From Aid to Equality
You are viewing archives of the Aid Watch blog, a project which ended in 2011.
For the new From Aid to Equality blog, click here.
UPDATE 10:30AM 1/15: Chris Blattman has a thoughtful response to my blog. The Complexity tribe is still upset that I didn't do their sacred idea of Complexity justice.
On the Guardian Global Development blog, I tell Paul Collier that he's crazy to recommend a coup in Cote d'Ivoire. But the use of complexity theory allows me to be very nice about it.
One of the points that we try to make on this blog is that aid, planned from an ultra high level and driven to alleviate just the symptoms of poverty, doesn't realistically address the complex problems of international development. We understand that our own economies are complex and require complex allocation mechanisms (i.e. markets; see also "failure of the U.S.S.R.") but this thinking doesn't hold when it comes to helping the poor. So consequently we come up with overly simple solutions to far more difficult puzzles. Ben Ramalingam, author of the blog (and forthcoming book) Aid on the Edge of Chaos, explains this another way in an interview with Dennis Whittle:
[I]nternational aid has been built on a very particular way of looking at the world, and this continues to dog its efforts. As a senior USAID colleague put it, because of our urgency to end poverty, we act as if development is a construction, a matter of planning and engineering, rather the complex and often opaque set of interactions that we know it to be.
...The whole system disguises rather than navigates complexity, and it does so at various levels – in developing countries and within the aid system. This maintains a series of collective illusions and overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of systems, about the nature of change, and about the nature of human actors.
So the end result of all of this is that poverty, vulnerability, disease are all treated as if are simple puzzles. Aid, and aid agencies are then presented as the missing pieces to complete the puzzle. This not only gives aid a greater importance than perhaps it is due, but it also misrepresents the nature of the problems we face, and the also presents aid flow as very simple.
Instead of engaging with complexity, it is dismissed, or relegated to an afterthought, and the tools and techniques we employ make it easy for us to do this. We treat complex things as if they were merely complicated.
What is the difference? As Ben goes on to explain, complicated systems can be modeled mathematically, but complex systems cannot.
[For complex systems,] there is no mathematical model which can say, if X is the situation then do Y. Sustainability, healthy communities, raising families have all been given as examples of such complex systems and processes. Peacebuilding would be another, women’s empowerment, natural resource management, capacity building initiatives, innovation systems, the list goes on and on. Complexity science pulls back the curtain on these processes and it can force you to think about the world you live in in a different way.
Thanks to Dennis for this pointer to Ben's work. (See also Nancy Birdsall's blog post about Dennis on the occasion of his retirement from GlobalGiving.)
There are signs of coming collapse all around us. The complexity of the system is accelerating, despite the good intentions of the Paris and Accra declarations, as the system struggles to cope with change. Here is a graph showing the number of individual aid projects recorded in the AidData database:
This comes from the blog of Owen Barder. His apocalyptic musings were inspired by NYU professor Clay Shirky blogging about Joseph Tainter’s book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which describes how advanced societies (the Romans, the Mayans) become inflexible and collapse rather than adapt in the face of stress.
Owen sees evidence for impending implosion of the aid system in the proliferation of aid projects (pictured above), the popularity of anti-aid views from figures like Dambisa Moyo and Andrew Mwenda, and emerging actors like China and the Gates Foundation that work to some degree outside the existing aid system.
The post is full of great examples illustrating the development bureaucracy truism that it is perversely much easier to make something more complex than it is to make it simpler. The most succinct: “Senegal has 82 individual aid coordination forums.” He also describes a recent donor meeting in Ethiopia intended to simplify and streamline the aid landscape in which each donor came prepared only to make the case for their essential involvement in every single sector.
Why should this be so? Owen observes that “the bureaucratic and political need to be involved in many sectors in every country is a far more powerful force than the intangible development benefits of simplification.” A new paper presented at the recent Aid Data launch conference argues that bilateral donors fractionalize their aid into smaller and smaller projects order to increase their control over aid expenditure. Once again, it’s all about control and what makes good politics for the donor, not about what’s most effective for the recipient.
These examples and new research make it easy to follow the argument that the sector is doomed to become more and more complex. But what the apocalypse will look it – or if it will happen – is very unclear.
