In some countries it [citizenship] is, in effect, on sale. In others, such as America, it may be an accident of birth, with no conscious choice involved. Rather than making a fetish out of passports, a better approach would be to use residence (especially tax residence) as the main criterion for an individual’s rights and responsibilities. That encourages cohesion and commitment, because it stems from a conscious decision to live in a country and abide by its rules. The world is gradually moving in this direction. But many states (mostly poor and ill-run) resist the trend and some rich democracies like the Netherlands and Germany are trying to curb it (see article), offering a variety of excuses.

Here.

Mr. Neuwirth introduces us to a woman named Jandira who for a decade has peddled coffee and homemade cakes to the unlicensed vendors at São Paulo’s early-morning wholesale market for pirated movies. Her street-corner business, she proudly tells him, has enabled her to buy two cars and a house and to pay her children’s fees at private school. Another of Mr. Neuwirth’s sources, Chinese handbag designer Ethan Zhang, prefers to stay illegal. For him it’s a matter of costs and benefits: “If I want to get a license, then I will need a bank account and an office in an office building.” These are not people who lack the skills to survive through legal employment; they just see no good reason to join the legal economy.

System D is full of surprises. From Linda Chen, who trades counterfeit auto parts, we learn that China has a hierarchy of fake merchandise: The manufacturers of high-quality fakes offer guarantees and take back defective products, but with low-quality fakes it’s caveat emptor. Ogun Dairo buys woodchips from a sawmill and uses them to smoke fish, for sale by street vendors; her unlicensed grill is in an illegal squatter settlement in Lagos, but she buys fish that have been imported from Europe. At the euphemistically named Guangzhou Dashatou Second Hand Trade Center, where Arthur Okafor obtains the pirated mobile phones that he later smuggles into Nigeria, the cash turnover is so high that almost every (unlicensed) kiosk has a battery-powered currency counter.

The review reminds me of a chapter in my dissertation, in which I follow a container of secondhand clothing from the Cotonou port to the used clothes market in the Beninese city, and from the market to the Seme border and then into Nigeria. I show the different regulatory regimes under which batches of the imported used clothing fall – when taxes get paid on them and when not, and how the final retailer in Lagos sometimes actually pay some form of tax on the goods he has in his small stall on Lagos Island – even when secondhand clothing is not legally supposed to be imported or sold in the country (there is a ban on the importation of secondhand clothing into Nigeria). It also reminds me of the importance of ethnography for understanding microeconomic interactions that eventually feed into macroeconomic figures of a country. (Try understanding why Benin would always have a balance of trade deficit without knowing that almost all consumer goods it imports ends up being smuggled into Nigeria.) Of course, the whole idea of the informal economy itself arose from Keith Hart’s ethnographic study of urban slums in Ghana in the 1960s.

Read the review here. H/T to Bunmi Oloruntoba on Twitter.

I was looking through my computer earlier today and I discovered a review I wrote during my first weeks as a Masters in Development Studies student at Uppsala in Sweden. The first thing those guys did was to encourage us to question the whole idea of development by making us read Gilbert Rist’s The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. Below is a review I wrote of the book – an assignment. As I read through it today I strongly resisted the urge to edit my 24 year-old self, so excuse the sometimes flowery language. 

Words, Spirits and History: A review of Gilbert Rist’s The History of Development

What is it with words? While some hardly make a sound others simply stand out, they call attention to themselves, beg to be heard. One of them is development. It is simply unimaginable that this word, and its most recent offsprings, human and sustainable development(s) should be subjected to as much rigorous examination and criticism as Gilbert Rist does in The History of Development. But the word is not what Rist battles with, it is the philosophy which gives the word life, which makes it relevant; it is the spirit which the word conjures, and the faith which it commands that necessitate such examination. Then, words have long had a way of creeping into our consciousness and dominating our imagination, but not without some aid. Rist set out to explain the process by which this word gained and kept prominence. Perhaps the first thing it would be good to know is that the word has an origin.

Even before opening the book we get an idea of where the word came from. From the subtitle of the book we have a vague idea of the word’s birthplace, but not its birth process. Rist traces the process by which development came to become the dominant paradigm of measuring relations between North and South, he shows that the word has its roots in Western consciousness. He goes as far as to Aristotle’s conception of nature as development in circles, i.e. as a series of beginnings and ends and new beginnings, to St Augustine’s view of history as eschatological as it is presumed to be linked to the Bible, and ultimately to Jean-Baptiste Say and his social evolutionists who saw the western world as the most advanced one because of its high level of production and consumption. Apart from this argument for the western world’s referencing of itself as the ideal, their defeat of “savage races” seemed to lend credence to social evolutionism. It seemed only sensible to conclude that the western human was the most advanced of humans. Of necessity, this set the stage for the next level in the development of the history of development: colonialism.

In the late nineteenth century, the savage needed protection, and guidance in utilising the abundance of natural resources which nature had deemed fit to thrust upon him, or so the colonialists say. It was a period in which global relations marched from conquered/ conqueror to savage/civilised, and so colonised/coloniser. Several arguments were used to convince the people of the nobility of the endeavour, one was economical and another was purely paternalistic. Who wouldn’t blame the civilised world if they failed to bring civilisation to the dark parts of the world? If some parts of the world were uncivilised it was only morally obligatory for the part that was to bring civilisation to the other part. But the dominant paradigm was soon to adopt a different, more portent and enduring concept, that of development.

Rist gives the birth of development as the time of President Harry Truman’s inaugural address. From that time on, the relationship of countries of the north and those of the south came to be defined by the level of development. The paradigm shifted from that of colonised/coloniser to underdeveloped/developed. The main problem of this distinction was its assumption that underdevelopment is a natural stage of humanity. It was not an effect but could only be the antecedent of the “developed” Northern world. It was as if the North could look at the South and see how it was before it was touched by development. This perception of things could absolve the North of any responsibility in making the South the way it was, as underdeveloped is an intransitive verb, it is not an effect but can only be affected. The peoples of the South were no longer viewed as individual nations with individual histories, they were simply underdeveloped countries; they were deprived of the privilege of having their situations explained by history and were instead described as the natural state of being that was embarrassing and so would have to be helped to the state of the industrialised countries. And the way to do this was given as increasing the GDP. Perhaps we should say a little about Rostow’s proposition and his stages of economic growth.

Rostow’s recommendation for economic growth underlines an assumption that is an offspring of the development paradigm. Since it is believed that underdevelopment is a natural state from which the developed countries rose, it was only natural to presume that to effect development all one had to do was to follow the steps through which the North rose and then development would necessarily arrive in the underdeveloped regions. Rostow’s scale of development then starts with the underdeveloped stage, a natural state in which development is lacking and which has to proceed to the stage in which the preconditions for development are taking shape. During this time the society is gearing for the next stage when the preconditions are already set and the society is ready to develop. This stage Rostow calls the take-off stage – the GNP starts rising and the move towards industrialisation is instituted. The fourth stage is the drive to maturity stage. Here, the societies are already experiencing a rise in GDP and since the elite are benefiting strongly from this they would be encouraged to ensure the continuation of growth. The final stage is that of high consumption rates since the gains of productivity is distributed to the people. This stage is also characterised by the welfare state. This is another evolutionist account of development that, needless to say, is doomed to fail in capturing the development process.

Rist also examines the different conferences and reports that were convened and prepared in the name of development. There is almost no need to examine each one in itself, the basic theme that runs though all of them is the desire to write away history by not focussing on the need for a redefinition of development. This is exemplified by the report of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The text of the report is a reinforcement of the dominant paradigm, it emphasised “economic growth, expansion of trade and increased aid by the industrial nations” as the solution to the problem of underdevelopment. Like many reports produced by such organisations its recommendations were not implemented. Rist says it is really a relief that it was not, as the recommendations would have been more harmful to the Third World than before, it would have widened the gap between the rich and poor countries as it still situated the source of development in the North, and the source would have to help the poor countries to achieve development by assisting them with aid and investment. Experience has shown that private investment in poor countries only come when the investor knows that it can maximise his profit, and this often to the detriment of the economy of the poor countries.

However, there is a report that Rist says stands out for its boldness in declaring that another development is possible. The Dag Hammarskjörld Foundation report extends the concept of development from mere economic growth to something that has to be born by each society out of what is unique to it. This means that there cannot be a universal definition of development. Another thing that sets it aside from all other reports is that it includes the industrialised countries as part of the countries that need to become developed. They need to review their consumption patterns. This report was simply forgotten.

The structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s is another point that is worthy of note in the history of development. It was a direct child of the lending activities of Northern creditors who lent money irresponsibly, without enough security, to Southern countries. The major impact of structural adjustment programmes was in impoverishing the peoples the more. It was thought that for the countries to be able to pay off their debt they had to, among other things, cut down on the involvement of government in the economy and the financing of infrastructure projects. The meaning of this is continued impoverishment of the population. This era was the era of the trickle down policies. The harm these policies did in the Third World has been severally studied. Considering that Rist’s mission is to show how contradictory development could be, and in fact is, he paid too cursory an attention to it. For the recency of these programmes and their failure make them scream for attention.

One of the problems with works that set out primarily to criticise a notion is the failure to provide an alternative. Rist’s criticisms are the state of the art in its field; they capture the very contradictions of the term, its actions and proponents. But they fail to provide a way out of the problem. One could try to understand this problem by pointing at the fact that it was not easy to proffer a solution where a whole industry is built around a concept. Rist talks about this when he pointed to the organs of United Nations, and the NGOs, both local and global, that are founded around the development concept. If one were to do away with the concept and its baggage what does one do with the industry? Where does one put them?

Another problem is about what is to be done instead of giving aid and other forms of assistance to poor countries. Rist’s cynicism in criticising these moves as reinforcing the development paradigm is understood but, practically, what is to be done? What is the alternative to this? Isn’t it rather better to continue with these and all its different siblings than to simply sit and whine, especially as the paradigm does not seem about to change in the nearest future? I am saying this at the peril of sounding naïve and simplistic but, being a citizen of the Third World, I understand that a long-term solution would have to take into account not just the immediate satisfaction of hunger but the continued survival, and by extension peaceful existence of a people, it would be more naïve to fail to act for today while being pre-occupied with thinking about tomorrow.

To answer the questions about what to do Rist offers three answers. One of them borrows from Christian Comeliau. This approach advocates economic growth and the proper integration of the Southern economies into the world economy, especially according to how they can gain from it. This is against blindly advocating the promotion of free trade. He is not against loans as long as the terms of the loans ensure that they can be paid back. He also advocates the transfer of technology to poor countries by multinational companies. In the classic Rist tradition he picks apart this proposition by questioning the intentions of the people who are supposed to initiate these moves. Will they be sincere enough to initiate the needed reforms? And even if they are what is the assurance that the programmes won’t be abandoned after the next coup d’etat, or elections? What does this leave us but a feeling of utter dejection and disillusionment? The second answer draws from the experiences of some grassroots movements in some poor parts of the world. Instead of seeking to become like the rich countries they organise to change the attitude and behaviour of the people, encouraging them to concentrate on what they posses and not on what they lack. Although Rist admits that a person who believes in GDP and per capita income would point to the material needs of these people, he concludes that what they feel would nevertheless be fewer discontentments as it would be if they were concentrating on their needs. But for how long can such islands sustain in the world where diffusion of information is the norm and not the exception?

The third and most appealing answer to the question is a total rethinking of the relationship between societies, drawing from the anthropology and history disciplines, as against a purely economic approach. These disciplines should help to study alternative models to achieving the state popularly referred to as development. This is because theoretical models that are expected to capture the reality, and reality, or alternative reality, can be perceived basically from historical and anthropological perspectives. This is a theoretical approach that does not neglect the potency of the two earlier suggestions. For Rist, the three form a good team, although certainly not the best.

These answers are good enough on the surface but considering that development is such a new creature that has grown in so much importance over a short period of time, a creature that can be likened to a religion, with its own priests and institutions, what is the assurance that these are practical answers? Just like Rist criticises the first answer we can almost see resistance to the development of an alternative paradigm. To be practical, are studies advocated by anthropologists not going to be funded by development agencies? Are these anthropologists not going to work within certain frameworks prescribed by development experts? In a world where research-funding agencies provide funding only for projects in their own interest, what would be the incentive to embark on such studies? Rist’s book is a classic deconstructionist text but it falls flat when it attempts to do more than that.

Energy companies operating in Senegal will drill three offshore wells next year as the West African nation vies to join a growing group of regional crude producers, according to the state-owned oil company,Petrosen.

Senegalese officials held talks with more than 10 oil companies this year in attempts to lure investors to its energy industry, said Joseph Medou, Petrosen’s geologist, in an interview in Dakar Aug. 25.

“If we make comparisons to what is happening in Ghana and Ivory Coast, to Sierra Leone, we think we have the same kind of plays,” he said.

Read here.

On the current political situation in Senegal, see this Project Syndicate column from Sanou Mbaye.

2. Can stocks be safer than bonds (strange times, right?)

3. Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, formerly of World Bank, then of Nigeria’s finance ministry, then of World Bank, returns to take charge of Nigeria’s economy

4.  Commentary on Islamic finance in Nigeria

5. Robert Skidelsky’ – Life after Capitalism (Let me just quote Mark Twain: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated).

What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.  On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy.  I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc.  On the other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is nothing new in this article.  Indeed, the implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this.  But what of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists).  Hell, what of the Peace Corps?

Whether intentional or not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum.  This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method.  While I am sure that there is more to their research than presented in the article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security.  They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making.  I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present.  But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena.  The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and my analyses.

You really should read the whole thing.

As one who has a Masters degree in Development Studies but who chose to do a PhD in anthropology because I found that development research is all too often dealing with quantitave, “generalisable” data, and who has concluded said PhD, I find it really interesting that the RCT movement in economics seem to be taking credit, in the media and in policy circles, for what ethnographers – anthropologists, rural sociologists, historians, human geographers – have been saying all along. This is that things are a lot more complicated than people want to think, that it is extremely difficult to find a generalisable explanation, and that at the end of the day, what leads one to better understanding of issues is attention to personal stories, and an attempt to tease out how those stories are linked to larger structures, like local politics, regional politics, the economic structures, colonisation, culture etc. etc. One cannot arrive at this sort of understanding without spending time trying to understand the interaction between all these elements. Now that economists have discovered qualitative research it seems as if it were never there, as if there aren’t people who have been pointing to the importance of understanding nuances and personal stories.

I have deliberately refrained from commenting on RCT in economics because I wanted to read some of the texts, but since Edward Carr took thoughts out of my head I thought I would quote him and call attention to the fact that these kinds of studies have been going on for a long while. If economists are not aware of that (I think some of them are) it is their fault for not looking at other social sciences.

My copy of Karlan’s book is in the post to me, and I look forward to reading it. I doubt that I will learn anything new from it, but I feel it is important, as an economic anthropologist, to know what economists are doing. I wish economists would extend the same courtesy to other disciplines whose works often overlap with theirs.

And on RCT itself, check out the link that my brother, a medical doctor and researcher, sent me. It is a Lancet article titled “A philosopher’s view of the long road from RCTs to effectiveness”. Remember, RCT has been in medical and pharmacological research for a while.

PS, I promised a while ago to blog a list of must read economic anthropology books. I should get to it pretty soon.

Once feted as saviours in much of Africa, Chinese have come to be viewed with mixed feelings—especially in smaller countries where China’s weight is felt all the more. To blame, in part, are poor business practices imported alongside goods and services. Chinese construction work can be slapdash and buildings erected by mainland firms have on occasion fallen apart. A hospital in Luanda, the capital of Angola, was opened with great fanfare but cracks appeared in the walls within a few months and it soon closed. The Chinese-built road from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, to Chirundu, 130km (81 miles) to the south-east, was quickly swept away by rains.

Here for more.

First of all, may we not be cursed with The Hype, otherwise known as being-blown-out-of-proportion-to-the-point-that-a-thing-can-only-disappoint.

I really don’t understand this simplistic search for a silver bullet that will catalyse development and “solve the problem of poverty”. Poverty is caused by a whole lot of different factors that are horribly specific in different contexts, so why assume that the addition of one variable, applied all over, is going to suddenly “cure” poverty? If a lot of the things I am reading is true (see this article by the writer of Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism) MC will have to be applied with care so that it does not create more problems than it solves.

The master narratives about Africa are inevitably political; art about Africa and Africans, especially art created by non-Africans, inevitably becomes intertwined with the historical use and abuse of the African imaginary. The political entanglements of literary artists engaged with African affairs are complicated by the emergence of a new humanitarianism, which presents African problems as a litmus for the moral capacity of wealthy societies to respond to the plight of less fortunate souls around the world. Just as the response to the genocide against the Jews defined the contours of conscience following World War II, so today does the engagement with Africa define the moral condition of the developed world. Because the engagement with Africa is a test, often narratives about the region and its people are consciously fabricated and fantastic; bad means are justified by good ends. Master narratives from a century ago have been revived and renovated, aimed at generating vast global audiences, with lies and distortions rationalized as part of what the storytellers themselves view as a legitimate “campaign” to help liberate Africans from various maladies—from disease, bad leaders, environmental hazards, wars and other menaces we’ve come to associate with the region. These “progressive,” or developmental, storytellers have even gone so far as to willfully ignore or distort African realities in order to tell the worst stories possible—and thus attract the greatest possible support, financial or moral or otherwise, for “saving” Africans. Such stories that diminish or degrade Africans have been justified (though rarely publicly) as necessary; for without such stories—true or not, exaggerated or strictly accurate—it is believed that people around the world would not express sympathy for the plight of needy Africans.

Here.