Why Poverty Doesn’t Matter

1. Why Poverty Doesn’t Matter Christopher Nelson – Director Performance Systems and Support – AusAID Canberra

2. Where is this contention going? • Perceptions of development and poverty – a contested phenomena • How is poverty applied to development practice – facing up to 40 years of failure • Where it is leading us – the bleak landscape of multiple messages and messengers • Engaging with a circumstance, a process and reflecting contentedly

3. Perceptions of development and poverty • “… while aid will certainly play a role in promoting progress towards the MDGs, it will be only partial if assessed solely on the basis of its contribution to growth. Even the most favourable estimates of the impact of growth on income poverty will see aid having a comparatively small impact on growth-induced progress towards the MDGs.” Mavrotas &McGillivray

4. Perceptions of development and poverty • Poverty is a contested phenomena – “…it is both complex and ambiguous … recently it has taken on the limited meaning of the practice of development agencies, especially in aiming at reducing poverty and the MDGs.” Thomas “… since poverty depends on values and on alternative conceptions of ‘necessity’ there is no uniform or unique answer to its articulation.” Kanbur

5. Perceptions of development and poverty • Strong focus on poverty emerged in 1970s with the UK publication of More Aid for the Poorest – focus on agriculture, social services and education – in addition to governance support – continues to dominate with MDGs “… short-term evaluations give the impression of aid’s success … yet, aid effectiveness should be measured against the contributions to long-term sustainable growth. When seen through this lens, aid is found to be wanting” Dambisa Moyo

6. Perceptions of development and poverty • Making ourselves redundant by making others profitable – the business case “We keep hitting the targets, but missing the point.” Phil Davies Oxford Evidentia “I realised that we were so passionate about our jobs and our place in the scheme of things, about being on the radio and talking loud and long about poverty, that we were not willing to let go of our ideologies or our position to achieve real justice.”Nic Frances

7. How is poverty applied to development? • “Projects have much in common with the highest quests undertaken by human kind – they are privileged particles of development, units or aggregates of public investment that, however small, still evoke direct involvement by high, usually the highest, political authorities – they produce visible results that taxpayers in rich countries can understand and appreciate.” Hirschman

8. How is poverty applied to development? • What we must not forget is that projects are not ends in themselves – at best they are levers of country development, at worst merely a metaphor for modern management. ‘… the most commonly used dependent in the experimental research on creativity seem to involve some kind of problem solving, perhaps because when problems are administered it is relatively easy to operationalise success’. Torr

9. Where it is leading us • Two observations by Nic Frances “The environmental movement has run very successful campaigns – if you measure success by media attention. But in terms of real change, they’ve had remarkably little effect. The same can be said for indigenous issues, particularly in Australia; there is a lot of campaigning, commitment, government spending, yet indigenous advantage is getting worse.” Nic Frances

10. Where it is leading us • “And they did give us money. Millions of dollars. It still wasn’t enough to solve the problem, but it was enough for business and government to assuage their guilt and enough for us to continue to feel good about ourselves: we were fighting poverty.” Nic Frances

11. Where it is leading us • Problem solving is easy to measure and does not have to rely on theories of the unconscious for proof of validity – it does not have to explore the rat holes of daydreaming and acknowledge the existence of ‘the other’ – most importantly, problem solving is instrumental.

12. Where it is leading us • The development logframe ‘cookie cutter’ • What has been found with recent studies on creativity is that individuals can easily be induced to perform inefficiently in problem solving situations as a result of success with one specific solution – it is easy to be blinded by previously successful solutions or approaches such that simpler solutions are overlooked.

13. Engaging with a circumstance, a process and reflecting contentedly • Phenomenography – starting by learning – profit by partnership, analysis and the ‘tangentials’ “The analysis starts with a search for meaning, or variation in meaning, across the interview transcripts and is then supplemented by a search for structural relationships between meanings.” Marton 1986

14. Engaging with a circumstance • The suggestion is that we need to begin thinking like a revolutionary if we are to avoid being victims – even if you think you’ve reached the end of a problem, you are usually simply at the start of new troubles. • “Most phenomena around us seem rather distant from the basic laws of physics – they exhibit catastrophic behaviour where one part of the system can affect many others by a domino effect.”Per Bak

15. Engaging with a circumstance • Floods, rivers and aid workers (sitting in trees and the $200 million problem) • What we want & what we learn – development and poverty our way – show don’t tell – invest in risk for reward – venture capital in aid • An economist without real data – the messy world of understanding poverty and development

16. A Process – Situated Learning • The social perspective on learning has the following principles: learning is inherent in human nature; learning is first and foremost the ability to negotiate new meanings; learning creates emergent structures; learning is fundamentally experiential and social; learning transforms our identities; learning constitutes trajectories of participation; learning means dealing with boundaries; learning is a matter of social energy and power; learning is a matter of engagement; learning is a matter of imagination; learning is a matter of alignment; learning involves an interplay between the local and the global (Wenger 1999).

17. A Process • In this way, situated learning becomes a process of engaging with the circumstance in which a phenomenon takes place. Importantly, it identifies that learning happens, design or no design, and thus it is about capturing this process and reflecting on its machinations.

18. A Process Aid should no longer be conceived and evaluated as a resource transfer mechanism – “it should be a transmission belt for ideas, an instrument for building state capacity, and a platform for policy experimentation and dissemination based on good analytical work and sensitive advisory service.”Robert Picciotto

19. Reflecting contentedly • “What is required is more detailed analysis of aid’s impact on the ground. Such analysis is the day-to-day work of donor agency evaluation departments. However, the work of these departments is often held by critics to be insufficiently rigorous, particularly in its approach to answering the central question of aid’s impact on poverty.”Howard White

20. Reflecting contentedly • A feature of recent success – the instinct for change, an eager fluency with the tools of disruption, and a responsive twitch for the movement around them – illustrated in the success of Hizb’allah in the 2006 Israeli attack – 500 fighters versus 30,000 soldiers and imminent stalemate • Often the most absurd illustrations are what we might and perhaps should be looking for!