Helping People Help Themselves

From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development AssistanceBy David Ellerman

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © 2005University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11465-8

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 Themes........................................................253First Do: Starting from Where the Doers Are........................................................253Second Do: Seeing through the Doers' Eyes..........................................................255First Don't: Don't Try to Impose Change on Doers...................................................257Second Don't: Don't Give Help as Benevolence.......................................................259Third Do: Respect Autonomy of the Doers............................................................261Notes..............................................................................................265Bibliography.......................................................................................301Index..............................................................................................327

Chapter One

Introduction & Overview

Helping People Help Themselves

The World Bank, the leading multilateral development agency, begins its mission statement with a dedication to helping people help themselves, and Oxfam, a leading nongovernmental organization (NGO) working on development, states that its "main aim is to help people to help themselves." Perhaps the most successful example of development assistance in modern history was the Marshall Plan, which "did what it set out to do-help people help themselves" (Stern 1997). American official assistance to developing countries began with Harry Truman's "Point Four" program in 1949, which was conceived as a worldwide "program of helping underdeveloped nations to help themselves."

John Dewey gave perhaps the best statement of the theme:

The best kind of help to others, whenever possible, is indirect, and consists in such modifications of the conditions of life, of the general level of subsistence, as enables them independently to help themselves. (Dewey and Tufts 1908, 390)

The idea and the rhetoric of "helping people help themselves" has been with us throughout the postwar period of official development assistance. For instance, we are all familiar with the ancient Chinese saying that if you give people fish, you feed them for a day, but if you teach them how to fish-or rather, if you enable them to learn how to fish-then they can feed themselves for a lifetime. There is broad agreement-at least as a statement of high purpose-that helping people help themselves is the best methodology for development assistance in the developing countries as well as for other types of helping relationships.

Yet, in the course of this book, I argue that the notion of helping people help themselves is in fact a deep conundrum far more subtle than is realized by the many development agencies that routinely use the slogan. Indeed, most of the "helping people help themselves" rhetoric from the development agencies simply takes the idea as being the same as helping people. There is little or no suspicion that most "help" is in fact unhelpful in the sense of overriding or undercutting self-help and is thus quite antithetical to helping people help themselves. Thus much of our discourse must be negative-showing how most help is actually unhelpful in fostering "people helping themselves." On the positive side, genuine help is not something that can be done in a direct frontal way or mounted like an engineering project. You cannot force a person to act spontaneously. You cannot externally supply motivation to a person to act on his or her own motivation. This is often indicated with metaphors like "pushing on a string" or "you can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink." But the failure of direct frontal help does not mean that external help is impossible. Genuine help is a far more humble and subtle activity that enables self-help in an indirect manner. Our task is to lay the intellectual foundation for the alternative methodology of development assistance that genuinely helps self-help.

The continuing inability of the major development agencies to understand the subtlety of helping people help themselves is evident in the repeated and increasingly frenetic calls for "massively increased aid" and "redoubled efforts" to push through more programs "to help" reach the periodically announced development goals. In a historical perspective, international development assistance has only been a major official organized effort since the end of World War II. It has not been an outstanding success. To some extent this is not surprising since the development of whole societies must surely be one of the most complex tasks facing humanity. It far outstrips the complexity and difficulty of building developmental infrastructure such as highways, power plants, and airports. Dreams that economic development could be engineered in the way that smallpox was conquered or someone was put on the moon have remained dreams. Indeed, I argue that it is not even the same type of task; it is not a task of engineering written large at the level of a society ("social engineering").

The failure is not for lack of money. While one can easily argue that many rich countries have been less than generous in their development aid, I argue that the failure has not been one of insufficient benevolence. The current calls for pouring more money into the conventional channels of development assistance are, unfortunately, not a solution and are not even a move in the right direction. Indeed the approach to development assistance either as a task of social engineering or as an exercise in benevolent aid is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Many of the current forms of assistance not only are ineffective but tend to perpetuate if not exacerbate the problems of development.

I take a different approach, arguing that the problems lie not in the details of the development models nor in the content of the conditionalities imposed by development agencies but in the whole mode and philosophy of development assistance. The intellectual strategy is, in part, to look at the great historical thinkers who have wrestled with the basic conundrum of helping self-help and then to adapt and carry over their ideas and recommendations to development assistance. The results show a strong affinity with the seminal contemporary work in development of Albert Hirschman and Amartya Sen.

This approach exploits the fact that similar subtleties and difficulties occur in all fields of human assistance-in education broadly construed, management, psychology, and social organizing as well as in economic development. For instance, just as most development assistance is in fact unhelpful to self-help, so most schooling has little to do with real education in the sense of awakening and enabling a person's intrinsic thirst for learning. Various thinkers have wrestled with these parallel problems in all areas of human endeavor. Hence my methodology is "to triangulate" on the problems and solutions by bringing out the parallels between the fields in spite of much difference in the terminology and in the particulars. Workers in one vineyard can be heartened when they see workers in other vineyards facing similar problems and perhaps making some progress. Learning to translate between fields-giving due weight to differences-can be a powerful engine of discovery, and it is an engine that I try to exploit.

Across the fields, helping or assistance is a relationship between those offering assistance in some form, the helper or helpers, and those receiving the assistance, the doer or doers. The helpers could be individuals, NGOs, or official bilateral or multilateral development agencies, and the doers could be individuals, organizations, or various levels of government in the developing countries. The relationship is the helper-doer relationship.

The Fundamental Helping Self-Help Conundrum

In every parent-child, teacher-student, manager-worker, or, generally, helper-doer relationship, there is the frustration of the helper wanting the doers to do something-and wanting them to do it for the doers' own reasons. Whatever cajoling, enticements, rewards, or bribes might be offered by the helpers will only supply external reasons. Yes, the doers might be induced to go through the motions in this way, but that is not the desired internally motivated performance. That frustration on the part of the helpers frames our basic problem.

The assumed goal is the doers helping themselves-autonomous development on the part of the doers. The problem is how can the helpers "supply" help that actually furthers rather than overrides or undercuts the goal of the doers helping themselves. This is actually a paradox or conundrum; if the helpers are supplying help that directly influences the doers, then how can the doers really be "helping themselves"? Autonomy cannot be externally supplied. And if the doers are to become autonomous, then how can external helpers have any direct influence? This paradox of supplying help to self-help, "assisted self-reliance," or assisted autonomy is the fundamental conundrum of development assistance. David Korten terms it the "central paradox of social development: the need to exert influence over people for the purpose of building their capacity to control their own lives" (Korten 1983, 220). And Julie Fisher elaborates on this conundrum as the "central paradox of social development" (Fisher 1993, chap. 8). Thomas Dichter refers to the "Classic development dilemma-how can you help people become self-sufficient?" (Dichter 2003, 271).

I have promised to emphasize the parallels between fields. The helping conundrum is always present wherever there is a helper-doer relationship. For instance, it is fundamental not just to social development but to education where it occurs in various forms as the "learning paradox." This learning paradox was clearly posed by the early twentieth-century Socratic-Kantian Leonard Nelson:

Here we actually come up against the basic problem of education, which in its general form points to the question: How is education at all possible? If the end of education is rational self-determination, i.e., a condition in which the individual does not allow his behavior to be determined by outside influences but judges and acts according to his own insight, the question arises: How can we affect a person by outside influences so that he will not permit himself to be affected by outside influences? We must resolve this paradox or abandon the task of education. (Nelson 1949, 18-19)

The philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave a particularly clear statement of the same conundrum or paradox in education.

How can one person teach another person to think things out for himself, since if he gives him, say, the new arithmetical thoughts, then they are not the pupil's own thoughts; or if they are his own thoughts, then he did not get them from his teacher? (Ryle 1967, 112)

Or again, the philosopher of science and education David Hawkins has outlined the conundrum in education that his daughter called the "central paradox of social development" (Fisher 1993).

If we ask how the teacher-learner roles differ from those of master and slave, the answer is that the proper aim of teaching is precisely to affect those inner processes that ... cannot in principle be made subject to external control, for they are just, in essence, the processes germane to independence, to autonomy, to self-control. (Hawkins 2000, 44)

This educational conundrum is the pedagogical version of the general helping self-help conundrum. Over the years, the seemingly endless debates about aid, help, assistance, and capacity building keep circling around and around the helping self-help conundrum in development assistance.

There is a dangerous bend in the road here that requires special caution. This is a book about development assistance, the helper-doer relationship in development, but the methodology is, in part, to look at the helping conundrum in other fields to get insights into development aid. Thus when education is being examined in the works of Dewey, Ryle, or Hawkins, this is not about "education in development." It is about the helping conundrum in the helper-doer (teacher-learner) relationship in education as an engine of discovery and understanding about the similar helper-doer relationship in development assistance.

The Key Factor in Development Assistance: Autonomy-Respecting Help

Comment is required at this point about the assumed notion of "development." Growth or an increase in wealth (say, in the sense that could come from discovering oil or other natural resources) is not the goal; the goal is development as freedom or autonomy in the sense of the capabilities approach (e.g., Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000; Alkire 2002) of having the capability and know-how to satisfy one's own needs. But in the idea of development-as-autonomy, there is both autonomy as an end and as a means. In Sen's terms, freedom has both a constitutive and an instrumental role. This dual role of autonomy might be related to the old discourse about the "key" factor in economic development.

In the over half-century of development economics, there has been a parade of "key" factors in development. The initial key was capital formation, particularly the infrastructural capital of transportation, power, and communication networks. After much expensive disappointment, the emphasis shifted to education (the formation of human capital), health, and the satisfaction of basic needs. Without pretending to cover all the development fads, lately there has been an emphasis on governance (e.g., corruption), the atmospherics of the business climate, and the background institutions of a country. Frustration with attempts to specify the key elements has also resulted in vaporous affirmations that "everything is important." But from the viewpoint of development assistance, this focus of development economics on the key elements is "asking the wrong question."

Development agencies do not do development; at best they do development assistance. Perhaps an analogy with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would be useful. Scientists who work at the atomic level do not have direct contact with the quantum reality; they only have contact with quantum realities as affected by their measurements. In a similar manner, we might say that the development agencies or, more generally, the helpers are not the doers of development. The helpers are involved only through a helper-doer relationship. Thus the question of whether this or that factor is key for the doers is not the first question for the helpers.

According to the helpers' latest theory of the key factor (e.g., capital, education, institutions, or business climate), the helpers might override or undercut the will of the doers in order to substitute their own will and thus push the doers in the direction of that "what." But this defeats the instrumental role of autonomy on the part of doers. The helpers cannot substitute for it. Thus the first question for the helpers is not the "what" for the doers (which will surely vary from case to case) but the "how" for the helpers in their helper-doer relationship. And that question does have an answer; the key "how" is autonomy-respecting help-for the helpers to help in a way that respects, fosters, and sustains the autonomy of the doers. Help that defeats the instrumental role of autonomy on the part of the doers is unhelpful. When the doers have the will, there is a way; the best role for the helpers is to indirectly enable and expedite that way, not to try to substitute their will for that of the doers.

Unhelpful Help

There are many strategies for development assistance that may supply "help" in some form but actually do not help people help themselves. The forms of help that override or undercut people's capacity to help themselves are called unhelpful help. There are similar critiques of "help [that] does not help" that emphasize the demeaning psychological effects of most help (e.g., Gronemeyer 1992). The late Ivan Illich developed a general theory of how the "helping professions" (e.g., doctors, nurses, lawyers, psychologists, teachers, ministers, aid workers, and social workers in general), each with its cartel of professional associations, can counterproductively generate "needs" to be administered to by the helpers and thus lead to a learned disability (Illich 1972, 1976, 1978a, and, particularly, "Disabling Professions" in 1978b). These ideas have been further developed by John McKnight (1995) using the notion of "disabling help."

(Continues...)

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