Why is this book being written? What does the writer hope to achieve? What sort of impact will a changed paradigm for development produce?

Why on earth this book?

Why would anyone want to write a book about development? There are already a lot of books about development. Do we need another one? Is this book any different? Does it add anything new?

This book has been more than 20 years in the making. The first draft of this book was completed in 1987, and much of what was written then remains valid today. It did not get to the publication stage because I wanted to propose solutions and not just to redescribe the problems. I started to rework the manuscript after the events of 9/11 in 2001. The failure of development suddenly became an issue with practical security implications in the United States.

This book reflects upwards of 40 years of personal exposure to issues in relief and development and builds on the incredible potential for ordinary people to do amazing things.

I like to think this book reflects 40 years or more of exposure to development. I remember however the story of an old farmer in Malawi who made much the same claim. “I have 30 years farming experience” said the farmer. To which the young agricultural expert replied “No sir, in fact you have one year's experience 30 times”

This book tries to go beyond a description of the result of failed relief and development, to understand how and why and move to solutions. The goal is to help improve the performance of development. It will have been a success if there is significant improvement in the performance of development, perhaps not everywhere, but in a good number of places. The book identifies initiatives that are central to this goal. In this regard this book is very different from most other books that address development and the related issues of globalization and poverty..

I wish I could say that this book has been a “labor of love”. In fact this book is the product of a long and profound frustration. I see many possibilities for success in development, but decade after decade, there seems to be worsening failure, and an official relief and development assistance (ORDA) community that is stuck in a “business as usual” mindset that is leaving half the world poor and hungry.

This book starts from the premise that “development” has failed. And because development has failed it is time that the systems and procedures and decisions that have produced these results are looked into and get replaced with something that will succeed.

I used to think that more money would make development successful until I started working in developing countries and realized that there was a lot of money available, but none of it was getting to be used for development priorities. The divide between rich and poor was immense, and not closing up. And then I started to see wealth and death in the same economic community. I saw it in India. I saw it in Nigeria. No shortage of wealth. No shortage of poverty. In both place, people dying prematurely because of a systemic failure of economics.

This book will be a success if it helps to get change made that improves the performance of relief and development.

Development has failed

Socio-economic progress in the SOUTH and especially in Africa is a failure. Relief and development has been in a failing mode for years, as long as three decades. In the post war 1940s, 50s and 60s there were huge changes and a colonial world became independent. A new world order came into being. The pre-independence expectation was that post-colonial independence would result in socio-economic progress with peace and prosperity.

As it turns out this was wishful thinking.

There has been little success in relief and development. There has been a huge amount of death and destruction: more in the second half of the 20th century than in the first half of the century which included two World Wars and the Holocaust. There have been changes, but the aggregate result has been continuing, actually growing, poverty and hunger around the globe. Rich parts of the global society have been able to increase their wealth and make use of modern technology to create even more wealth and wonderfully productive industries, more and more are left out of the success.

Over the years, I have kept coming across little things that make me very optimistic that relief and development can be a success. I have also become very determined to get the message out that the way relief and development resources are now used means that development will never be successful. What is being done now just does does not work. The “numbers” set out in the annual reports of all the major ORDA organizations show that today’s global society is just one huge big disaster.

Taken as a whole, the work done in the area of relief and development has resulted in an aggregate disaster. The following are some key big issues that show the scale of the failure of relief and development:

1. Hunger and famine (food, water and basic necessities)
2. War, insecurity and violence (refugees, IDPs and victims of trauma)
3. Poverty, economic value destruction and the distribution of wealth
4. Balance of trade, currency crises and government insolvency
5. Health pandemics

Why and how development has failed

We really need to know why development has failed. If we do not know why development has failed. We also need to know how it has failed. When we know why and how, then we will know what to fix.

There is an enormous need to get answers to these questions. Almost all the writing and analysis of relief and development describes the status of development and confirms in no uncertain terms that development has failed. But none of the writers and analysts seem to want to explain why it is that development is such a failure or how failure came about.

As long as the why and the how are missing, a complete understanding of failure is impossible, and the errors of the past will be simply repeated. The sad fact is that few in the ORDA community understand and accept that relief and development has failed. In the broadest sense the ORDA paradigm that has prevailed for the past three or four decades just does not work. Bits of it are functional, some of it is excellent, but most of it consumes resources and destroys economic value.

But it is not easy to get the ORDA community to answer these questions. The culture of the ORDA organizations has evolved in a way that makes it impossible to get a straight answer. Individuals may acknowledge the issues of failed performance privately, but the organizations themselves never answer the tough questions. This is not a failure of people, but a failure of organizations. The system is just not structured to allow performance question to get answered because it puts into focus too many issues that are best, for the organization, left undisturbed. Do not open “Pandora's” box. People know the answers, but they cannot put their careers at risk by raising questions about failed relief and development.

Development performance is not going to get addressed within the ORDA organizations. The phrase “conspiracy of silence” is a good way to sound bite the issue.

Over and over again in my experience with development there were cases of complete ineptness. There were cases of outright fraud. But the system protects its own. And the system does not force these incidents of failure to be addressed. The system makes it difficult to be efficient while allowing incompetence and fraud to survive.

Criticism of development is not coming from the experts and organizations of the ORDA community but is coming from others who can see what is going on, and do not like what they see. Consultants will not put their fee income flows at risk. Staff will not put their salaries and pensions at risk. Someone else is going to have to take on the task.

I wrote this about two 2 months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. The ideas still apply years later.

History seems to show that terrorism happens when there is a high degree of hopelessness and it is quite clear that the power structure has no intention whatsoever of a meaningful change in the status quo. These were arguments expressed over a century ago. Dickens did not like what he saw in the 'justice' of the capitalist society of the day. Nor did Karl Marx who argued that the capitalist system could only be reformed by revolution. Most of the terrorist situations we are looking at today have this element. Nobody needs terrorism. But sadly, we have got it and it will not go away until there is some positive and creative new thinking about how the global economy functions.

Many of he problems of development are blamed on lack of resources, especially financial resources. There is a lot of dialog in development about lack of resources, and the inability to achieve sustainable development because of resource constraints. Every needed resource is a constraining factor. Human resources are not good enough. Organizational arrangements are not good enough. Infrastructure is not good enough. Natural resources are huge, maybe, but that is not important for local development progress. Machinery and equipment is inadequate. Working capital in business is very limited. Financial resources are short. Knowledge is irrelevant.

Simply put, it is time for something like Turning Development Upside Down

Development needs to be done to get progress that reaches the bottom of the economic pyramid. There needs to be progress from the perspective of the three billion or more who are terribly poor, hungry, diseased and dying, from the perspective of those that are affected by famine, disease, war and disruption.

The major ORDA institutions have talked about making substantive changes in the way they approached development for decades, but the reality that substantive changes have never been made. The problems that were in place in the 1980s are largely still in place 20 years later The problems continue on and on and on.

There needs to be substantially new approaches and ways of doing things. There needs to be a respect that development is a complex process, with a lot of linkages and interrelated elements.

After 40 years of post-independence development, ways to make development successful should be known. And they are. The problem is that the ORDA organizations as they now are, are not needed to make relief and development successful. Decision makers need, more than anything else, to fire themselves. And, of course, this is not going to be done as part of an internally generated process of reform, though it certainly can be done by indpendent outsiders.

But this requires more than just advocacy. It requires development of alternative organizations and structure, alternative systems and processes and procedures. It requires new ways of mobilizing resources and flowing the funds to relief and development activities.

Nothing in the way forward requires any breakthrough in science or technology. All that is required is getting the resources available to be used much more effectively. Everything we will talk about can be done, and in a modest way is already being done.

Time to make waves, time for change!

As a practical matter the need for change has been recognized for as much as thirty years, but change has not been achieved. This book shows how relief and development can be changed. This book is about systemic change that will improve development performance by an order of magnitude. Over and over again, the opportunity for change has been missed in favor of continuation of the failed status quo. Later on we will explore why and how.

I expect there will be many critics of this book. My work in development was never easy, because not many development experts want to work with hard numbers and do the accounting and accountability of development. People do not want to face up to the fact of failed development that good accounting in relief and development will reveal.

There are a lot of vested interests in the status quo. Doing development right will not be comfortable. My hope is that by trying to organize my thoughts about the relief and development sector into a “book”, my arguments will be better prepared and my goal of an effective change that improves relief and development performance will have a stronger foundation.

Nobody seems to be willing to take on the challenge of writing about critical change. Most of the writing about relief and development is by people who have been paid to do the study and write the report, maybe as part of of a consulting assignment, or as part of “academic” research work funded by some “grant program”. These writers cannot afford to upset the people that are helping to pay the bills.

Changes should have been made long ago. Relief and development was already in a failure mode in the 1980s, two decades ago. The need for change was clear, but the changes that were made aggravated the situation rather than making it better.

Now I am at a great advantage. At my age I do not have to reflect my employer's views and I do not have to safeguard a pension, or be careful about my next career step. I have the unusual freedom to write what I believe.

It is time that the ORDA community and the financial and economic and political leaders of the NORTH are challenged about the failure of development in the SOUTH. Every year millions of people are dieing prematurely because of failed development. It is time to do the accounting and reengineer and restructure the relief and development industry.