Date: 2024-11-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0913-TVM-MMW-000002
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TrueValueMetrics ... Peter Burgess Manuscript
Making Management Work for Relief and Development |
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Chapter 2
The Failure of Development ... Who Cares? |
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Essentially ... nobody
Does anyone really care about failure in the relief and development sector? The quick answer seems to be that nobody cares. Certainly not the rich and powerful. If they did, then the situation would have never got to this state in the first place, and it would have been fixed long ago. The failure of relief and development is obscene. But mostly its impact is far away from the people who are comfortably off, and are able to live the good life. Ordinary people do not want homelessness in their neighborhood, but homelessness that one never sees is not a problem ... at any rate, it is someone else's problem. And organizations involved in relief and development seem to be comfortable with the disastrous status quo. For the staff there is job security as long as there is funding to respond to disaster. Except the poor Maybe the poor do care, but what can they do about it. As a practical matter, the poor have little access to any of the tools or resources that they need to climb out of their poverty. They do not have a voice, and even if they did, would anyone listen? Worse, the poor have stopped talking. There is a level of hopelessness that is numbing. The poor get by, but they have given up. Nobody is in their corner ... nobody in their local government and nobody in the international community. Maybe it would be smart to care Whether the rich and powerful like it or not, the technology and the techniques that enabled their own wealth is going to make it possible for others to start a climb towards a more affluent life. In the 1960s a barrel of oil was just $3.50. In 1973 OPEC was able to create a cartel of petroleum exporting countries and move the price to $13.50 a barrel. The balance of global power changed in a dramatic manner. Perhaps it was the biggest single economic event in all of history, and it might have been the end of wealth creation in the old money centers of the world (London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, etc). As it turned out, it was not. The OPEC countries were co-opted into the money center system and a crisis for the “north” was averted ... at any rate for some decades. An emerging community of anti-north activists Young people are learning all over the world. People in the “south” are not only learning what we in the “north” want them to learn, but have learned how to learn for themselves, how to analyze and draw their own conclusions. Many are figuring out that the world is not the way it should be. It takes a lot of explaining why some places and people are so wealthy while others are in abject poverty ... how some groups are so rich, and some are so poor. The rationale that “the poor have always been with us” is not a very useful argument when trying to explain why someone is poor, has no job, has hungry sick children, and has no reason for hope. What a community of anti-north activists will become is worth thinking about. Maybe it explains why increasingly people hate countries like the USA are want to do anything to inflict hurt. And worse It is reasonable to argue that it is a rather small additional step for anti-north activism to morph into anti-north terrorism. All too often the face of the “north” presented in the “south” is very negative, especially the “north” as represented by government and its official policies ... and so much of what is being done seems to be simply in the interest of the “north” and nobody else. By early in 2006, the price of a barrel of oil passed $70.00 a barrel making huge profits for every oil producing nation and the oil companies. Rich people can handle the increased cost of gas (petrol), but for poor people it is a problem. The crude oil price increases of the 1970s was handled ... but it is less clear that the price increases 30 odd years later are going to be as easily handled. The old “north” needs to pay attention. The global fund flows are not the same any more, and North America and Europe (and Japan) are a lot more fragile than is safe. This will certainly be exploited when the “anti-north” is good and ready. The “north” would be well advised to think through what it is that they can do that would be helpful. Maybe it is too late ... but maybe there is time to make some changes. Also a “north” community of advocates for reform There has been a small community of advocates for reform for many years. There has been a steady stream of critiques of development, and a lot of advocacy for change going back as long as I have been interacting with the relief and development sector. In the late 1980s books like Hanson's “Lords of Poverty”, and in the 1990s books like Catherine Caufield's “Masters of Illusion” posed important questions and documented problems taking aim mainly at the World Bank. I sense that there is a broader base now than in years past. The relief and development sector was less mature twenty years ago and the organizations could more easily argue “give us more time”. A number of authors have started to write about aspects of the relief and development sector that were previously off limits. John Perkins has written “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, James Henry has written “Blood Bankers” and Bill Easterly has written “The White Man's Burden”. These books challenge the status quo and pose questions that need some serious answers. These authors and others are starting to suggest that failure of the relief and development sector has been orchestrated by agents for the rich and powerful, and that this failure has been of inestimable benefit for the incumbent wealthy. They are suggesting that poverty and failure makes it possible for the rich and powerful to remain rich and powerful and then become even richer and more powerful. Will this be different from ten or twenty years ago? Maybe ... maybe not. We can be confident that there will be a lot of talk, but whether or not there will be anything more than talk is not yet clear. |
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