Failures of top-down development planning

International development is not working. Externally defined expert-driven plans continue to override the reality of the local context and intervene in ways that are either irrelevant or damaging. This chapter examines iconic strategic planning approaches: big push thinking (Millennium Villages) technically driven programming (Green Revolution), good governance programming, and rights-based approaches, and concludes that lasting results have been elusive because our approach to development is rooted in flawed assumptions.

Keywords: planning failure; top-down development; big push; Green Revolution; good governance

http://dx.doi.org/10.3362/9781780448510.001

Defining development 'problems'

Across the world, people and nations are facing huge challenges. Our climate is changing and temperatures are rising, principally as a result of human activities. This affects water supply, food production, health, and peace. Mitigation and adaption will be required at local, national, and international levels. Increasing urbanization is creating unprecedented concentrations of deprivation whose hallmark is poverty and social unrest. Whole cultures are being threatened by powerful new governance systems, with ancient systems such as pastoralism now facing an uncertain future. War is becoming more prevalent, with social and political unrest in the Middle East spreading at an alarming rate. Pandemics are becoming more common, with new diseases and new resistances. Water scarcity affects more people than ever before. The need for development interventions that enable humankind to meet these challenges is more critical now than at any time in our history.

Development organizations have tried to bring about lasting and sustainable change to improve people's lives. Vast sums of money are spent on reducing poverty, promoting rights, stimulating economic growth, reducing inequity, reversing environmental damage, and promoting good governance. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Co-operation Directorate (2014), in 2013 almost US$135 billion official development assistance was spent, yet much of this has had minimal impact on the lives of marginalized people and those living in poverty.

To make improvements happen, development practitioners and investors analyse poverty, try to determine its root causes, define causal pathways and design interventions to fix these. Linear intervention logic is used to offer solutions that address critical problems in the causal pathway and thereby reduce or reverse bad effects. Impact is seen to be a direct result of intervention. Like other contemporary commentators such as Ramalingam (2013), we will argue that this does not make sense as change happens through far more complex processes. By failing to understand how change happens, development interventions are likely to be ineffectual or damaging.

A central feature of all development programmes is the definition of problems that need to be fixed, and the positioning of technical solutions to address these. Viewed by experts, development issues occur within a defined and subjectively bounded domain. Boundaries are set by ideological frameworks that determine what is seen to be beneficial and what is not. Over time, development agendas change. In the years since the Marshall Plan, they have evolved to cover food production, industrialization, good governance, human rights, democracy, basic services, free markets, peace and security, gender equity, and much more. Now there is particular focus on creating security, economic growth, more food, and sustainable energy while apparently antithetical narratives such as mitigation of environmental damage are growing simultaneously. At the beginning of this century, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were enshrined by the United Nations as a unifying mantra.

Consensus on what constitutes progress has changed as global discourse has meandered through new philosophies and ideologies, and the world experiences new events. We will refer to the ideas that bound and shape development investment and intervention as 'development frameworks'. Viewed through these frameworks, issues that do not present themselves as a problem are deemed contextual, in a process that shapes development programmes by what they exclude. In other words, issues that cause human misery are only identified as issues to be addressed when they are seen as a problem within these frameworks.

While working to improve access to drinking water and sanitation services in towns around Lake Victoria (see Chapter 4), we came across repeated examples of onerous and difficult procurement bureaucracy practiced by the government and by a large international infrastructure investment programme. We heard stories of how this was preventing people from accessing basic services, was causing bankruptcy among local small businesses, and was incentivizing corruption by municipal leaders. This was consistently cited as one of the most severe development problems being experienced in these towns. They described predatory practices by municipal officials and project staff that were justified as being necessary in order to comply with procurement standards. When evidence of this was presented to project managers, they were obdurate. World Bank procurement standards that framed both municipal and project practice were sacrosanct. They resisted evidence, and could therefore never be part of the problem. Project leaders seemed blind to act.

Development problems are articulated as technical issues because the armoury of fixes used by the development industry is largely technical, and there are strong vested interests in keeping it that way. This process of 'technical rendering' (Murray Li, 2007) takes wider political issues and reframes them as technical problems. This effectively depoliticizes questions that are being asked and removes politics from the analysis. Where there are power imbalances, solutions offered tend to be aimed at helping people to adjust (e.g. focusing on technical inputs to improve capacity for the poor to adapt) rather than actions that would support activism to overturn inequity.

Problems are usually defined as being a 'lack of' something. This presupposes the solution. A lack of schools can only be fixed by building schools. If instead, the problem was framed as 'children are unable to go to school', then a range of other causes become possible. In Afghanistan in the 1990s, while school facilities were indeed sparse and inadequate for quality teaching, it was the policies that prohibited education which undermined primary education. As we shall show later, local action by...