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Article Article July 6th, 2017
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Why pragmatism is not enough in development

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Development professionals have in the past sought to be pragmatic, says @BrianLevy387

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Post-Brexit and Trump, development professionals are changing their approach, says @BrianLevy387

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There now needs to be a new balance between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, says @BrianLevy387

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As a professor, development professional and author, one thing I'm not short of is books. Books to read; books to learn from; books to stimulate discussions and debate - the list is as endless as the stacks of books that litter both my study and bedside table.

One that made a big impact on me recently is How Change Happens by Oxfam's Duncan Green. “At times in the last few years”, he writes, “it has felt like something of a unified field theory of development is emerging”.  As recently as early 2016 (which is about when he wrote these words) Green's exuberant enthusiasm was shared by many of us. But a year, we now know, can be an eternity.

How Change Happens synthesises a growing body of work that has aimed to move development scholarship and practice away from a pre-occupation with so-called “best practice” solutions. But has our quest for useful insight reached its destination only to find that a new journey has begun,  a  different and more difficult journey than the one we had planned?

Dancing with the system

Change, Green suggests, can be understood as shaped by interactions between power, complexity and agency: “Understanding how the state in question evolved, how its decisions are made, how formal and informal power is distributed within it, and how distribution shifts over time - are essential tasks for any activist intent on making change happen,” he writes.

Insights such as these have led many of us to adopt a pragmatic approach to policymaking and implementation. In the spirit of working with the grain, we focused on incremental change - pursuing quite modest gains to address very specific problems, and taking much of the prevailing configuration of power and institutions as given, as constraints on what is achievable. But then, our pragmatism notwithstanding, we were mugged by reality in the form of Donald Trump and Brexit. Suddenly we find ourselves in a world where many of the foundational presumptions of the turn to pragmatism can no longer be taken for granted.

Blindsided by change we must ask: what did we get wrong in the way we danced with the system? What I think happened is that while we were looking elsewhere, we allowed ourselves to be trumped.  We ignored the rising counter-reaction - the pushback of powerful (and monied!) interests, the resentment of those whose relative (though not necessarily absolute) standing was being undercut by a changing world, the growing resistance to a progressive (in our terms) change in norms.

Crucially, we lost sight of the dynamics of power - specifically of the power of political parties to mobilise on the basis of ideas and incentives which we easily dismissed as reactionary. In so doing, we ceded the terrain of contestation over the largest political prize of all - control over state institutions - to actors and ideas which we presumed had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

And then, one bleak morning after another, we awoke to discover that the terrain had shifted radically, that control over state institutions was shifting, and that our hard-won incremental gains risked being washed away by tidal waves of reaction.

What is to be done?

What now? On the surface the task is straightforward: we need to learn from the example of the right. As Green puts it, quoting Milton Friedman, “only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. As we also learn from the right, to be transformational these ideas need to have broad appeal, to be actively incubated within the framework of a large, resurgent political party.

The times require heightened attention to the vision towards which our many localised efforts are directed; we need a new balance between the ‘what' and the ‘how'. The broad contours of a progressive vision are clear: that we give our lives meaning by embracing inclusion, mutual solidarity, and stewardship as organising principles for a thriving society - thereby honouring the highest values inherited from our past, and acting on behalf of future, as well as current generations.

When I speak of a ‘new balance', I am not suggesting abandoning what we have learned over the past decade about wrestling with the ‘how' of development. Overcorrection - an endlessly swinging pendulum of fashionable ideas - has long been a chronic, debilitating disease of development theorising and practice. Rather, what we need to do instead is communicate two superficially contradictory ideas at the same time: that embracing a vision of inclusion and stewardship in a thriving society offers a pathway to a fulfilling life - and that the quest to realise that vision will be challenging, fraught with obstacles. In the recent past, we have done neither.

A way to combine hope and pragmatism in a coherent vision is to underscore that, however challenging and fraught with obstacles, the quest itself can itself be a source of fulfilment. Doing our part; not everything, but enough to inspire a sense of possibility, and thereby successfully pass the baton to the next generation. That, as per the wisdom of ancestors, “it is not for us to complete the task, but neither is it for us to desist from it.”

 

Want to read more? Check out the longer version of this article, Pragmatism and its discontents

FURTHER READING

Written by:

Brian Levy Professor of the Practice of International Development, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
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