Let’s Drop the “Driver’s Seat” Mindset in International Aid
This text by Jean-Marc Bernard marks the launch of a three blogpost miniseries within a new NORRAG blog series on “Financing Education”. The mini-series on “Rethinking international aid” highlights disconnections and sometimes contradictions between development processes and aid processes, advocates for a mindset shift, and explores how such a shift would require radical changes within international aid.
“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves… There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” (Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
“We need to put the government in the driver’s seat” is a phrase I’ve heard many times in my 30-year career in international aid, including recently. Coming from international aid agencies, such a top-down language is rather problematic at a time when the sector is talking seriously about decolonizing aid. This mindset assumes there are people who know what to do (international experts) and people who don’t know or know less (governments and local actors in the developing world). Further, those “who know” consider it their job to convince those “who don’t know” what is necessary to accelerate development. Nowadays most international aid professionals would strongly disagree with such a statement, however this mentality has been prominent for decades and is embedded in strategy, planning and operational processes that drive the daily work of all of us working in international aid.
Take, for example, our obsession with the concept of “ownership”. The convincing rationale behind this obsession is the idea that if people own a process, an initiative, a program (etc.), they will do their very best to ensure it succeeds. Statements of how “it is critical to ensure ownership by national/local authorities” are ubiquitous in meetings in aid agencies, yet this is paradoxical. Indeed, development is a process that originates within countries and can’t really be engineered externally, so don’t national and local authorities already own their processes? Perhaps not, considering that “ownership” is generally used to refer to processes driven by aid agencies rather than to development processes initiated locally. Of course, we, in the aid community, like to think that aid processes support development processes led by local authorities and leaders. In my experience, this perspective is most of the time wishful thinking. In fact, the desperate call for ownership is an attempt to escape or even deny the reality of the principal-agent relationship that characterizes most international aid work. The archetypical example of this principal-agent relationship is the classic project of an aid agency that depends on national counterparts (local civil servants) to implement.
Thinking that any international aid agency has the power to put any government “in the driver’s seat” is not only offensive and naïve, it also demonstrates a total disconnection with the reality of development. This “driver’s seat” mindset is clearly inconsistent with what we know about development. First, development is fundamentally a change process that originates within countries, which implies that local leadership is the main driver of such process. It is leaders from the public sector, civil society and the private sector who initiate and drive development processes at country level. Second, development is a complex, messy, and nonlinear process marked by uncertainty and requiring time. There is no one expert solution or silver bullet. Don’t get me wrong, expertise is needed to tackle many complicated problems that countries face along the way, but it’s neither the driving force nor the key to success of any development process. Acknowledging that is an important step in the right direction.
From a development standpoint, it is time to replace the “driver’s seat” mindset with a leadership mindset. I am not suggesting that we simply replace the word “ownership” with “leadership”. International aid agencies often adopt a new rhetoric without changing the way they operate. What I am really talking about is a mindset shift towards local leadership, which will make it a key driver of actual practice in aid agencies. Such a shift would require radical changes within the international aid sector.
What, you may ask, are these changes? Stay tuned for my next blog where I will take up the main implications of a leadership mindset. In the meantime, if you are interested in diving further into this topic, I suggest reading Stefan Dercon’s 2022 book Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, Ben Ramalingam 2013 book Aid on the Edge of Chaos, and William Easterly’s spirited 2013 treatise The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.
About the Author:
Jean-Marc Bernard holds a PhD in Economics and has three decades of experience in development, both at country and global level. He is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and an independent consultant advising multi-lateral, civil society, and philanthropic organizations.
View this post on the NORRAG Blog at this link.