By Fred Pearce, originally published at Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog, CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE)
Timing is everything. And Michael Hobbes, an old aid hand and human rights consultant, got the timing spot on with his recent blog at The New Republic on how “big ideas are destroying international development”.
As the international aid community labours hard to deliver a set of the biggest of all big ideas – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), due to be laid before the UN next year – he argues that this is just about the worst way of doing good.
Our expectations are broken
Could be, he is right. It feels like everyone from the CGIAR network to small humanitarian agencies and environmental NGOs has got hooked on an idea that was, not so very long ago, very unfashionable: the notion that big is beautiful and any idea or project that won’t scale up and be endlessly replicable is a waste of time and money.
He may exaggerate. And aiming for the moon may always be no bad thing, even if we usually fail.
But his argument is that in too much do-goodery, the evidence base quickly gets left behind. To check if you are achieving what you hope, as you spend donors’ money, can be seen as defeatism. And an addiction to putting all that money on some big idea that “we can simply unfurl” compounds the problem.
The truth is more prosaic. Deworming, text books and PlayPumps will all work in some places – in some social environments and some landscapes — but not in others. There is no substitute for the hard graft of finding out which is which. Hobbes is a sceptic, not a cynic. “It’s not that development is broken, it’s that our expectations of it are,” he says.
Even the green revolution, one of the great “big ideas” of the late 20th century, while a spectacular success in much of Asia and the Americas, crashed in Africa, the hungry continent.
The CGIAR WLE is hosting a session on large-scale land restoration at the Global Landscapes Forum 2014 on Sunday, 7 December, 14.15
Where did we go wrong?
His dictum applies to presumed technical fixes, but also, I think, to big targets.
Take the Millennium Development Goals. The aid community threw the kitchen sink at halving the number of people without access to basic sanitation. But it ended up giving millions of people toilets that had nowhere to drain beyond the yard, the lane or the nearest pond. In cities like Dhaka, all that effort spread the risk rather than containing it.
No doubt the SDGs will do much the same.
Where did we go wrong? I think Hobbes is right to identify scale as a vital issue here. “We should all dream a little smaller,” he concludes. The aid world rather forgot what many of us thought had been learned a generation ago: that this kind of top-down prescriptive thinking was part of the problem.
It’s time to listen
But it is not just about scale. The aid community has also forgotten to ask would-be recipients what they think. The two problems are undoubtedly linked. The search for the big idea suggests that the big person who thought of it has the solution. It just needs rolling out.
A better way would be to think small, but also to ask and to listen. To stop playing the lord of the manor handing out Christmas charity.
Often what is required is time and attention to detail. It requires being specific to local people, local needs and local landscapes. It requires people who know their business spending time in the field rather than at their desks writing fund-raising proposals.
I am a journalist. I flit in and out of places. A week anywhere is a long time for me. So perhaps I am the last person to preach this message. But I have spoken to enough people at the receiving end of aid to know that what they crave is engagement, time, consistency and above all people who listen and act on what they are told. Not much aid work these days looks like that.(…)
Read full blog at CGIAR WLE
