People in poorer nations don’t have the nice things we do, so it must be because their ways of doing things aren’t as effective as our own. If we could just convince them to do things the way we do them then everyone would be rich, and Bill wouldn’t get any reception in Ghana either. So wealthy nations have spent a lot of time trying to export their newest and best makes and models of laws, regulations, and government agencies to the rest of the world.

One problem with this approach–one among many–is that it assumes that our every institutional and organizational innovation is beneficial. We call this “Whig history.” And while it’s hard to argue that wealthy nations don’t have an overall mix of institutions better adapted to producing wealth, it’s quite another to assume that they’re superior (at wealth production) to poor nations’ institutions on every margin. It could be that the evolution of our ways of doing things has taken a wrong turn in one or more spheres of activity.

Two recent articles raise the concern of Whig history, in ways relevant to ongoing debates in development. Eustace Davis writes at African Liberty that:

Governments world-wide are struggling to solve the problem of deficiencies in their schooling systems.  Politicians, teachers, educationists, administrators, employers, parents, politicians, policy analysts and students have differing ideas on how the problem should be solved.  All agree that something is wrong.  All have ideas on the kind of tinkering that is needed to fix the problem. The framework within which schooling functions is seldom or ever questioned; a framework that is little changed since schooling was nationalised in England in the late 19th and in the US in the early 20th centuries…

Schooling systems everywhere have become frozen in time. Schools are configured much as they were, and function in the same way they did, a century ago. A 1910 child would feel very much at home in a ‘modern’ school environment, whereas everything else in the world we live in has changed dramatically over the past 100 years.

Davis is concerned that the whole world copied England’s public educational institutions after they changed for the worse (see also James Tooley’s work on this topic).

And this article reports on the work of historian Eckard Höffner on 19th century Germany’s copyright law, or lack thereof. Höffner argues that the absence of copyright law facilitated the spread of knowledge that was critical to Germany’s industrialization and flowering scientific community. There is certainly no shortage of debate about the role of intellectual property in international development, but most of it assumes that IP law is wealth-enhancing in wealthy nations. Are we sure? How sure should we be before we export our IP laws?

Are these convincing examples of Whig history gone wild? Are there others?

Statement from CARE (Aug. 30, 2010):

Contrary to what Till Bruckner suggested in a recent blog, CARE did not withhold information in response to his FOIA request to USAID regarding certain projects in the Republic of Georgia. Our records indicate that CARE never received the request from USAID to review CARE’s budget information before USAID provided it to Mr. Bruckner. USAID’s email request to CARE went to two inoperative emails; one was for a former employee and one went to a current employee, but the email address was incorrect.  As a result, the CARE document that USAID sent to Mr. Bruckner was redacted without CARE’s knowledge.

We have since reviewed the document and will ask USAID to produce it in full without any redactions, including our indirect cost rate, which was the primary information that had been withheld.

Can you dig it?

Aid Watch readers might find this part* worth listening to. Hayek lambasts the “intellectuals” for their susceptibility to fads. By “intellectuals” he does not mean primarily academics, but rather “secondhand dealers in ideas” who specialize in conveying ideas to the general public: reporters, teachers, writers, artists, etc. Even though the ideas they propagate are frequently more trendy than well-founded, Hayek claims they end up serving as the public rationale for potentially grave policy decisions, such as interference in the internal governance of other nations.

And in this case, the example Hayek uses as a trendy idea has stuck around, especially in the development and aid world. Is Hayek ahead of the curve or behind the times in his prognosis?

*Those unable to view the video can read the transcript under the fold.

You see, my problem with all this is the whole role of what I commonly call the intellectuals, which I have long ago defined as the secondhand dealers in ideas.  For some reason or other, they are probably more subject to waves of fashion in ideas and more influential in the United States than they are elsewhere.  Certain main concerns can spread here with an incredible speed.  Take the conception of human rights.  I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it.  He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd. The United States discovered human rights two years ago or five years ago.  Suddenly it’s the main object and leads to a degree of interference with the policy of other countries which, even if I sympathized with the general aim, I don’t think it’s in the least justified.  People in South Africa have to deal with their own problems, and the idea that you can use external pressure to change people, who after all have built up a civilization of a kind, seems to me morally a very doubtful belief.  But it’s a dominating belief in the United States now.

Back to school shopping leads many people to buy apparel that was made in sweatshops. Rather than feel guilty for “exploiting” poor workers, shoppers should rejoice.  Their spending is some of the best aid we can give to people in poorer countries.

When workers voluntarily take a job they demonstrate that they believe the job is the best alternative available to them – even when that job is unsafe and the pay is very low compared to wages in the United States. That’s why economists with political views as divergent as Paul Krugman and Walter Williams have both written in defense of sweatshops.

Sweatshop jobs are often far better than the vast majority of jobs in the countries where they are located. David Skarbek and I researched sweatshops that were documented in U.S. news sources (or see here for my shorter, more general defense of sweatshops). We found that sweatshop worker earnings equaled or exceeded the average national income in 9 out of 11 countries we studied. Working in a sweatshop paid more than double the national average in four of the countries.

Sweatshops can also play a crucial role in economic development. Sweatshops bring investment, better technology, and the opportunity for workers to build skills. It was not long ago that sweatshops existed in many now-wealthy Asian countries.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that “We need to build a constituency of humanitarians who view low-wage manufacturing as a solution” for poverty in the third-world.   I hope many AidWatchers will join that constituency by defending sweatshops.

Both Laura and I are away for a week starting today.

I am cutting off the Internet entirely for a week in a bid to regain my sanity, so anything addressed to me in any Net medium (email, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments) I will not see for a week.

In the absence of Laura and I, DRI post-doc Adam Martin has generously agreed to take over as Guest Editor for a week, beginning with this morning’s post about what we can learn from city plans based on shapes of zoo animals.

See you after Labor Day! Bill

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:                Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Dr. King spoke these words 47 years ago today.The practical implementation was clear: give blacks the vote, give blacks equal rights. The vision is clear: fight double standards, don’t give freedom only to some while denying it to others, fight hatred.  How sad that people like Glenn Beck today, who promote hatred against unpopular groups, are trying to invoke some connection to these words.

In a much more subtle way, the aid industry has never come close to the moral clarity of this vision; it often practises double standards, with freedom for white men, but condescension and denial of voting rights and other rights for black men.  It covers this up with euphemisms and jargon, which I satirized on Huffington Post yesterday with the Powerpoint aid jargon version of I have a Dream.

People don’t realize that often the most skeptical and critical people have a soft spot for inspirational eloquence.  It certainly applies to me. I am getting goose bumps as I listen to “I have a dream” right now. …let’s speed up that day when all of God’s children can be Free at Last.

We at TI Georgia have closely followed this debate about whether and to what extent USAID and its NGO contractors should make their budgets public. Till Bruckner began his quest for answers while he was working with us in 2008-09, although his pursuit of the NGO budgets via FOIA requests to USAID was not conducted under the auspices of TI Georgia.

Mercy Corps’ response to the debate begins by stating, “it is unfortunate that the discussion has devolved into insinuations about NGO motives rather than an open discussion of what constitutes meaningful accountability in aid work.” Yet nowhere in this debate has TI Georgia witnessed an attack against the motives of aid workers. Transparency can open up a discussion on the global aid system and how to better address problems that lack of openness can lead to in ANY organisation:  waste, inefficiencies, redundancies and, sometimes, fraud and corruption. As Scott Gilmore points out in his post, the impact is what matters.

The discussion on the blog has been engaging, open, honest and productive. But we do not agree with attacks against individuals who speak up against problems that they see. To call someone a “self-appointed watchdog” misses the point. Others would call Till a whistleblower – exactly the practice we should encourage and protect if we are serious about delivering on our development promises, protecting aid funds and transforming the aid system.

Mercy Corps proceeds to make an ad hominem attack against Bruckner by drawing attention to problems in an assignment he did on behalf of TI Georgia in 2009. Mercy Corps’ criticisms of the unpublished report are fair. That is why TI Georgia chose not to publish the report. But we fail to see how problems in drafting that report are relevant to the question of whether NGOs should publish their budgets or not.

Further, claims that raw budget data are not useful to measure NGO effectiveness are misguided. The question of aid effectiveness is tied up inherently with having access to ALL the information behind aid programs, allowing for comparison and analysis. While releasing project budget documents may not be a catch-all indicator for transparency of an NGO or donor, it is certainly a meaningful one.

Even if conditions are precarious, such as in humanitarian assistance work, there should be a clear NGO or donor policy on transparency, and organisations need to be open about which information cannot enter the public domain – and why. TI, in its handbook, recommends that financial information should only remain secret if its publication endangers staff or beneficiaries.

Mercy Corps argues:

NGOs have different cost structures and different methodologies, and budget documents reveal little about which are most effective.  Certain types of projects – such as technical assistance or gender-based violence prevention – tend by their nature to be heavy on labor costs and light on capital items, while food distribution or micro-lending tend to be lighter on labor costs and heavier on capital requirements.

There are two separate arguments above. The second is about differences between types of assistance projects. No one advocating for aid transparency has implied that one kind of cost structure is inappropriate. Let us see the numbers, assess them and discuss our concerns with you.

The first is an argument we hear from NGOs over and over again: that publishing their budgets will erode their competitiveness. This argument has not gotten the attention it deserves in this exchange. The most sensitive information in those budgets, even before salaries, is the Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreements (NICRAs) that every NGO competing for USAID funds has, as Counterpart’s post highlights. NICRAs arrive in sealed envelopes and are carefully guarded secrets within the industry, differing widely in structure from one organization to another. Perhaps someone can explain why USAID contracting uses this system – presumably if all NICRAs were the same (or if they were all public), NGOs would be slightly more willing to disclose their budgets

In its current state, USAID’s system rewards secrecy and discourages public accountability. We applaud Bruckner for his efforts to raise these serious questions and we look forward to the viewpoints of more NGOs, USAID, and others on the topic.

Related posts:

The accidental NGO and USAID transparency test
Till Bruckner Responds to Critics on Meaningful Transparency
NGO Response: CNFA Reaffirms Commitment to Transparency
World Vision responds on transparency
USAID and NGO transparency: When in doubt, hide the data
Response from Mercy Corps on Transparency
NGO Transparency: Counterpart International to release budget