I have been very open in my views that working in “international development” and in “developing countries,” while most times well-intentioned, is deeply rooted in colonial thinking. This is the biggest issue that I struggle with in my work… and it is, to a certain extent, unavoidable if you work in this industry.
Hence, I consistently focus on working with individuals, spending as much time in the country with them as possible, and trying to understand their culture, family, and worldview to the best of my abilities.
I’ve written about this in the past yet last night, I read an article by Andre Dao “Reverse the Flow” in the latest “New Philosopher” that touched precisely some of my complex “guilt”on what I do.
It's not that I’m trying to bite the hand that feeds me; the opposite… I always look for ways to do a better job… and the first step is recognising and incorporating criticism.
What hit me the most, someone who grew up in between cultures with a European dad and an indigenous mum in an indigenous setting, is the sense of “inevitability” of all this… which wasn't the idea at the time of the independence of many of the countries I work with… nor the one I grew up.
I remember understanding as a kid the movement of the non-aligned countries… something this article touches on… yet somehow, it seems to have lost its independent voice… and become an echo chamber for authoritarians.
What I liked was that they were the original “third world”.
Today, the term is synonymous with poverty- as if vast swathes of the globe were destined to be poor. However, for the nations that initially organised themselves as the Third World, it was not a label of denigration but of hope. For if the First World was the capitalist West, led by the US, and the Second World was the communist East, led by the USSR, then the Third World was neither - a collective of newly decolonised states committed to the idea that another world, neither capitalist nor communist, was possible. The Third World was thus not a place but a project.
Like the development industry, that project aimed to close the gap between wealthy and poor nations. But instead of focusing on the failings of individual countries, the Third World project aimed to reform the global system that ensured that the flow of global wealth was unidirectional.
Yet today, we talk openly about of ‘first-world problems' or 'third-world conditions'
Despite the ubiquity of such phrases, there is little consensus about what causes this wealth divide."
If anything, thinking about global inequality can function as some thing of a political Rorschach test: all too often, experts take what they already believe to be a fundamental virtue and retrofit that virtue - and its corresponding vice - to history.
So if having X is good, and having Y is bad, then the argument goes: rich countries are rich because they have abundant amounts of X, and poor countries are poor because they lacked X and had too much of Y.
One example of this kind of thinking - thankfully less palatable than it once was - is that the wealth of rich nations can be explained by some intrinsic quality of its people: a shared spirit of invention, or a culture of entrepreneurialism," or simply an ethic of hard work.
The necessary corollary of such beliefs is that the people of poor nations lack smarts and individual ambition. Of course, this is (not particularly veiled) racism, in which tropes about unintelligent, lazy people of colour are trotted out to not only explain but justify global inequality.
In other words, the distribution of wealth is made to seem natural - and thus there is little that can be done about it.
In seeming contrast to these out dated views are experts who look not at intrinsic qualities of temperament but rather at political and economic institutions. Take “Why Nations Fail,” the bestselling book by economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, which argues that wealthy societies share a set of inclusive institutions - namely, property rights including patents that encourage economic activity, and political rights that allow the majority of people to have a say in how they are governed.
Or take Thomas Friedman's “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” in which the columnist for the New York Times argues that the world could be divided into those willing to put on the "golden strait jacket" necessary to build luxury cars like the Lexus - namely, privatising public goods, reducing public spending, deregulating foreign investment, and liberalising trade - and those "still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree".
"On first glance, these prescriptions for generating wealth seem less humiliating than attributing poverty to biology. After all, it was open to every society to establish 'modern' rules about property or to adopt free trade policies. But if we look more closely, we can see a familiar hubris at work - the hubris of proposing one's own society as the lodestar of progress.
Granted, the language of a racial hierarchy- of civilised and uncivilised states, for instance - has been erased. But there remains a kind of universal timeline for the world with Western liberal democracies at the far end - already 'developed' - and everyone else, still 'developing', arrayed somewhere along the line behind.
On this timeline, poor countries are recast as 'backwards'—or, better yet, as the children of the international community. Either way, they are seen to need tutelage—including, where necessary, the toughest of tough love—to establish the Western institutions required to join the (rich) adult's table.
And that is precisely what happened after World War II, when international economic organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank took it upon themselves to tutor the newly decolonised states of the Global South in how to fit the 'golden straitjacket'.
This school of hard economics - aka 'modernisation theory' - included forcing poor states to abandon welfare and infra structure programs to repay a debt to former colonial masters, abandoning 'traditional' patterns of land use for 'modern' property titles, and opening up to multinational corporations.
Seventy-five years later, international development remains a booming industry. (I have work lined up for the next 2 years… and have been only taking 50% of job offers than come to me for the last 15.)
Which makes it all the more awkward that in that time, the divide between rich and poor has gotten worse rather than better. In fact, between 1960 and 2000, the gap between the richest country and the poorest country quadrupled.
One potential explanation for the failure of modernisation theory is that despite the rhetoric about aid and development, rich countries have deliberately been keeping the poor down. Or, to borrow a phrase from the South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, once wealthy Western countries got rich, they kicked away the ladder.
That is, the major developed countries all generated wealth precisely by not donning the golden straitjacket; instead, they used interventions and protectionist policies to build up large-scale domestic industries. Only once those industries were well established, says Chang, did the rich turnaround and kick away the ladder of prosperity, insisting on 'free' trade policies that decimated fledgling industries in the Global South.
Perhaps, then, the answer to our question is not to be found in the internal attributes of any one nation at all - whether that be temperament, political and economic institutions, or indeed geography and natural resources (another popular explanation following the logic of 'rich countries have X').
Instead, poverty might best be understood as an attribute of the global system.
Of course… this further aligns my views on the colonial nature of ecolabels and private certifications like the ecolabels