Problems with international development - I

The biggest problem I have observed with the mainstream international development discourse is its obsession with the search for innovation and big new ideas AND its near-complete neglect of the pursuit of doing better what have been the staple human development policies historically across countries. 

This obsession arises from the belief that there are several new and big ideas that can help countries leapfrog their development trajectories. This belief is part of the general narrative of progress as the adoption of new ideas and doing things differently. This narrative is amplified by the rapid changes, especially in the field of digital technologies (e-commerce, ride-sharing, social media, etc.), and their adoption in the private sector. 

There are at least three other contributors to this obsession with new ideas and innovations. One, aid agencies (bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions) and philanthropic foundations, especially but not only the latter, are for a variety of reasons primed to view the success of their interventions in terms of of (measurable) impact they create. This comes primarily from their program-driven approaches that seek to target the achievement of outputs and outcomes within finite time periods. The institutional principal-agent problems of these entities also bias them towards time-bound programs with quantifiable impact creation. 

Second, the opinion formation on international development is disproportionately influenced by the outputs of narrow quantitative economic research, which too are inherently biased towards new ideas and innovations. It has not helped international development that its ideology is captured by the field of economics, especially quantitative economics. As an example, I have struggled to understand why the World Bank should have a Chief Economist, and not a Head of Research drawn from a multi-disciplinary pool. 

Third, aid agencies, philanthropies, and opinion makers are all primarily based out of developed countries and despite their genuine best efforts struggle to appreciate the complex realities of the development contexts (the problem, the social milieu, the political economy, and state capability). Many also suffer from what Courtney Martin has called "the reductive seduction of solving other people's problems". 

Sometimes international development actors stumble on the right direction of engagement in development. The idea of systems transformation is an example. But these endeavours struggle to quantify or evaluate impact, thereby leaving them difficult to be packaged as a program or project that can be funded by aid agencies or philanthropists. In fact, there may be a fundamental problem with such framing - systems, especially those involved with messy and complex development challenges, rarely get transformed. Instead, they evolve and change, the pace of which can be hastened with appropriate policies/programs and their committed implementation. 

For policymakers and politicians in developing countries, this narrative of innovation and new ideas helping to leapfrog the entrenched bad equilibriums offers the misleading comfort of being able to do something in a finite time (specifically in their limited 2-5 year tenures) to address chronic and persistent problems and make perceptible enough (if not transformative) impact. 

So, everyone wants to support Edtech or Development Impact Bonds to improve student learning outcomes instead of engaging with teachers to motivate and capacitate them, and building the system's supervision and monitoring capabilities. Or support biometric or facial recognition attendance systems to monitor teacher or nurse/doctor attendance instead of nurturing the governance capabilities and local accountability to monitor and ensure compliance. Or support health insurance (or micro-insurance) or Medtech to improve health care instead of the hard slog of improving public health and primary health care delivery. Or erect smart meters to reduce electricity distribution losses instead of addressing the political economy of regular tariff increases and doing basic energy audits and enforcement. Or support cash transfers instead of running a good public distribution system for the provision of food items or building a well-targeted and cost-effective social safety net. Or support Agtech and micro-insurance to improve farm productivity and incomes instead of working with farmers to change behaviors by demonstrating good practices and working with them to adopt those practices. 

This search for new ideas and innovation is a serious distraction from the deep and tortuous struggle that societies, polities, and bureaucracies in developing countries have to undergo to figure out how best they can realise their development objectives. It weakens democratic accountability by distorting the development processes of prioritising objectives, selecting policies, and allocating scarce resources by governments. It comes in the way of the internal debates and struggles that are essential to creating the social and political consensus and collective commitment to national development objectives. 

At a purely operational level, the implementation of any new idea and innovation, how much ever simple its design, imposes non-trivial change management challenges and significant implementation costs on the frontline functionaries who are implementing the change and their immediate supervisory levels. It ends up displacing a disproportionate amount of time and effort from their regular and routine activities, with the result that final outcomes often turn out to be lower than earlier. 

Even if you disagree with everything I have said till now, and we were to indeed focus on new ideas and innovations, it still remains to be addressed as to how these new ideas and innovations will be implemented. And implemented with enough fidelity to create the expected impact. Here again, we will come back to the problems that come in the way of implementation of the existing programs. Just because we have a new idea does not mean that the chronic problem of the general implementation deficit in developing countries disappears. 

Now, I'm not saying we should swing to the other extreme and neglect innovation and new ideas. For sure ideas and innovations have their relevance at the margins and in some cases, especially with digital technologies, significant role to play in improving service delivery. And they should be encouraged and funded. But at a broader level, the argument is for a recalibration towards a different perspective of international development. One that prioritises getting the basic things right and good governance, and opportunistically adopting new ideas and innovation at the margins as required. 

Then there's the point about whether there are indeed great new ideas and innovations with the potential to have transformative or even significant impacts on development outcomes. I have long argued that there are no big untapped ideas in human development in developing countries. I'll discuss this in another post.