“I will never forget the look of hope on the face of the farmer, as I watched him sign the loan agreement and handed out the loan in the amount of two hundred dollars. This would help him repair his old Soviet tractor and buy seeds for next year’s crop. He was happy. So was I. This was my first loan disbursement during the month of internship at FINCA Armenia. Since then I have seen the same expression of hope and gratitude on many faces, which has been the best reward in return to my work and the greatest source of inspiration. I do believe that it is possible to make a difference in the lives of people, however small the efforts and changes might appear at first glance.”
I applied to Brandies with a genuine desire to learn about development. Ranking among the best in the field, the program offered an alternative, “holistic” approach to global development issues, covering a wide range from poverty reduction to global health, to environmental protection to sustainability. At the time my knowledge of “development at work” was based on observation rather than first hand experience, and likewise, my understanding of development was more intuitive than based on existing theories and approaches or backed by empirical evidence.
I was driven by belief that it was “possible to make a difference in the lives of people, however small the efforts and changes might appear at first glance. ” I also felt that those who are more fortunate bear a certain responsibility towards those who are born without their basic rights and opportunities. To me development meant creating opportunities to those who are born without them, as further rephrased by one of my professors as “development is expanding human choices.”
By the time I got to Brandeis, I had read, if not significant, at least certain amount of literature that turned my aspirations to hardcore interrogations, my desire to learn how to achieve development to skeptical “why do existing approaches fail one after another,” and “are there any alternatives other than numerous attempts to achieve blueprint, universally applicable models that act more like band-aids than true solutions to existing issues?”
As I delve deeper and deeper in existing challenges facing development, I am overwhelmed by array of issues that arise as I attempt to answer even one single question. The misadventures of development practitioners in the field during the past decades, as phrased by my beloved Bill Easterly, leave little to no hope or reason to adhere to any given approach or method. Even more so, in the course of time, seemingly simple and well defined development objectives have been becoming more and more obscure as the attempts to overcome them are meeting bigger and bigger obstacles.
As reluctant as the field appears to be to admit its shortcomings and ignorance when it comes to achieving worldwide development, it is becoming obvious that if you don’t know what works, chances are you have little to nothing to teach about how to achieve development. The most you can do is to critique the past approaches, learn from past mistakes and search for alternatives that may not necessarily guarantee any tangible result. However, the first step in even trying to move towards development is to accept the fact that we are, initially, ignorant in the field and do not know how to achieve development, as our failures indicate, as opposed to pretending that we know what we’re doing and giving far reaching promises such as Millennium Development Goals stand today.
From this viewpoint, I cannot help but consider the moral implications of my choice. Medical students, before starting their practice, swear under oath to do no harm. There is no such oath for those practicing development. And yet, at this point it only feels as if we’re the blind trying to lead the meek, without stopping to question whether we’re doing good or making things even worse. Do we have the right to treat social policies as experiments of some kind and thrive to achieve development for the sake of development only without stopping to consider the lives we’re aiming to alter? Do we have the knowledge? Do we have the strength? Do we have the ethical right, even if our intent is driven by nothing but goodwill? Is our intent driven by goodwill alone? Is goodwill alone enough to try and accomplish something that’s rooted deep into centuries and challenges such basic fundamentals as justice, equality, basic rights and needs?
The hardest part of this journey is not the academic work (or in my case, the lack of challenge that I’m faced with these days). Nor is it the professional pressure or genuinity of my intent. It’s not even the over increasing complexity of social, political and economic challenges that the field of development faces. The hardest thing, as this point is finding answers to the ethical questions, without reconciliation of which I do not think I’ll be able to go on.
2 comments:
I am forever grappling with the relationship between ethics and application, such as you discuss here, although I have generally dealt with that relationship in the context of another field. Not to suggest self-congratulation for either you or for me, but do you ever wonder how your peers (and possibly your professors) manage to proceed without these conflicts in their minds? How do they reconcile these tensions? Does it not occur to them, or do they choose to somehow set them aside?
Tangentially related, my dad and I were recently bemoaning the present state of urban public education, spurred by news of Houston's phenomenally-high high school drop-out rate, which is estimated by some to exceed 50%. He and I both, each to our own degrees, have experience with that system, both on the theoretical/policy side and on the practical side. While neither one of us could, naturally, claim to have an instant solution to the complex cycle of urban poverty, poor education outcomes, under-tapped human capital, etc., what we could both quickly agree upon was this: we know a hell of a lot about what does NOT work, even if we know little about what DOES. So, why keep repeating the same strategies & expect better results? At the time of our conversation, my dad and I speculated about possible innovations. I stand by those thoughts generally, but your questions about the rights of outside policy-makers and -implementers to "experiment" with entire populations based on untried speculation and unsubstantiated theory at least gives me pause.
I know the development work that you are thinking about involves populations in more dire circumstances than relatively-poor, urban high schoolers in the U.S., but your questions still resonated with me.
Thank you for your comment, Tamara. Your first question actually got me thinking about whether or not my peers, professors, other development practitioners have considered the ethical side of our actions and whether they have been successful in finding some kind of reconciliation or justification. Since i didn't have the arrogance to assume that such issues did not occur to the majority of them, i started thinking that perhaps i should explore the subject more actively, not necessarily through posing the question directly, but rather looking for indirect answers that might help me settle with my own issues as well.
Once again, i do not question how genuine our intent is. Seeing the amount of poverty and suffering that's out there in the world, one would naturally WANT to do something to help, right? On practical level it's a matter of HOW we choose to help, and whether or not OUR ideas of help are truly helpful (which, as experience and evidence has been continuously showing, hasn’t done much good, not to the extent of how much resources have gone into our trying to help).
As for the second part of the comment, relative to the field of development, it looks like we do know a hell of a lot about what does not work, but very little about what does. i would be fine with this situation, if both the academia and the aid industry HONESTLY acknowledged and disclosed this fact and then called for joint efforts to try to find new solutions, instead of pretending that we have the knowledge, and that we don’t see that our efforts are not only unrewarding, but harmful to an extent.
I see the role of academia in challenging the old, established, traditional and often blueprint ways of thinking, because without these challenges change cannot take place. Ignoring the problem, whether it is in the field of development OR in educational system is going to make matters even worse. Whether the new innovations will yield better results is a whole new story. BUT, if old ways are proving to be useless, if not detrimental, change is necessary, and one way to start the change is the acknowledgment of our ignorance, before we can even start looking for what may come to replace the old...
I hope this does not sound to preachy. The truth is, i really don't know. Otherwise I would not be so split and conflicted myself.
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