Development discussions often seek “answers” to “how to develop?” But to whom do we tell the answers? We assume the existence of someone who can take our answers and turn them into actual Development. Let’s call this person “Bob,” as in the following diagram:
But who is Bob? Of course, many autocrats would happily volunteer to be “Bob,” and many development experts show some sympathy for such a “benevolent” autocrat. Indeed the whole Bob theory of development seems to imply coercion of everyone else at several points along the way, as illustrated below. So Bobism is a great ideology to justify autocracy. But is the deprivation of freedom “worth it”? Who gets to decide? And even if autocrats like Bob were OK, Bob faces many other problems going from experts to the development outcome, as further illustrated below. So, frankly, the “guy named Bob” theory of Development is not really very satisfying.
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“So, frankly, the “guy named Bob” theory of Development is not really very satisfying.”
Yes it is, if you are Bob.
I even suspect William to resent Bob.
The whole setup, with information imbalances and 2 masters: the beneficiaries and the tax payers, just screams for a central facilitating role for Bob. It is even difficult to imagine anything happening at all, without a benevolent Bob on a throne in the middle.
Dear Mr. Easterly,
I concur.
Sincerely,
Searcher N. Training
P.S. I’m guessing Bob didn’t send roses and a heart-shaped box of chocolates. Sorry. = )
If Bob is Lee Kuan Yew, it just might work. If he’s anyone else, the chances aren’t so hot.
Swap “autoract” with “development worker” and the statements are just as true:
“But who is Bob? Of course, many
autocratsdevelopment experts would happily volunteer to be “Bob,” and manydevelopment expertsautocrats show some sympathy for such a “benevolent”autocratdevelopment expert…. So Bobism is a great ideology to justifyautocracythe development industry.”Both autocrats and development project workers are administrators with a self-assigned duty for reforming society in accordance with some vision, and with independent resources to do so. The harm isn’t just that development workers support autocrats but that, in a much milder way, the aid industry replicates similar power structures. I’m not sure why you’re holding back on your cynicism with this one…
What’s the alternative? All we highly paid professional outsiders can do is offer advice and suggestions – sometimes backed up by coercion and distorting payments – to “guys named Bob”.
David Ellerman made a great distinction between the ‘helpers’ and the ‘doers’. People do their own development; outside advisors do development assistance. The problem comes when outsiders start believing their own hype and acting as if they have direct responsibility for other people’s development outcomes. Madness! And instantly recognisable if you turn the roles around and put yourself in the unenviable position of receiving all this advice.
The change in perspective has huge implications for managing what aid agencies do. I wrote about them at http://www.ngoperformance.org.
There are ways for researchers to get their findings implemented in a way that they can live with. Take Paul Collier, who sits on the Board of the Bank of Botswana, for instance. He has direct access to the mechanisms to see his research in action. More researchers should follow this approach.
Moreover, often it is the student of the researcher who is pushing the research. I’m sure there are quite a few ‘The Elusive Quest for Growth’ readers who have the ear of Bob. So in this instance, it’s not Bob who is choosing the research necessarily, but the student who is manipulating Bob.
Also, let’s not forget about the role of the WTO, IMF, NGOs, and other organizations who find their own way to push an agenda on Bob. If history is telling the story, Bob is not the autocrat he appears to be when it comes to development policy, as the IMF, WTO and the like have shoved its share research/policy/insight down Bob’s throat.
However, when Bob is the autocrat choosing research for political reasons, there are ways to navigate around Bob.
Obviously we need to spread the word about development, I don’t have to talk about here about how many people in the world need help.
But “coercion” is kind of a strong word.
Telling others that others in the world don’t have it as well, and need your help, is simply stating facts. It is only coercion if the facts are a lie.
Hm, this does seem to imply a rather top-down approach to development. As if development is something brought by development experts and autocrats (benevolent or not). If we took these developers away, what would happen to development?
Geir Sundet
Hm, this all does seem to imply a rather top-down approach to development. As if development is something brought by development experts and autocrats (benevolent or not). If we took these developers away, what would happen to development?
Geir Sundet
i know who’s bob.. ….bob is rob …. bob is rob man…
——
question 1: what is a dynamic system?
question 1a: what is a system?
question 1b: what is “dynamic”?
question 1c: what is system dynamics?
question 2: what is system economics?
What are you whingeing about!? From now on, if you are not happy with Bob’s work you can send him an SMS! Isn’t that great?
http://www.devex.com/en/articles/5-months-after-mdg-summit-citizen-tracking-mechanism-is-launched-in-kenya#comments
Agreed, Alex Jacobs! Having a little humility and knowing your role are the most important traits development assistance workers can have. This goes along with the recent debate about who benefits from volunteer experience. Scott Gilmore argues it’s clearly the volunteers and no one else, but others disagree in the comment section. I’d also like to point out this post Whose Volunteer Experience is this Anyway? written by a blogger who met a woman who took her kids on a volunteer building trip to Cambodia and was appalled that the locals actually wanted to lead the project themselves instead of listening to her kids. Volunteers are different than skilled professionals in many ways, but I think the underlying argument of humility applies to both.
Gregory, I did not mean development is inherently coercive, I meant the “Bob” approach is coercive.
The “Bob” approach is top-down, as Geir Sundet noted, and I believe this top-down “Bob” approach is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
don’t even get me started on Bob — I hate that guy.
So, Bob is bottom-up [BTW, I have previously posted a comment in favor of bottom-up Egypt's uprising] and Beans is allegedly top-down. As an aside: Well, there could be pretty good arguments from both perspectives (notwithstanding bottom-up admirable “activism” and the usual “muscular” top-down ). We, perhaps, need both Bob and Beans – but an “alleged” “idea” that is sympathetic toward Bob and Bobism. Still, how would you get to implement it at a “scalable” level without convincing, coercing, concubining, cajoling Beans? Cheers!!!
My apologies, I totally got confused with “Bob and Beans”… to correct myself:
Beans is allegedly bottom-up [BTW, I have previously posted a comment in favor of bottom-up Egypt's uprising] and Bob is allegedly top-down. As an aside: Well, there could be pretty good arguments from both perspectives (notwithstanding bottom-up admirable “activism” and the usual “muscular” top-down ). We, perhaps, need both Beans and Bob – but an “alleged” “idea” that is sympathetic toward Beans and Beansism. Still, how would you get to implement it at a “scalable” level without convincing, coercing, concubining, cajoling Bob? Cheers!!!
Hmmm.
I’ve been Bob.
Now modify your chart and include a development manager that is an undiagnosed manic-depressive who routinely freaks out on Fridays.
Who are these “development experts” who apparently don’t actually “develop” anything but come up with “ideas” ? Fire them and find someone who has actually built something to be your “expert” …
Maybe the problem with aid organizations is that they are staffed by people who are in touch with their inner child and “care for the poor” and not by engineers and business people …
“Our work is based on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid.”
Really are you trying to say that if more people bear witness to aid that it will be more effective ?
Really ??? How did that “idea” turn out for Darfur ?
How about basing your work on getting the job done … a concrete goal as opposed to a nice “idea” … I guess its hard to measure the idea …
Good observation. Someone should write a book about that and get a Nobel prize for it.
@F.Hayek, ouch, Nobel is hmmm tempting. But I dumbly reason: I am nobody, so I give it a pass
[you know who should get it].
Hallelujah Prof. Easterly, what is your response to memomachine, jeff and jeff?
Do not tell me you are busy, or unworthy a response. In conjunction, hope you do not deploy your “experts”.
So, is “Jeff” (whatever) finally troubling you?
Simplistic thinking divorced from reality. There is no – and there are no – Bobs anywhere. Development experts purportedly influencing Bob are joined by a variety of others who arguably have much, much more influence – big companies being chief among them. Development gets a lot of attention because it’s so visible. But it’s not the real problem in developing nations. The real problem is multinationals exploiting the countries and, to some extent, the governance that facilitates that and then takes the crumbs that spill from the multinationals. Anyone living in these countries can tell you that. Those sitting in offices in Washington and New York do not see it – or refuse to acknowledge it – because it does not suit their interests – in fact, they are often on the same payroll as the governments in the developing countries. Continue your debate on development. Meanwhile, the big corporate machines keep humming along.
I am Bob. Pay me.
In the last step, were “Bob perturbs complicated dynamic system”, really describes why this system is not “sustainable”, at least in understanding and harmonizing with facts and logic. With respect to the truth about any given field of study, it is not “sustainable”.
When “Bob” moves to tweak decisions and information, it only distorts the results, and as those results diverge from the hard realities of life, “Bob” has to expend even more energy to produce a result he finds acceptable. So “Bob” intrudes even more, becoming in the end like a person trying to control the level of water in a lake by measuring the waves from the back of a motorboat circling in its own wake.
This is exactly why socialism is economically impossible. The more economic decisions that are distorted for the sake of ideology or political goals, the less efficient the economy becomes. The instant an activity cannot produce a real profit, where the value of the result is greater than the value of all the inputs, that is the instant when capital starts to be consumed. And when the capital is exhausted, the activity cannot take place, no matter how much “Bob” directs and commands that it must. That is exactly how every socialist economy collapses.
Don’t call him ‘Bob’. Would be better to call him ‘Benito’ or Big Brother. Or Czar.
you forgot the part:
Bob takes the money and pockets half of it in his Swiss (or Malaysian) bank account and then uses the rest to make his cronies rich by having them “implement” the development.
Joe and Jill, of course, remain in deep poverty. The money was supposed to help them but never mind.
OK, one problem I have with your main ongoing critique of “development as we know it” is, how is this different from any other academic discipline that engages in policy advice? Replace “development” with “health care” or “trade policy” or any other policy topic du jour and you will run into the same set of potentially dangerous assumptions between theory and implementation. This is why we rarely get good policies even when the academics are in complete agreement, e.g. US health care system or drug policy or agricultural subsidies. Not that this makes the criticism invalid — it just makes it part of a much bigger story about the relationship between academia and policymakers.
Also I don’t see why Bob HAS to be an autocrat. Simply writing “This is the policy that evidence suggests will work” does not imply “I also think this policy should be enforced via dictatorship.” (All of the development literature I’ve seen on the potential benefits of autocracy comes down against it.) So what if we expand your model to include both Bob and Alice, who each select the expert findings they feel are most compelling, and some mechanism for the intended beneficiaries to choose whether they want Bob or Alice. Like, say, an election! Hey, I think I’m on to something here!
So maybe the real question is why the specifics of development policy are rarely on the political agenda in poor democracies. Surely if Candidate Bob campaigns on the promise “I will pressure our donors to do more water infrastructure projects, because that’s what we really want,” and then gets elected with a big majority, the donors would be more than happy to go along? Instead, we just get occasional “I hate the World Bank! Let’s be friends with Venezuela instead!” candidates who end up taking money from the IFIs anyway when the treasury runs out. I can’t see how development experts are to blame for this.
(P.S. The Bob and Alice model also works if Bob and Alice are different development agencies, and countries/communities/whatever get to choose the one they want to work with. I think this does happen in actual practice more than you are ready to admit.)
(P.P.S. Bill, I’m glad that you’ve graduated from the “FAO report from the 1980s” graphs you use in your academic papers to “my dad using PowerPoint”-style SmartArt but please, please, please: do yourself a favor and get a graphics intern!)
As a guy named Bob, but without the power, this critique does not make much sense to me. Central policy does not have to be autocratic. Intermediaries are needed to bridge research and policy, to apply theoretical ideas in the real world, through political negotiation to convince stakeholders. This is generally done quite badly, but the idea that the overall process of policy reform can be replaced by ‘bottom up’ development is laughable. A good nudge at the policy level has lasting impact beyond any number of aid projects directly helping the poor. Good policy lets the poor help themselves. Poor countries only get lasting growth when they systematically apply good policy, based on evidence. When the wonks have enough clarity and rigor and openness to convince Bob and sensible onlookers that their ideas make sense, he ought to champion them. There are plenty of good top-down ideas out there, for example policy and regulatory reform to make financial systems more inclusive and to focus on the binding constraints for market value chains. Without Bob these ideas go nowhere.
This argument is very interesting but I don’t understand why “development experts” have to give their advice to another group to carry out their plans. Why won’t these development experts take on the role of BOB as well? This kind of reminds me of your argument of planners and searchers. Development experts should be doing work on the ground to really make an impact. They should not be relying on Bob to make development happen.
@Gaby, yes it would be great if all policy makers in poor countries were development experts, but they are not. There is also the small matter of the Paris and Accra principles of country ownership of development policy. Experts have to find and convince intermediaries who can understand and sell good policy, amidst a welter of political and social constraints.
OK, isn’t this article just perpetuating stereotypes about Bobs in development? What is it about Bob that makes it the name to use in articles like this? Does Bob constitute the everyman who blindly follows bureaucratic leadership and never seeks the truth? Or is he more along the lines of a nice guy, but village idiot?
We may never know the answers to these questions. Nice post, though, although next time perhaps it could be “Mike” or “Phil”, or even “Gonzales” or “Francois”.
I can see how the Bob theory may trouble some, but whether it’s autocratic or bureaucratic the same risks exist. At the end of the day the people at the bottom being affected by the decison(s) of one or a couple have very little say so in what is being done to fix their problems. Their is no universal blueprint that will work for every country, so whether it’s the “bob” theory or another in order for it to work the people at the bottom have to have to have a say so as to the methods being implemented to help them out. For example the bob theory could work as long as the so called development experts are not the only ones that bob is relying on to make his decisions, he can also get the community leaders involved and listen and learn from what they have to say about what methods/policies might work.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for this “Bob” character to please all parties involved. There are so many aspects that would effect the developmental outcome of aid. For each section of the graph (research, application, politics, etc.), there are an infinite number of different opinions and needs. The people who need the aid probably want to use it in some way other than how it was intended to be used by the researchers. The people who provide the aid always think they know best. All of this shows that there is an extremely important job to be done by this “Bob” party. “Bob” can communicate with all parties and decide the most effective way to use the resources.
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