I’m with Ivan Illich on this one, sort of

Nicholas Kristof’s NYT column “D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution” inspired a cottage industry of development professionals pointing out the inadequacy of his argument and wannabe development amateurs complaining about the development practitioners being mean. However many of the responses to Kristof – even Dave Algoso’s excellent response “Don’t Try This Abroad” (which promptly turned into an excellent series of posts) – miss a wider problem with Kristof’s article.

The wrongness begins with Kristof’s revelation that we’re at the beginning of “a revolution, so far unnamed… what might be called Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid, because it starts with the proposition that it’s not only presidents and United Nations officials who chip away at global challenges.” A slight inconvenience for Kristof’s narrative is that it’s not a revolution, since that’s exactly how and why “development” (in the sense of engineered interventions to improve peoples’ lives) began in the first place.

The history of social progress in western societies is a curious mix of top-down and bottom-up, and I’m not even going to try to untangle that here. The important point is that most initiatives which we might identify as “development” began with committed individuals with powerful ideas in their own countries, and that approach was exported when “development” as a project replaced the gap left by colonial largesse. We have a development industry simply because individuals can’t scale their work to national level.

Kristof gives the game away when he cites Muhammad Yunus of Grameen and Ela Bhatt of SEWA as examples: Yunus started his work in 1976 and Bhatt in 1972. They reveal that Kristof’s narrative of “a revolution, so far unnamed because it is just beginning” is anachronistic nonsense that only demonstrates either how little Kristof knows about the history of development, or how much he’s prepared to gloss it to pitch a good story. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

Yunus and Bhatt’s example also shows us what might be wrong with Kristof’s stories of Americans abroad – they’re using the foreign poor as their laboratory. That’s not to say that all of these initiatives will fail: some of them will have tremendous impact, but there’s something problematic at their very core. If I was feeling particularly anarchist, I’d suggest looking at the profiles of the DIY revolutionaries: are they rich Americans looking for meaning in a life that’s been sucked dry of meaning by the society that made them rich in the first place?

When Kristof tells us that “Passionate individuals with great ideas can do the same”, what he means is that passionate individuals JUST LIKE YOU with great ideas JUST LIKE YOU can do the same. This is powerful, and powerfully wrong. I wouldn’t go as far as Ivan Illich in utterly condemning Americans abroad (although I’d love to have been present when he made that speech) but we need to be clear that Kristof’s narrative is about YOU (the actor) and not about THEM (the acted on).

The big reveal in Kristof’s article is the heartwarming story of Lisa Shannon of Portland, who “was feeling a nagging emptiness [until] she happened to watch an “Oprah” show about women suffering from war and rape in eastern Congo”. Her first sponsored run “left Shannon with the warm, fuzzy and novel feeling that she was really doing some good in the world”, but the high point was her first Congo trip where she had a joyous meeting with her new “family”.

These stories don’t give me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside, because I’m British. Kristof relates how “Shannon lost her business and her fiancé. She is struggling with no income, because she pays herself no salary and passes on all the money she raises to Women for Women International.” You don’t have to be The Last Psychiatrist to call this one: the reason why Lisa is doing these things is blindingly obvious to everybody except Lisa (and Kristof, apparently). There’s a career path for people who want that kind of life and it’s called missionary work; these people are secular missionaries, spreading the good word of social entrepreneurship.

Columns like this by Kristof are a gateway drug for do-gooders, encouraging people to roll up their sleeves, get stuck in and solve this thing together. I can’t blame Kristof: as he explains in his follow-up column, “I’m writing for a mostly American audience, and I’m writing not about development as such but about Americans doing work in development.” That is to say, he’s writing what Americans want to hear, and what Americans want to hear is that Americans can save the world.

The ghost of Ivan Illich laughs like a drain when Kristof writes “Many Americans see huge needs around them and don’t see why we should worry about Africa or Asia when our own needs are so striking” and doesn’t see the deadly irony of his own words. If American ingenuity really could save the world, it seems strange that American ingenuity hasn’t managed to save America. The truth is that only the poor will get themselves out of the poverty trap, if they’re given half a chance; the DIY revolutionaries won’t get themselves out of the wealth trap if they never realise they’re in it.

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2. Quickbits November 2008 UPDATE
3. No comment on Haiti
4. Call to (PHP) arms
5. Come down from the mountain, we need the clouds