The "Absence of History" at the World Bank
by Geoffrey Clarfield (October 2010)
Introduction
There are two kinds of corruption, macro and micro. Macro corruption occurs in the capital cities of third world countries. It takes place quietly and secretively. It is here where companies and cabinet ministers have historically “made deals,” “eaten from the cake” or whatever euphemism is used to cover the fact that large percentages of the funds dedicated to public contracts and the general welfare have often disappeared offshore.
A close African colleague once said to me, “At the end of the day, development in Africa seems to have become a situation whereby poor people in the West give money to rich people in the South.” If donor institutions led by the World Bank, develop the necessary political will, this kind of high level corruption can be tackled head on and reduced through transparent and accountable bidding for development contracts of all kinds.
Conditional ties can also be imposed on democratizing regimes that can effectively and dramatically reduce the misuse of development dollars. It is hoped one day the World Bank will spare no efforts to redress this “hemorrhaging of western tax dollars” that has characterized development finance across Sub Saharan African. In addition to donor scrutiny, an increase in forensic auditors hired by the Bank (as its employees and everyone else in the development field call it) that will take on “macro corruption” is needed. Petty or “micro” corruption may need different methods applied to its eradication.
Anyone who has lived or worked in rural Africa will know that petty or “micro” corruption permeates local government. Local budgets are constantly mismanaged and unaccounted for. The poor do not get the services that have been promised to them by their national governments and local authorities (clean water, primary health care and universal primary education). For example in countries like Tanzania rural literacy has been declining, despite the fact that for two decades Tanzania has had a democratically elected government dedicated to massive reform.
Money from development programs and projects is often “diverted” at the local level. One has only to read the national papers of East Africa to find numerous examples reported in the daily press. It is not a secret.
In order to get the treatment that the law guarantees it is often necessary for poor peasants to pay off local administrators and service providers. In short “micro” corruption could be defined as “having to pay for those goods and services that should be received as rights guaranteed by the law and fair administrative procedure.” An informal survey of Westerners who have managed rural development projects across Africa would no doubt confirm this general observation.
Just before the death of the late President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, who although he was a doctrinaire socialist whose policies drastically impoverished the country, admitted to this same African colleague that rural government officers had been transformed from servants of the revolution (African Socialism) to what he called “predatory bureaucrats.” Although hopelessly misguided by Marxism and Fabian socialism, President Nyerere did not enrich himself at the expense of his countrymen and died with very modest assets.
Recognizing the continuous failure of its own and of other donors development interventions in sub Saharan Africa, the Bank has for some years now been pushing a rural development called Reaching the Rural Poor. You can get the 18 page Executive Summary of the strategy online, or, you can, instead of sending 25 US to the bank (a difficult task for most rural Africans who have a GDP of perhaps 400 US a year and postal systems that barely work).
The World Bank’s Rural Development Strategy and Its Ahistorical Weakness
Here is an official summary of the Bank’s rural development strategy:
“From Vision to Action”, the Bank’ s previous rural development strategy launched in 1997, had a decisive influence on global thinking – but disappointing results on the ground. In 2001, lending for agricultural projects was the lowest in the Bank’s history. The new strategy is results oriented: “Reaching the Rural Poor” stresses practice, implementation, monitoring, and empowerment of the people it is designed to help. This strategy responds to changes in: the global environment; in client countries; and, in the Bank, starting with the development of regional action plans, and extensive consultations at the regional level. It also reflects, and reinforces the Bank’s commitment to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to increase rural incomes, and broaden opportunities for rural people. The key features of this strategy are to: focus on the rural poor; foster broad-based economic growth; address rural areas comprehensively; forge alliances of all stakeholders; and, address the impact of global developments on client countries. In this capacity, support for better agricultural, and trade policies, should be achieved through increased advocacy for trade liberalization, by mainstreaming agricultural trade liberalization, and trade-capacity development in the Bank’s country assistance, and operations; and, by facilitating capacity building through technical assistance…
It sounds reasonable and, the 250 page book that accompanies the policy outlines cutting edge issues and objectives that are widespread among rural development strategists. Nevertheless, it is curiously silent on just what was the previous strategy, what was wrong with it with examples, evaluations, analyses and financial data, and those aspects of the old strategy which continue to be in force despite the massive and admittedly self diagnosed failure of the Bank’s previous rural development strategy for the Third World and especially that of Sub Saharan Africa. I assume that by now it has been rewritten. But you can be sure no outside evaluation of its use has been carried out.
This is because there is an “absence of history” in these programmatic books which in the attempted application of such a bold policy may have serious and fundamental weaknesses. One of them is the use that the Bank has made and still advocates for that method for consulting the poor that goes by the name of “Participatory Rural Appraisal or PRA.” Curiously it is not mentioned once in the book which described the new strategy.
PRA at the Bank
Participatory Rural Appraisal is a term that should be familiar to almost every bona fide rural development field worker but one which generally elicits little interest from development theorists at the “higher level” of the development discourse.
That is because the Bank still believes that PRA, as it is now, and has been practiced is the fairest, most just and transparent method whereby poor and often illiterate peasants can be consulted with regards to the nature and extent of planned development interventions in their home areas.
Deepa Narayan has been one of the most visible Bank employee who advocates this method as the first and foremost way of eliciting the needs of the poor and planning projects and changing policy on that basis. Her study “Listening to the Poor” and the accompanying training film “The Poverty Experts” show how PRA can be used to properly assess poverty in one African country and to adjust national policies to adopt a pro poor approach. Any visit to the Bank web site will find other articles and books by her.
During the last two decades governments such as those in Tanzania have adopted PRA (largely at the Bank’s prodding) as a preliminary planning tool for practically all rural development initiatives, programs and projects. The manner and style of its application is fundamentally flawed and more importantly, prevents poor peasants from exercising their freedom of speech and to describe the real context of their life, a life surrounded and suffused by local and petty government corruption. Let us now take a look at what exactly is participatory rural appraisal and what are some of its major weaknesses.
What is PRA?
As a social movement it has its charismatic leader (Mr. Chambers), its methods and its disciples (among which we can reasonably include Ms. Narayan and her colleagues). PRA supporters argue that that it will help its practitioners raise the awareness of the poor and oppressed and by doing so, help bring about a degree of social justice. Part of this rhetoric includes an implicit critique of Western and multi lateral development organizations for first dealing with non-Western authorities rather than, the people that these authorities claim to represent. But in practice this is more apparent than real.
PRA is based on a number of assumptions. It began as a critique of conventional sociological and anthropological methods when used in development programs. PRA promoters have argued that sociologists and anthropologists took too long and that their data was out of date by the time that it could be ready for project and program planning. In addition, PRA advocates also criticized these social scientists for not actively engaging the subjects of their research, in their research and, for not quickly sharing their findings with them in public forums.
Instead, PRA practitioners (in those days it was called RRA-Rapid Rural Appraisal) help community members understand their local conditions by using a small number of methods that are supposed to feed back into the project cycle and its partners in the community.
By now, thousands of NGOs, most bilateral donors and parts of the World Bank have adopted PRA as its primary means of consulting the poor. It would seem that it is destined to reorient development thinking as it goes from success to success. So what could possibly be wrong with it?
PRA Methods
PRA methods began with a few basic participatory practices such as village mapping, annual resource mapping, time lines, trend lines and interviews of select focus groups and individuals. It was and remains a method that almost anyone could learn and apply in a foreign culture or society, in particular in rural Africa in the context of designing development interventions.
Within a short time the number of methods increased so quickly that one had to pick and choose according to the needs of the community and project. To have practical experience of all the kinds of PRA methods could take any novice up to one hundred days before he or she knew just which methods are applicable to the situation at hand. I have met an African expert in participatory methods who wrote her Phd on the topic.
Power
To the objective reader, PRA articles and reports often seem clean and sanitized. They give the impression that life in the village is hard but, with a bit of external help and boot strapping, gender inequality, soil erosion and deforestation can be reversed.
Homework and Optimal Ignorance
PRA reports and practitioners do not do their homework and they are proud of it. Let me quote the World Bank web site dedicated to PRA:
Optimal ignorance. To be efficient in terms of both time and money, PRA work intends to gather just enough information to make the necessary recommendations and decisions.
That is to say, PRA practitioners make a virtue out of the fact that they do not read and make reference to the classic historical, sociological and anthropological literature for the area that they work in. In Africa this literature is dense and textured. It can be accessed through the bibliographies of institutes of human science, departments of anthropology, sociology, history, area studies and psychology. It is a rich literature.
The main point here is that cultural and historical studies can tell you quite a lot about the main patterns of culture and behavior that one can expect to encounter in a specific village or region before the PRA even begins. Yet they are almost never referred to in the PRA literature. Certainly the Bank and its projects can afford to hire the necessary experts to reevaluate and contextualize PRAs!
Let us take a look at some of them recognizing that they are essential to any judicial understanding of peasant life in Africa, how it is actually lived and how it might be improved.
The Concept of the Limited Good
The concept of the creation of wealth over long periods of time is almost non existent in large parts of the third world and especially in rural Africa. Add this to the fact that objectively, life has gotten worse for most of the pre industrial segment of human kind in Africa during the last thirty years, then this presents a formidable challenge to those who believe that local resources can be better utilized with a little help from sympathetic outsiders. (UNDP reports suggest that the quality of life is declining in sub Saharan Africa during the last twenty years despite the fact that sub Saharan Africa receives more development assistance than any other continent.)
Amoral Familism
The Idealization of Village Life
The Elaborated and the Restricted Code
One could extrapolate that the elaborated code is the linguistic basis of the English speaking democracies or for that matter, any country that successfully industrializes such as the Asian Tigers, all who have some common, modernized and highly differentiated national lingua franca or, an adopted one such as the English spoken by the Indian middle classes, those drivers of the Indian economic miracle.
PRA Incentives
Villagers work hard and when they have leisure time they have many things that they like to do. PRA is not one of them. The reason that villagers participate in PRA is that there is usually a financial or even culinary incentive. It is a rare day that villagers come to a PRA meeting voluntarily.
Biblical Rhetoric and the Routinization of Charisma
Optimal Ignorance of the Private Sector?
Geoffrey Clarfield is an Anthropologist at large.
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