Error and myth

Abstract

The history of international development is replete with errors of knowledge and practice and self-sustaining myths to which they have given rise. Often these are generated, propagated with passion, and acted on in good faith, by people who mean well, only later to be recognized as wrong. Examples are presented from policies and programmes, beliefs about rural realities, supposed and asserted scientific and medical 'facts', and heresies which later proved to be true. Analysis of these and other evidence identifies three clusters of actors and forces which alone or in combination generate and sustain error and myth. These are, first, relational and personal (power, interests, mindsets, and ego); second, data-related (misleading data, extrapolating out of context, and overlooking history); and third, behavioural and experiential (embedding narratives and beliefs; distance and insulation; selective experiences through visits, presentations and perceptions; repeating narratives, stories and statistics; repetitive confirmation bias; public relations, soundbites and speeches; and reimagining and rewriting history assisted by the self-serving malleability of memory). Combined variously in different contexts, these factors and forces stand in the way of knowing better. To confront them, an agenda is proposed for reflection and action.

Keywords: error, myth, beliefs, heresies, mindsets, data, narratives, repetition, memory, ego, self-delusion

To err is human. (Seneca, Roman stoic philosopher, c. 4 BC–AD 65)

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)

Adults are obsolete children. (Dr Seuss, psychologist and cartoonist)

Prologue

International development is replete with errors, myths, and omissions. To know better, we need first to understand how these come about and are sustained and to reflect on what can be done. In this chapter I describe some errors and myths and try to tease out some of their common characteristics.

We all make mistakes. We can all learn from them. But whether we actually do learn from them, and our speed of learning, are things that decline with age. As infants and children, our trial, error, and correction are continuous: falling over or mispronouncing words are ways we learn. But as we grow older, know more, and are more in control of our actions, we become more responsible for what we do and do not do, and errors of commission or omission become increasingly matters of shame to be hidden or denied. Learning is less instantaneous and automatic: the time between actions and effects extends with longer causal chains. We know much more, and it is more embedded. Feedback from which we can learn takes longer and may be distorted or rejected. Power, social relations, and ego more and more influence how and what we learn, mislearn, and do not learn. From a learning point of view, we can ask ourselves, do we become, have we become, as in Dr Seuss's aphorism, obsolete children?

What has this to do with development? I ask this question both for development in the sense of 'good change' everywhere, and for international development in its past usual sense. For these, as I shall illustrate in later chapters, changes are accelerating in the conditions we experience, in what we need to know, what we need to learn and unlearn, and how we do that. One major shift is reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the past development and international development referred to less developed and developing countries, but in 2016 the SDGs have made development objectives universal. SDG 10, for instance, to reduce inequality between and within countries, applies to the USA, UK, and Russia as much as to Afghanistan, the Philippines, or Zimbabwe. The old distinctions of North and South, of developed and developing countries, make less sense than ever as we all recognize that we have much to learn collegially from each other.

On the positive side, enormous progress has been made with outstanding contributions to understanding and action. Among scholars, Amartya Sen stands out for his revolutionary insights and thinking, and among international organizations, UNICEF for its leadership and contributions to the welfare of children and women. And across the board, innumerable past errors have been corrected.

So learning, learning to learn better, and learning from each other become opportunities and priorities for us all. We cannot return to childhood: the causal chains between actions and effects are often uncertain and feedback missing or misleading. But what we can do is ask how we 'know', and how we learn, and how we can know and learn better. Can we 'embrace error', to use David Korten's phrase from the 1980s? What can we learn from failure, from what has not worked, and what lessons can we draw that are applicable across countries and contexts? And what can we learn from the resilience of myths, of beliefs that are false?

In searching for answers to these questions, I have chosen to focus on examples and evidence with which I have some familiarity. This gives a bias towards rural development, agriculture, and sanitation. The reader will make her own judgement whether this distorts the inferences and conclusions I draw, or whether and to what extent they have general validity.

The costs of errors and myths to those who are 'last', those who are poorer, weaker, and more vulnerable, have been horrendous. The environmental, social, economic, and other costs in damage done and resources misallocated have been beyond counting. These errors and myths have often been generated and propagated with passion and acted on in good faith by people who meant well, only later to be revealed as ill-founded and wrong. Like others, I have myself been seriously wrong (see, for example, chapter 1 in Chambers, 2014) and have done harm when believing that I was doing good. This has led me to wonder how I and others could have been so misguided and made me curious about error and myth, how we know and do not know, and how and why we so often get it wrong. So in what follows there is no 'holier than thou'. My hope is that if we can understand how and why we – the collective development professional 'we' – have been so wrong so often and for so long, perhaps we can learn to do better.

With this in mind, this first chapter is empirically based on cases of error and myth (for more detail on the examples, see Chambers, 1997: 15–32). If we accept that all knowledge is contingent and provisional, this applies also to 'corrected' versions. There is no simple, final or complete truth and there will always remain the residual question of who debunks the debunker.

Being wrong: clusters of errors and myths

The errors and myths I shall consider cluster into three domains: policies and programmes; professionals' beliefs about rural realities; and rejected heresies which have later been recognized as well founded. I draw on these...