Helping People Help Themselves

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Contents

Foreword by Albert O. Hirschman....................................................................xviiPreface............................................................................................xix1 Introduction & Overview.........................................................................1Helping People Help Themselves.....................................................................1The Fundamental Helping Self-Help Conundrum........................................................4The Key Factor in Development Assistance: Autonomy-Respecting Help.................................6Unhelpful Help.....................................................................................7The First Don't: Don't Override Self-Help Capacity with Social Engineering.........................8The Second Don't: Don't Undercut Self-Help Capacity with Benevolent Aid............................12The Scylla and Charybdis of Development Assistance.................................................16Knowledge-Based Development Assistance.............................................................17The Three Dos......................................................................................19Eight Thinkers Triangulate a Theory of Autonomy-Respecting Help....................................232 Internal & External Motivation: Beyond Homo Economicus..........................................25Toward a Critique of Agency Theory.................................................................25Nondistortionary Interventions.....................................................................29Internal and External Motivation...................................................................363 The Indirect Approach...........................................................................52From Direct to Indirect Assistance.................................................................52McGregor's Theory Y: A Prototype Indirect Approach.................................................61Intrinsic Motivation and Theory Y..................................................................644 Indirect Approaches: Intellectual History.......................................................68Background.........................................................................................68Taoist Antecedents.................................................................................69The Socratic Method................................................................................70The Path of Stoicism...............................................................................73Learning in Neoplatonism...........................................................................75The Learning Paradox and Augustine.................................................................77Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Copernican Revolution in Pedagogy..........................................79John Dewey and the Active Learning Pedagogy........................................................81Carl Rogers' Nondirective Therapy..................................................................83Sren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein on Indirect Communication................................85Gilbert Ryle and Michael Polanyi on Uncodified Knowledge...........................................89Gandhi and Satyagraha..............................................................................91Summary of Common Theme: B-ing and Non-B-ing.......................................................975 Autonomy-Respecting Development Assistance......................................................100Development Intervention as a Principal-Agent Relationship.........................................100First Do: Starting from Present Institutions.......................................................104Second Do: Seeing the World through the Eyes of the Client.........................................107First Don't: Transformation Cannot Be Externally Imposed...........................................109Second Don't: Addams-Dewey-Lasch Critique of Benevolence...........................................113Third Do: Respect Autonomy of Doers................................................................1186 Knowledge-Based Development Assistance..........................................................121The Standard Methodology and Its Problems..........................................................121Examples of Building "In-capacity".................................................................129Types of Development Knowledge.....................................................................139Knowledge Assistance: Brokering between Experiments, Not Disseminating Answers.....................1477 Can Development Agencies Learn & Help Clients Learn?............................................149Introduction: A "Church" versus a Learning Organization............................................149The Open Learning Model............................................................................163Competition and Devil's Advocacy in the Open Learning Model........................................165Nondogmatism and Socratic Ignorance in Organizations...............................................176Rethinking the Agency-Country Relationship.........................................................1798 Case Study: Assistance to the Transition Countries..............................................186The Challenge of the Transition....................................................................186The Privatization Debates: Did History have a "Timeout" under Communism?...........................187Voucher Privatization..............................................................................189Voucher Privatization was a Political Strategy.....................................................193Institutional Shock Therapy versus Incrementalism..................................................195China: An Incrementalist Transition................................................................196Why an Incrementalist Approach Might Be Successful.................................................197The Lease Buyout Counterfactual....................................................................202Closing Remarks on the Transition Case Study.......................................................2059 Hirschmanian Themes of Social Learning & Change.................................................207The Balanced Growth Debate.........................................................................207Conditionality-Based Development Aid: The New Big Push.............................................210Unbalanced Growth Processes........................................................................213Cognitive Side of Unbalanced Growth................................................................216Bridges to Other Thinkers..........................................................................219Parallel Experimentation as a Basic Scheme for Learning under Uncertainty..........................23410 Conclusions.....................................................................................240Concluding the Example of the World Bank...........................................................240Concluding Remarks.................................................................................247Appendix. Eight Thinkers on the Five...