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ACTION INFORMATION FOR ALL OF SOCIETY Metrics about the State, Progress and Performance of the Economy and Society Metrics about Impact on People, Place, Planet and Profit Chapter 2 - SYSTEMIC DYSFUNCTION 2-13 INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT EXCUSES | |||||||||
Conclusion: What a mess! It is a sad commentary on 40 years of development effort that there are now a record numbers of people in poverty, and there is a global fear of terrorism and there is hopelessness more than there is hope. Failed development The phrase “failed development” is not in common usage, but it should be. Development performance is not just failure at the margin. It is failure that affects the whole of the global economy. It has a devastating impact among the world's poorest. There is something wrong when the functioning of the global economy results in around 50% of the planet's population being in abject poverty and hungry ... while the rich countries have a problem with obesity. Something is surely wrong. I have the temerity to suggest that this is not a chronic problem, but a problem of poor decision making and misused resources, and a dysfunctional global system that allows this to happen, not once, but over and over again In the broadest sense the development paradigm that has prevailed for the past three or four decades just does not work. Bits of it work OK, but most of it consumes resources and destroys economic value. Bluntly put, the world is neither more secure nor much happier, nor much better fed than fifty years ago. The euphoria and expectations for post-independence countries in the 1960s has not in any way been realized in the past four decades. So little of what was projected by the development experts of 50 years ago has been achieved. The only people who appear to have been right are the reactionary critics of independence who said that developing countries would never amount to anything. Thirty years ago there were a lot of trends that were favorable, and expectation of life, a very basic measure of economic performance, was going up. But in recent years, this very basic measure is going down. That failed development is causing a vast number of people to be dying prematurely makes the need for solution to the development crisis so very important. There has been immense technological and economic progress in some parts of the world, but as much as 50% of the world's population is hungry, and will be hungry for their whole lives. Most of the world's people live a life that is best described by the old phrase “Life is brutish and short”
Not now, but soon, the crisis of development failure is not going to be confined to the poor people of the world who just get hungrier and die quietly. The crisis of development is going to get translated into a different sort of crisis where poor people get angrier and angrier and though weak, will start to challenge the comfort and security of the world's rich. The SOUTH is not going to let the NORTH have it all. The stage is set for global terrorism in a way that has never been seen before. It might be very messy. In time, failed development is going to have a devastating impact on the quality of life in rich countries.
The developing world, the SOUTH, is facing economic disaster. Even though health and education have been improved, the standard of living is far worse for most people in developing countries today than it was 50 years ago For fifty years, most development resources have flowed through the public sector, with questionable results The paradigm for development has not worked and is not working. There has been a long time continuum of economic value destruction in most developing countries. Look at the market price history of all of the products originating in developing countries and see what these countries have to deal with. In this chapter some of the symptoms of failure will be looked at, recognizing that treating symptoms does not cure the underlying disease. But what we will see is a generalized pattern that seems to suggest a way forward that can be extremely successful. As a starting point, then, the following:
Development performance ... a mess What has been done in the name of relief and development for the past forty years has been ineffective. Why ... and equally important ... how?
Most interventions in the past forty years have removed wealth from developing countries rather than creating wealth in these countries. How? Why? Development resources are used ineffectively throughout the ODA community. How? Why? The processes in development do not result in minimum cost and maximum outcome. The procedures and systems will not allow that to happen. Good people are beaten by bad systems and bad processes and ineffective organizations. Development has failed because of process. There are examples of success, of development excellence, but in the aggregate development has failed. While the amount of money involved in “development” is small compared to the funding of the international oil industry, or the trade in illegal drugs, it is substantial. There have been some successes, but the total performance of development expenditure is terribly poor. The development situation would have been better served by putting development money into a savings account and just leaving it to accumulate than using it in the way we have, and now having to face an enormous debt overhang, that just will not go away. Clearly something is wrong. Why is development analysis so poor? Incompetent analysis The outcome of analysis suggests that the analysis has been incompetent ... but the problem is much more systemic than it is personal. If the questions being asked are wrong, then the analysis is likely to be wrong as well. I believe there is actually a lot of very good analysis ... but it is about the wrong things. Neither institutions nor the key leadership wants analysis that highlights what is wrong and needs to be fixed, rather, they want analysis that shows how good the performance has been. Good analysis is dangerous The fund flows in development are huge ... with most of the money important to a whole chain of beneficiaries to the process. The use of money to deliver value to the nominal beneficiaries of the fund flow is detrimental to those that are feeding from the process.
Too much an academic exercise There is lots of analysis of development, but it is not very useful. Most describes the condition, in more or less detail. Almost none of the analysis results in action oriented information or management information. The mindset is research not management. Most analysts seem to have a mindset to have rigor no matter what the cost, rather than most useful at minimum cost. In one case a good outcome is to have data for a research agenda ... in the better case the outcome is to have better development progress. Highly aggregated reports The World Bank, UN agencies and others produce a plethora of highly aggregated reports. One of these is the World Bank's World Development Report. Most of the UN specialized agencies produce something similar with respect to their own sector. Over and over again ... year after year ... these reports show that development has failed, and quantifies the scale of the failure. The key information that I would like to see is the relationship between resources used and results achieved.
When I started working in the ORDA world this sort of information was not being used at all. Nobody knew what I was talking about when I wanted to know about costs and the bahavior of costs under different project scenarios. That is not to say that there was little numerical analysis. The World Bank has used numerical analysis to support its decision making process. But the World Bank does a lot of economic analysis, and almost no accounting analysis. /////////////////////
The development data about Africa are serious. The numbers highlight the RESULTS of a failed paradigm for development that has been used for several decades. I have tried to draw attention to the need for change and the possibilities that change can result in success. I have tried to draw attention to the many dimensions of the development process that are of great importance, but not being addressed in any meaningful way. This was written in 2003:
There are many issues:
I have been trying to ask meaningful question about the why and how of development failure. I have been trying to get people to think about “value adding” and “value destruction” This was also written in 2003:
But nobody is going to pay any attention because the information about development is voluminous but essentially useless. More from 2003:
These main characteristics of failed development in Africa are rarely talked about by the leading spokespeople on Africa's economic crisis, especially this associated with the official development assistance (ODA) community (World Bank, IMF, UN, USAID, DFID et al.). And ways forward to address these issues do not seem to be forthcoming from our ODA leadership. Because the high profile academics and development experts don not understand the reasons why and how development has failed, it does not mean that the why and how is not known. This was written in 2003:
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Colonial overhang When 'development' first started in its modern form, that is after independence of the former colonies in what I am referring to as the SOUTH, there were a lot of experienced former “colonial” civil servants who were able to do a career change and become 'development' experts and advisers. To the extent that they knew something of the geography, and the culture and the problems and the potentials, these people were an enormously valuable resource. And they made a significant contribution, especially when they were appointed to appropriate positions in the UN and the World Bank and the bilateral development agencies. But they did not succeed as well as they might have, and the reasons for this are many. And of course, much easier to see now with the benefit of hindsight than at the time.
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