I got very good feedback and support on something I wrote a few days ago about the colonial nature of my work, so I was asked to go deeper into it. And in my head, you can’t get much deeper than the basis of the “need” for the concept of “AID.”
i used to touch fish on my work
And I’m not talking about “Humanitarian Aid” as emergency relief provided in response to natural disasters, conflict, or other crises. Its primary aim is to save lives and alleviate suffering (when allowed by geopolitics otherwise, look at the present situation in Palestine)
I’m talking about “Development Aid,” often called foreign aid, which is designed to provide financial or material assistance from one country or organization to another, typically to support economic development, improve living standards, and address humanitarian issues in the recipient country.
I make a living in the “Development Aid” space, which is framed as short to long-term support for promoting sustainable development and improving infrastructure, education, healthcare, and economic stability, based on redressing the imbalances created mostly by colonisation, as I wrote before.
Besides the already discussed paternalistic and “inevitability” concepts, I also think that Aid and international development have produced their own distortions. The more aid there is, the greater the encouragement of assumptions that it is the only solution to redress the exploitation of earlier times. Aid and assistance are then expected as a right rather than a partial solution to particular circumstances in a bigger problem.
Imposing colonial (i.e. imported) government structures over traditional governance and tenure has also created wrong incentives. To enter someone's garden and steal food, to steal someone’s fish from their gear or traps is an exceptionally socially offensive act in most societies where I work. To work it out, both parties would have to go through customary restorative justice in most cases involving the families and “payments” of some sort. However, governmental bribery and corruption do not garner the same degree of public censure for example.
And I don't see this as a "moral failure" of developing states I work with; after all, the notion of accumulation of money as a form of "economic capital" is only a century old, when the prevalent role of the accumulation of social capital, in the form of social standing, "mana", favours owd instead of owed is the thousands of years old and the basis of their culture and world view.
Thus, when that crash of imposed expectations in the form of "modern governance" and traditional and cultural thinking forms the basis for framing my present work on policy and other high-level policy work, I feel like most of my work is futile. It is based on a "non-reality," an assumption of what it "should be" instead of what it really is.
When I worked more at the food-producing level (i.e., fishing, working with people to catch more fish, and maintaining that fish in better conditions for longer), I felt more useful than with some of the jobs I do today… and I struggle so much with it.
Of course, it is not always black or white. There are jobs that I feel I have been helpful at (my present work with RMI, my work with Ecuador in 2006/7, some of the work with the EU yellow cards I did for FFA in PNG, Solomons, Kiribati, and Tuvalu, some of my present efforts in crew labour). Still, there are also years of work done in many places of which there are no traces anymore.
Some developing agencies' usual assumption that it is the fault of the recipient countries is wrong, as is blaming the low quality of the consultants. While there may be an element of truth in some cases, for me, the poor outcomes of the "development industry" are the product of a bigger problem, which is the basis of the thinking and actions that created the situation in the first place.
We are stuck with it and cannot make the massive changes needed to rectify the situation. We are assuming it is possible to fix it, which is already an enormous assumption.