with what they know. Build with what they have.
But the best of leaders, when the job is done, when the task is accomplished,
the people say we have done it ourselves.
Drawings of Linus and Peanuts by Charles M. Schultz.
Chinese script is chapter 17 of the Dao de Jing
This might at first sight seem a very puzzling kind of homily for development workers to have for their reassurance, because not only does the homily pull people in two different directions at once, but in every aspect (bar the going) it is the precise opposite of what they do. ‘Development’ as currently practised is very much about achieving widespread acknowledgement of righteous interference in the lives of others – often in the absence of any expressed wish from them for such interference.
The reason the homily pulls people in two different directions is easy to explain – it is made up of two different statements with different origins and with entirely different meanings. The first two lines seem to be inventions of the late 20th Century. These are pegged on to the last sentence which comes from chapter 17 of the Dao de Jing – a compilation of Dao philosophies (which some attribute to Lao Zi) which reached its final form in the 3rd Century BC. The original point of this last sentence was to promote a system of government which ensures people have the freedom to sort things for themselves.[1]
Whatever its accuracy, however, development workers do indeed find some kind of reassurance, much as Linus does from his blanket, by the ambivalent homily. Why do they find this reassurance and why are they so needful of such reassurance?
The exploration of these two questions forms the basis of this paper.
What do development workers want?
The previous article[2] dealt with the contradictions and paradoxes of currently used participatory methods in rights-based approaches to development. It looked at the reasons why people in general, and development workers in particular, have difficulties in being critical of others, or in raising challenges. At the heart of these difficulties lie the identities which people choose to live with.
The point of that exploration was to suggest that unless such problems were addressed, it would be impossible to establish a rights-based approach to development – indeed the closing paragraphs of the exploration were suggesting that rights-based approaches as currently conceived rest on very shaky premises when applied to the reduction of inequalities and poverty.
The multi-billion dollar development industry is possibly the globalised industry which brings the most benefit to poorer countries through its provision of local employment, the transfer of foreign exchange and the trickle-through effect of the disbursement of local salaries to extended families.[3] This is no bad thing. It would be interesting to find out in this respect whether it is the world’s largest employer: there should be no shame in the understanding that a very large number of people work with development agencies merely to get a living[4], and see it more as a career opportunity than as an opportunity to help the lives of others. However, possibly just as many people work with such agencies because they really would like to make a difference to the lives of others whom they may see as less fortunate than themselves. At the least, a lot of people find comfort in the fact that even in a very small way they are somehow ‘doing good’ in the world.
It therefore often comes as a shock to some people to find that the work they are asked to do is often not in fact what they might have expected it to be doing, or what the agency advertises itself as doing, and that people in development agencies have the same spectrum of attitudes and interactions as everyone else. The range encompasses as much loving, caring, or sharing as in the rest of the world (and as much corruption, scheming, conflict, selfishness, competition, superficiality, politics and disingenuousness as well). A second aspect which hits those with any sensibility is that the people whom the agencies are supposed to benefit are also just as complex in their spectrum of attitudes and behaviour, in their range of selfishness, exploitation, acceptance, benevolence and interests.
These aspects make the implementation of the work very complex and often impossible. The development world is driven by a simple idea that it should somehow benefit those who are suffering, weak, exploited, brutalised, or poor. People who give money to others to ensure this happens want to see that their money is indeed being used wisely. And sometimes, as in natural disasters, the people who need immediate support are very obvious. But in many situations which demand humanitarian response, including in disasters, development workers have for ages known that the complexities soon multiply well out beyond the picture that is immediately presented – exploitation, greed, competition, power, politics and self interest as well as naïve interventionists often pose very great difficulties in decision-making even for those with considerable experience. It is not only the complex question of just who in the groups they serve are truly the ones who would benefit most from any assistance on offer, but also the level and type of support that will be most effective in the short, medium and long terms. In the vast majority of cases, the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable continue to miss out because it is simply too complex in any society to work out how the conditions of their lives can be improved without simultaneously enriching others and whilst ensuring the maintenance of their self-esteem and the improvement of the respect accorded to them by others in society.
The last thing donors (individual or corporate) want to hear about is complexity – they assume (wrongly) that the agencies have the competence to deal with any complexity. So the development agencies are driven to presenting their activities in a simplistic way, covering up the things that go wrong, and refusing to ask the fundamental questions that would reveal that their activities are not really hitting the mark.
An example of questions that are not asked:
A programme for Safe Motherhood is funded on the basis of promises by a development agency that it will motivate several villages remote from health services to institute a mechanism for transporting mothers with difficulty in pregnancy to a health service. No one dares ask the question about the percentage of women from any of those villages who already do get to the health centre – if you don’t ask the question, you don’t have the responsibility of dealing with the complexity. Yet when a new local worker does bother to ask the question of the local leaders the answer is readily forthcoming: “Yes, some women do go to the clinic. Someone drives them.” “So why is it that some women are not going?” the new worker asks. “The owner of the transport does not like those women” is the immediate answer. So the problem is not transport at all, but a social problem. The workers probably realised this all the time, as they are from the area, but it is far safer not to ask the question in the first place, to get the project going, and to demonstrate an end result with which the donor will be happy. The villagers, the workers and their managers collude silently in this deception.
The situation is made vastly more complex when the agencies move to take on the tackling of inequalities that lead to a disproportionate amount of suffering amongst some people. Workers then have to confront attitudes, interactions, behaviours, and differences between people which are not only difficult to disentangle, but which challenge the moral preconceptions of the workers, their own behaviours and attitudes and the reasons for which they believe they are working. In addition they have to face questions of the extent to which they are representative of the people they are supposed to be helping, and therefore of the legitimacy of what they do.
A final problem area is the language used more and more by development agencies which camouflages the fact that they are not representatives of people – language that includes a concept of ‘partnership’ which so often is seen by the workers as merely making use of local agencies to carry out pre-determined projects on behalf of their own agency.
In all this confusion and realisation it is hardly surprising that workers turn to the paraphernalia of comforting mechanisms to provide reassurance that they have some validity as human beings.
The paraphernalia of the ‘caring’ vision with which they want to identify include not only the type of homily at the start of the paper, but also include warming concepts and activities such as ‘participation’; ‘standing up for the rights of others’; rituals and games for bonding and establishment of group norms[5]; and the reduction of individual identity into generalised and sterilised concepts of ‘community’, ‘gender’, ‘the poor’, ‘the marginalised’, ‘the oppressed’, ‘youth’, or even ‘sexuality’.
As a result, development workers are left with desires for objectives which exist only cloudily in their imaginations. Such desires require constant re-fuelling and re-creation in order to avoid the dreadful realisation that they are unobtainable because they do not refer to any real world – or at least they refer to a world which is as real/unreal as the ‘floating world’ so beautifully described by Japanese artists of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Unfortunately, although these paraphernalia are the outcomes of the very positive and good desires in development workers and their supporters to be relevant to the lives of others, their cumulative effect is to distract attention from the ordinariness of the rea
lities of human interaction that create the inequalities on which they are supposed to focus.
It was this question that was left hanging at the end of the previous article. Does the current focus on rights-based approaches distract us from more problematic underlying issues of human interaction?
A return to the Dao de Jing is as good a place as any to start.
The Dao de Jing
The context of the line from the Dao de Jing referred to in the opening is a statement addressed to leaders encouraging them to adopt the hands-off Daoist philosophy – that leaders should not interfere with the people, that the Empire functions best when left alone. This makes the recent additions which suggest going to the people and loving them look rather paradoxical – far from mixing with them, one should stay well away from them!
The very beginning of the Dao de Jing[6] makes quite clear the preferred stance of the ruler:
“Therefore in governing the people, the sage empties their minds but fills their bellies, weakens their wills but strengthens their bones.
He always keeps them innocent of knowledge and free from desire, and ensures that the clever never dare to act.
Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.”
This is very far indeed from the kind of stance seemingly promoted by the modern homily. One of the reasons for the Daoist approach was that the Dao de Jing was itself a kind of homily. It was created in a time identical to our own in the 21st Century when warfare is continual and slaughter and maiming of civilians and combatants is carried out by governments and factions without discrimination or even interest.[7]
There are many strands to the Daoist thinking, all of them interlinked. Throughout all of the strands is the emphasis that ‘the people’ are not the undifferentiated mass, but represent a huge variety of beings with different degrees and types of interaction with one another, with different aptitudes and interests, and with different moral stances to what they do – their commonality is merely that they are subjects of a ruler, and it is in this sense that the term ‘people’ is used throughout.
The strands of thought include:
that a lot of the people are clever enough to get round most things put in their way by their leaders.
that being unimportant as a person (in a social sense) is far more powerful than being important – it gives you greater freedom of thinking and action and people tend to take little notice of you if you don’t seem to be important or a threat.
that power and knowledge corrupt – they allow people to be hoodwinked, and so power and knowledge should be obliterated.
that because of the diversity of people society is ultimately self-regulating, with winners and losers, strong and weak.
that trying to interfere in the lives of others only leads to a worsening of the situation, with the person who interferes ultimately losing or being exploited.
Against this there is the constant refrain of the need to be compassionate. Unfortunately the Dao de Jing is not clear on specifics. Instead, all that one is left with at the end is the suggestion that the leader creates the environment for freedom – a suggestion repeated by Kant some 2,300 years later.
The Analects of Confucius
In the Analects, which were written slightly later than the Dao de Jing, Confucius takes a more actively moral stand by framing compassion in terms of benevolence. He places benevolence in the highest possible regard, but equally says that benevolence is very hard (if not impossible) to achieve because of self-interest. In pursuit of how to be benevolent, two aspects were very important for Confucius – knowledge (in marked distinction to the Daoists, who wished that knowledge should be suppressed) and the meeting of obligations.
These two aspects are enormously important as they provide a marked contrast between the Chinese philosophy of development in the 5th Century BC to the one practised in the 21st Century. In the 21st Century the search for knowledge comes after a development worker has made their mind up about the issue – thus the forms of social analysis currently practised are mostly there to justify a preconception of power relations or inequalities or behaviour. In the 5th Century BC it was the opposite: in order to discover how to be benevolent, and for whom, it was necessary to have a full understanding of human interactions and the obligations in that particular culture. The stark contrast is the same with regard to rights. While Confucius saw the following of obligations as the way in to the achievement of rights, in the 21st Century many seem to want to concentrate on establishing rights before people have to meet their obligations to one another.[8]
So far, then, the older Chinese philosophers don’t at this stage of the argument seem to have much in common with the development efforts that are made today – except for the notions of compassion and benevolence which shine through, and this is the one area in which the philosophies
seem to agree. Benevolence and compassion are at the very summit of people’s aspirations, and all seem to agree that paternalism, ignorant charity and patronising attitudes are to be avoided.
Russia, 19th Century
Whilst Taoism, Buddhism and other ancient oriental development philosophies have been extensively abused in the name of development, it is surprising that few if any development workers have taken to heart the more recent lessons of development efforts in Russia in the 1860s to 1870s. Orlando Figes pictures the initial enthusiasm very well in his book Natasha’s Dance:[9]
“In the summer of 1874 thousands of students left their lecture halls in Moscow and St Petersburg and travelled incognito to the countryside to start out on a new life with the Russian peasantry. Renouncing their homes and families, they were ‘going to the people’ in the hopeful expectation of finding a new nation in the brotherhood of man. Few of these young pioneers had ever seen a village, but they all imagined it to be a harmonious community that testified to the natural socialism of the Russian peasantry. They thus convinced themselves that they would find in the peasant a soul mate and an ally of their democratic cause. The students called themselves the Populists (narodniki), ‘servants of the people’ (the narod), and they gave themselves entirely to the ‘people’s cause’. Some of them tried to dress and talk like peasants, so much did they identify themselves with their ‘simple way of life’.
“By dedicating themselves to the people’s cause - to the liberation of the peasantry from poverty and ignorance and from the oppression of the gentry and the state - the students hoped to redeem their own sin: that of being born into privilege.”
So far, so very reminiscent of the homily modern development workers hang on to. Of course, the superficiality of what they were doing soon shone through the cracks. Orlando Figes continues:
“Some of the Populists who left their parents’ homes to live in ‘labouring communes’ where everything was shared (sometimes including lovers) according to the principles set out by the radical critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his seminal novel What Is to Be Done (1862). Here was a novel that offered its readers a blueprint of the new society. It became a bible for the revolutionaries, including the young Lenin, who said that his whole life had been transformed by it. Most of these communes soon broke down: the students could not bear the strains of agricultural work, let alone the taste of peasant food, and there were endless squabbles over property and love affairs. But the spirit of the commune, the ascetic lifestyle and materialist beliefs which the students had imbibed from Chernyshevsky, continued to inspire their rejection of the old society. This generation gap was the subject of Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Children (1862) (often mistranslated as Fathers and Sons). It was set in the student protest culture of the early 1860s when the call of youth for direct action in the people’s name opened up a conflict with the ‘men of the forties’, liberal men of letters like Turgenev and Herzen, who were content to criticize the existing state of affairs without addressing the future. Nineteenth-century Russia had its ‘sixties’ movement, too.”
“The literary image of the Russian peasant in the early nineteenth century was by and large a sentimental one: he was a stock character with human feelings rather than a thinking individual. Everything changed in 1852, with the publication of Turgenev’s masterpiece, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. Here, for the first time in Russian literature, readers were confronted with the image of the peasant as a rational human being, as opposed to the sentient victim depicted in previous sentimental literature.”
“The question of the peasant may have been the question of the day. But every answer was a myth. As Dostoevsky wrote:
‘The question of the people and our view of them ... is our most important question, a question on which our whole future rests ... But the people are still a theory for us and they still stand before us as a riddle. We, the lovers of the people, regard them as part of a theory, and it seems not one of us loves them as they really are but only as each of us imagines them to be. And should the Russian people turn out not as we imagined them, then we, despite our love of them, would at once renounce them without regret.’
“Each theory ascribed certain virtues to the peasant which it then took as the essence of the national character. For the Populists, the peasant was a natural socialist, the embodiment of the collective spirit that distinguished Russia from the bourgeois West. Democrats like Herzen saw the peasant as a champion of liberty - his wildness embodying the spirit of the Russia that was free. The Slavophiles regarded him as a Russian patriot, suffering and patient, a humble follower of truth and justice, like the folk hero Ilia Muromets. They argued that the peasant commune was a living proof that Russia need not look beyond its national borders for guiding moral principles. ‘A commune,’ declared one of the movement’s founding members, Konstantin Aksakov, ‘is a union of the people who have renounced their egoism, their individuality, and who express their common accord; this is an act of love, a noble Christian act.’”
“Turgenev gave a portrait of the types who answered [the student radicals’] call. Though he saw through the illusions of the Populists, he managed to convey his admiration, too. These ‘young people are mostly good and honest’, he wrote to a friend on finishing the novel in 1876, ‘but their course is so false and impractical that it cannot fail to lead them to complete fiasco’.
The Peasant Wedding Dance (2nd State), Pieter Brueghel (the Elder) 1570.
Engraving by Pieter van der Heyden (born 1530).[10]
“Which is just how it turned out. Most of the students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasants, who listened humbly to their revolutionary sermons without really understanding anything they said. The peasants were wary of the students’ learning and their urban ways, and in many places they reported them to the authorities. … The socialist ideas of the Populists were strange and foreign to the peasantry, or at least they could not understand them in the terms in which they were explained to them. One propagandist gave the peasants a beautiful account of the future socialist society in which all the land would belong to the toilers and nobody would exploit anybody else. Suddenly a peasant triumphantly exclaimed: ‘Won't it be just lovely when we divide up the land? I'll hire two labourers and what a life I'll have!’”
Such a history could have been as easily lifted from any of thousands of development efforts throughout the world today.
So: compassion in abundance. Knowledge almost non-existent. Extensive waving of the flag of rights. Obligations none. And benevolence? Not even a chance. Dostoevsky (as was quoted above) had summed it up brilliantly. The ‘people’ (and for ‘people’ you can exchange any of the categories in common use today referred to before, such as ‘marginalised’, ‘oppressed’, ‘youth’, ‘women’) are still a theory for us and they still stand before us as a riddle – they are part of a theory, and it seems not one of us loves them as they really are but only as part of a theory. We are perhaps a little closer to understanding the need for a comforting homily.
The Anti-Politics Machine?
Some people, on reading of the Russian experience, will have dismissed it slightly contemptuously. With a perhaps superior air they might have spoken of the naivety of that development approach in terms of its understanding of politics. Since the 1750s (e.g. in pre-revolutionary France) there has been a lot of anger amongst development workers about the political processes that lead to inequality and the disproportionate burden of suffering and exploitation amongst those who are poorest and least powerful. This anger was well expressed in James Ferguson’s book[11] about the World Bank programmes in Lesotho in 1982 and the complicity of NGOs and bilateral organisations in that approach. The content of the book was true to the title – it examined the de-politicisation of development in favour of a bland technical development approach (or ‘discourse’ as he more accurately described it).
It is therefore important to start wondering if the current trendy concern in development agencies about rights is in fact reversing the trend he so meticulously delineated. Are we today really putting the politics back into development when we start thumping the barrel about rights?
In one sense we are, since it is a political process to achieve agreement on rights by all sides, and it is clearly political to be involved with activities such as:
monitoring abuses of human rights;
obtaining redress for the victims of human rights abuse;
relieving need among the victims of human rights abuse;
research into human rights issues;
educating the public about human rights;
providing technical advice to government and others on human rights matters;
contributing to the sound administration of human rights law;
commenting on proposed human rights legislation;
raising awareness of human rights issues;
promoting public support for human rights;
promoting respect for human rights among individuals and corporations;
international advocacy of human rights;
eliminating infringements of the prohibitions on torture, slavery, extra-judicial killing, arbitrary detention and disappearance.
All these are thoroughly legitimate activities for outsiders who have no local legitimacy in terms of representation. However, in relation to reducing the inequalities between people that lead to disproportionate suffering by some, it is not at all clear that a focus on rights will really help.
Before we look at this in more detail, there is one aspect of Ferguson’s argument which is worth taking on. He identifies very clearly how the World Bank created the Lesotho strategy with total disregard for the existing political context. Ferguson suggested that this was not a deliberate move on the behalf of the officials – it was more that the interventions proposed were merely what development agencies do, and to bring in the idea of political solutions would be to step outside of the terms of reference and competence of the development officials. He never goes much further than this, except to do a lot of moaning about that situation and how it led to gross failure and further exploitation of a section of the population. This is a pity, because he missed the chance of pointing to the fact that the discourse of development is driven not only by the need for nations to maintain unfair power relationships but also by the need for politicians and development agencies to justify to their populations and donors the expenditures on development which they make. In doing this a vital aspect is to assure the compassionate donors that the agencies have indeed identified ‘victims’, the ‘powerless’, the ‘poorest’ or the ‘suffering’ who as a result of their particular intervention will have their suffering reduced immediately. Precisely because they are not representatives of the people who are supposed to benefit, and because they are not elected by them, it is vital that all talk of politics is kept to a simplistic analysis of power and oppression that does not take into account local complexities: if they were to enter into such complexities they would immediately have to seek local legitimacy.
It is not therefore the agencies that are at fault. It is the perpetual need to feed the fantasies of the donating and voting public which drives the need for superficiality and appearance. The world of development is indeed a floating world dependent on illusion and the suspension of disbelief.
The clash of cultures?
One of the arguments that created problems for those working in relation to rights was not only the apparent diversity of rights across cultures, but also the diversity of obligations and behaviours that entitled people to the rights in each culture. Confucius struggled with this question just as much as modern practitioners of development have done.
Against this diversity, a number of people have pointed to the globalisation of behaviours and cultures that would seem to imply a convergence of rights as these are linked to accepted behaviours and interactions.
Thus Adam Kuper, in a recent review of a biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss[12] (one of the foremost analysts of cultural diversity), said the following:
“Now, however, the variety of ways of life in the world is being destroyed by modernity: the long historical interchange between cultural traditions is coming to an end.”The same thought appears in a more sophisticated form in a book by C.A. Bayly:[13]
“As world events became more interconnected and interdependent, so forms of human action adjusted to each other and came to resemble each other across the world. The book, therefore, traces the rise of global uniformities in the state, religion, political ideologies, and economic life as they developed through the nineteenth century. This growth of uniformity was visible not only in great institutions such as churches, royal courts, or systems of justice. It was also apparent in what the book calls “bodily practices”: the ways in which people dressed, spoke, ate, and managed relations within families.
Those rapidly developing connections between different human societies during the nineteenth century created many hybrid polities, mixed ideologies, and complex forms of global economic activity. Yet, at the same time, these connections could also heighten the sense of difference, and even antagonism, between people in different societies, and especially between their elites. Increasingly, Japanese, Indians, and Americans, for instance, found strength in their own inherited sense of national, religious, or cultural identity when confronted with the severe challenges which arose from the new global economy, and especially from European imperialism. The paradox that global forces and local forces “cannibalised” or fed off each other, to use words of the social theorist, Arjun Appadurai, is well known to the contemporary human sciences. But this ambivalent relationship between the global and the local, the general and the specific, had a long history before the present age. So, in the nineteenth century, nation-states and contending territorial empires took on sharper lineaments and became more antagonistic to each other at the very same time as the similarities, connections, and linkages between them proliferated. Broad forces of global change strengthened the appearance of difference between human communities. But those differences were increasingly expressed in similar ways.”
This tendency would seem to suggest that those who propose universal rights might have their jobs made easier. Unfortunately for practitioners of ‘development’, this gradual universalisation of rights only serves to reveal the underlying problem much more clearly than before.
The homogenisation of culture merely reveals the underlying differences
The homogenisation of culture in parts of the world[14] is gradually revealing something that was already well known to the Daoists. Once rights and obligations are agreed in any culture, one is left with the real reasons for the inequalities between people. Such inequalities cannot be simply analysed in terms of power relationships – rather it is the differences that lead to power inequalities.
These differences were to some extent analysed in the previous paper, as part of the exploration of how identity and social position are interlinked with personality in a multi-dimensional interactive process. They include differences in sexuality, greed, jealousy, anger, frustration, contentment, love, self-esteem, personal history, social support, attitude to loneliness, desire for companionship or membership of a group, and a vast panoply of factors under the influences of society, individuals and genetic make up that make up what Kant called ‘the crooked timber of humanity from which no straight thing was ever made’.
Such differences cannot be dealt with simply by declaiming rights or responsibilities. People are simply not homogenous enough to allow for universal laws, and, as the Daoists understood very deeply, people want to maintain their diversity – even if it means suffering or giving up some particular pleasures or desires in order to do so. Confucius and those that followed created the enormously confusing discourse with which we still live – that it is important to do something for ‘the people’ and that somehow ‘the people’ will respond. Dostoevsky, as has been mentioned, pointed out the difficulty of conceptualising ‘the people’ in this way without identifying the characteristics (other than arms and legs and suchlike) that unite them as a single category.
This is far from saying that a regulatory process to ensure rights and obligations are met is not necessary. Of course it is necessary. It is just that once that is in place it is unlikely of its own to reduce inequality. This is seen in every nation today – inequality in each Western society has in fact been growing more rapidly over the last 50 years as the homogenisation of cultures has gathered speed.
In the words of the UNDP: “Among the 73 countries with data (and 80% of the world`s people), 48 have seen inequality increase since the 1950s, 16 have experienced no change and only 9 – with just 4% of the world’s people – have seen a fall.”
And yet it is the stated business of most development agencies to tackle inequalities.
It looks more and more like the ‘rights’ issue is a bit of a red herring when it comes to dealing with inequalities.
Back to challenging
Given that we can’t follow the Confucian state of withdrawal to lead a moral life in the expectation that others will put to rights the problems that we see, what are the possibilities for improvement of our approach?
It was suggested in the previous article that in order to help societies reflect on reasons for inequalities in development, in education, in wealth, in economic opportunity, in employment or in health, it would be important to raise challenges to the leaders and institutions responsible for advocacy, social support, social regulation, debate, planning and service provision. This was because current participatory methodologies are very inadequate: they are either designed to ensure a group of people move in a direction determined by a project or else they are based on chance occurrences resulting from the exploration of a particular situation – which are then reported as successes. The exercises that are most often used try to bring people together and in order to do so either neglect or deliberately suppress the tensions existing between members of the groups that are assembled by project holders.
The notion of challenging carries with it a recognition that there is an enormous range of inter-relationships, behaviours, methods of coping, personality types, desires, hatreds, jealousies and preferences within the society, and the challenge itself is based on that recognition – given all those interactions, can the society do anything to improve the health/ education/ economic opportunity or other aspect of development with which the development agency involved is concerned?
In this way a challenge can never be judgemental. It starts with a fact: the majority of people are ok with regard to a particular parameter that is measurable in objective terms (say in terms of social support, or behaviour, or health, or education) and some are not ok. That is a fact that can be readily agreed by everyone. The challenge then becomes two-fold: to agree on the variety of causes and factors that influence that difference, and to establish mechanisms agreed by all to change the situation.
The challenging is therefore not a project, since the outcome of the challenge can not be constricted into the time-frames and planning methods that are necessary for projects to be funded. However, it is absolutely possible for development workers who are involved in forcing people to accept the projects that are doled out from on high to use the opportunity of their time with groups to raise challenges and work with the groups through their explorations during the time frame of the project.
Challenges are also much better at preserving the dignity of all those who are involved in the exploration, because it is clear that neither party has a particular agenda to follow, the answers can only come from the groups themselves, and they are based on the observation and articulation of observed facts rather than points of view.
In such a way it is possible to balance the Daoist idea of a hands-off approach with the practical limitations of current development practice. A challenge leaves it open as to whether people will engage with that challenge.
In order to raise such challenges, it is vital that those who do so will have sufficient local knowledge to allow their challenges to be both meaningful and accepted – unlike the situation described on page 5 with the Russian peasants in 1874. Because the majority of project workers are from a culture similar to the one in which they work, they will have that knowledge, but, as suggested in the previous article, their system of management will have to recognise and reward the use of that knowledge for such challenges.
Examples of challenges
Malawi
In Malawi, a project was designed to improve the performance of the health services by increasing interaction between a range of village representatives and the staff of health centres. As part of this they ‘encouraged’ the villagers to do a mapping exercise which covered a range of parameters including sex of the person heading the household, childhood illness in the previous year, childhood death in the previous year, adult death in the previous year, number of orphans, presence of a person with a chronic illness or a disability. Their aim had been merely to accumulate percentages and to see if over time the percentages were reduced. However, analysis of the figures by household revealed one very startling fact. Of the 26 households (in 295) with disability or chronic illness, 20 were in the ‘extremely poor’ category, 5 in the ‘moderately poor’ and only one in the ‘relatively well off’ category. There was a highly statistically significant correlation between poverty and disability/ chronic illness.
In the diagram of 100 households, the 9 have at least one person with chronic illness or disability, the 6 red ones are in the ‘extremely poor category’, the 2 green ones in the ‘moderately poor’, and the one beige one in the ‘relatively well off’ category.
This allowed the members of the aid workers to bring this observable distribution (a distribution established by the villagers themselves) to the attention of the leaders and the health services and then to raise a fundamental challenge. Why does this correlation between poverty and chronic illness exist? Is it that the chronic illness/disability leads to poverty because the people can no longer fend for themselves, or is it that poverty makes one more exposed to chronic illness and disability? In the situation of those villages, it seemed that the first answer was the more likely.
The second challenge was more fundamental. Who is responsible for improving the conditions and support offered to those households? At the moment, neither health services nor the existing community supportive mechanisms in the society are working for those households. So how do the services and the community institutions plan for this?
There was no easy answer. The job of the project workers was to keep prodding at this obvious festering sore – whilst the original project continues in its time-bound, objective-laden course.
The experience of this process of challenge allowed a programme in Malawi to explore this idea in a more structured way. Supposing one were to build on this experience and to see if villages in the same area could look at a particular health example to (a) establish whether differences exist between households which relate to support and service mechanisms, and (b) see if leaders and the institutions would be prepared to do something about the situation.
The aspect of health that was chosen as a focus was the differences in support given to mothers before birth, during birth, and during the time of care of the new-born. Even in the very first phase of the exploration, differences between households and mothers came to light. Thus young girls who were unmarried were given far less support than others, and had a higher rate of infant illness and other problems. A challenge in relation to this for the community members (who included the churches, schools, leaders, health workers, Traditional Birth Attendants, School Parent Associations) is therefore who will help improve the support to the young girls who don’t currently have support? For example, will schools give some education and advice about child birth and caring for infants to young girls who become pregnant? Such decisions can only be made by the community stakeholders. The job of the aid workers is to bring people together to argue out the challenge. It is not the responsibility of the aid workers to find an answer, or even to ensure that the community works on it. The project’s function in this case is to document all the stages of the exploration and to see how people react to the challenges at various levels.
Uganda
A similar process of documentation of responses to challenges was seen in Uganda, where aid workers were bringing all those involved in working for the sexual and reproductive health of young people, and all those who are involved in advocacy in relation to policy and law, in order to find out the types of young people who are in no need of support, the types of young people who are receiving support and who benefit from existing policies and legislation, and the types of young people who fall through the gaps. The challenge, after the analysis, was whether community members could get together to have a continued focus on the problem and to come up with plans that improve the situation. Again, the job of the aid workers was merely to bring the stakeholders together, to help them define the problem if necessary, to provide a constant set of challenges if things are not changing, and then to document what happens.
The continuing need for comforters
However, a major problem remaining, and the principal reason for this article, is to separate out the ways in which a challenge is carried out. Will the challenge be helpful? Or is it just a means of using others to serve another agenda?
This question is of course rhetorical. It can only be answered personally. As has been said, Confucius found this question very difficult even for himself – he remained suspicious that he was not a truly benevolent person. He recognised that it is probably impossible to get over the fact that personal interest gets in the way. Such personal interest would include, for example, all those things that make up your identity, your preferences for the type of group or social situation to which you would like to belong, or for which you would like to be recognised.
It has been suggested in these two articles that it is extremely unlikely that development agencies, dependent as they are on the whims of funding and the superficial politics that drive that funding, will ever embark on a process of challenge that lays open their own practises and philosophies to question, or which gives local people the full right to tell them to go away if they are found to be unnecessary. That may be one reason why their philosophies, if they exist at all, are so hard to pin down – few if any development agencies can be held accountable for anything other than to their donors for their expenditure because they can commit to nothing more than rhetoric. However, this very vagueness is a god-send for development workers who want to achieve something locally.
When it comes to work that involves anything more than a direct and simple humanitarian response, development workers who have any kind of a conscience (and the widespread existence of the homilies and other comforting mechanisms demonstrates that there are indeed a very large numbers of such workers) have to stomach the hypocritical aspects of the development industry in order to use to the fullest possible extent the opportunities provided by the vagueness of the industry to explore change for the good. There are plenty of ways in which development workers can use projects as opportunities to do something worthwhile with their communities whilst they are with them. In this way they can raise challenges of the type described, and by doing so they can learn about their own inadequacies of thinking and prejudice if they are revealed – they will become far better, and more valuable, people as a result.
There were two questions posed at the beginning of this article: why do development workers find reassurance in the homilies, and why are they so needful of such reassurance?
There must be hundreds of reasons why people use such reassurances, and all of them stem from the desire to be good people. For some, the reassurance comes from their immediate social context – others around them adopt the same formulae, play the same games in meetings, re-iterate that the values are good ones – and they can come to believe that even if the development agency isn’t quite meeting these expectations, at least its heart is in the right place. Others will set up the homilies as personal aspiration, much in the way people in various religions place pictures of those who have done lots of apparently good things, or like people who put up pictures of film stars or personal heroes in their particular field of work. Others will put it up as a kind of statement that despite what they see going on around them, their personal values will remain intact.
In all these cases the homily is there precisely because it reflects something the person does not do.
In the particular homily we started with there are a number of ingredients that would appeal to any person with a tendency to benevolence: humility, the understanding that often people are much cleverer than suggested by the programmes offered, and the idea that dignity is central to development. It may also be that workers interpret the Daoist laissez-faire philosophy (which wants people to work things out for themselves) as a statement about ownership – that by working alongside people at a problem, the people as much as the workers can feel they have contributed to the answer.
Homilies are vital to keep hope alive. They reflect the good nature of the workers who keep them. With this understanding and the approach to challenging that has been described, one can develop the homily that was discussed at the beginning of this article as follows:
Go to the development agencies.
Learn from them.
Live with them.
Love them if it helps.
Start with what they know.
Build with what they have.
But the best of development workers, when the job is done,
When the task is accomplished, say:
“We have done it with the people ourselves”.
[1] D.C. Lau in 1963 translated chapter 17 of the Dao de Jing as:
“The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
Next comes the ruler they love and praise;
Next comes one they fear;
Next comes one with whom they take liberties.
When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.
Hesitant, he does not utter words lightly.
When his task is accomplished and his work done
The people all say, 'It happened to us naturally.'”
[2] Thinking Critically, Speaking Critically, 18th November 2004
[3] The United Nations alone (not including all other development agencies) in Kenya brings in more foreign exchange than horticulture, tourism, coffee or petroleum products. In 1998, direct and indirect benefits to the country amounted to more than $350m (£210m), second only to tea as source of exchange and equivalent to 3 per cent of the country's gross national product, or 19 per cent of exports. The amount exceeded the government's combined budget allocations to roads, health and social welfare.
[4] This could well apply to the bulk of the administrative and support staff, who far outnumber those who have direct project functions. The various agencies who supply and support the aid agencies could also be factored in. Tourism runs close, as there is often little to distinguish ‘development’ from tourism.
[5] Such as the participatory games played by so many at the start of group meetings, or as ‘ice-breakers’ during meetings.
[6] Chapter 3. Translation as before by D.C. Lau
[7] The interest is so little that it is now a policy of warring governments not even to count civilian deaths, but just to count the deaths of their own military.
[8] There is one other aspect in which Confucius differed importantly from the Taoists. Although Confucius also seems to have the same hands-off philosophy for a good ruler as the Taoists, for him the people will only be governed well by a ruler who demonstrates a high moral code of practise, and his belief was that the mere observation of this by the people will lead them to following similar behaviour.
[9] Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, The Penguin Press 2002, p220.
[10] From the gallery of R. S. Johnson Fine Art
[11] The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho Cambridge University Press 1990
[12] Adam Kuper, Men's Work, London Review of Books, Vol. 26 No. 12 24 June 2004. The review was of a book by Christopher Johnson called Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years, Cambridge
[13] The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, C.A. Bayly, Blackwell, 2004
[14] Any homogenisation that exists is really only amongst the relative minority of peoples that intermingle and have access via media to other cultures.