| By Gavin Chait,
on 26 January 2007
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 The Martians really care about you! Without a sense of where it is going or what it is for any plan will be lost. Throw in a bunch of confused motivations and it will head in the wrong direction: doomed from the start.
Development, as a discipline, is a relatively young phenomenon – the idea that we (as benevolent outsiders) should intervene in the lives of a functionally distinct group of people to assist them in reaching some goal. Development sits uncomfortably alongside the objectives of the capitalist community at large. Capitalists enjoy the fruit of development but developmental organisations consider capitalists to be unworthy unless as a source of cash.
Developmentalists frequently make the assumption that the more developed parts of the world are soulless and have made fatal compromises on their paths towards development. They wish to undo the mistakes of the past and create a pleasant utopia amongst the communities in which they intervene.
This creates an awful divide between countries and communities that develop on their own, and those that receive coaching from the outside. Some of the poorest countries in the world are being smothered by the kindness of strangers.
Imagine, though, that the roles were reversed. Imagine that, one day, an alien space ship were to be seen hovering in the sky over New York. Imagine that, having studied us briefly, a sentient race chose to contact the United Nations and offer to become trade partners.
A sentient species that was focused on the outside and interested in exploration and growth would have two choices: to conquer other developed planets; or to develop a trade platform with them.
Perhaps they would have had a similar development path to our own; full of violence and incident in the beginning and then a gradual realisation that trade between mutually strong communities creates tremendously more wealth and ideas than does one nation conquering another.
You could see them pondering ways in which to assist us to reach a level of development suitable for trading with them.
Imagine now that they had a similar attitude to less developed nations that we have to ours. “My word, but they are backward. We reached this stage of development a thousand years ago. They are corrupt, their systems of governance are expensive and patronising, their infrastructure is nowhere good enough. This is going to be hard.”
We would be entirely dependent on their technology to trade with them. Overnight we would recognise our own inferiority and poverty relative to the opulence and grandeur present in our new visitors. We would be angry and want what they have.
Say their people decided to protect themselves from us Earthlings: “They have terrible working conditions; they work for slave wages for minimal benefits. We must insist that they adopt our work practices, plus, we think that an excise tax on cheap imports would be a good idea.”
Perhaps they too have a vibrant development sector. Students and their equivalent of hippies turn up all over the show. Rural Poland plays host to thousands of eccentric aliens who enjoy the climate and set up schools where they teach in their own language in a way totally foreign to the locals. They work for free. Polish kids decide that the alien schools are much more interesting than their own schools, so they abandon them. Polish teachers migrate towards better jobs in New York. Sensing that things are not going well in Poland, the aliens offer cheap loans to the government – so much money that they don’t collect taxes anymore. A gradual hollowing-out of the state follows. The aliens can’t understand what is going wrong. Clearly the Polish are just lazy and stupid. In a few years they’ll need a debt write-off.
This can go on and on, and wrong and wrong.
Development, uncoupled to any clear objective, isn’t going to achieve anything other than a gradual senescence. It is like holding down a drowning man while making sure he has a pipe in his mouth so he can breathe.
If we were to catch up with those aliens, if we were to do so under our own control and under our own guidance: what would it look like?
For starters, we wouldn’t allow them in to simply set up projects as and when. Innovations and inventions are shaped towards deliverable products. We don’t invent things or build buildings just for the sake of it. Only dictators can afford to squander assets not of their own making. It is no surprise that only the most corrupt governments entirely out of touch with the needs of their own people are able to build large, self-serving – and, ultimately, useless – monuments to their own genius.
Every organisation or community has only a limited capacity to absorb cash from the outside. If there is a surplus then it can be banked. But, if it is like pocket money – we can spend it any way we like and we’ll get more next week – then we’ll squander it.
If development is seen as magnanimous but totally disconnected from our daily lives, then we will waste it. If development is seen as a means towards trade and investment then we will ask for very specific things.
These would be:
- Infrastructure development: give us the plans and teach our engineers how to build the necessary infrastructure so that we can physically move our manufactures from our world to yours – this would also include the telecommunications infrastructure necessary to move intangible products (such as stories, services and ideas).
- Education: take a selection of our best and brightest in a wide range of fields to your schools and universities to teach them what you know; they must then come back and are obliged to work with us to develop our syllabi to incorporate the new knowledge; our laboratories and universities must have access to this knowledge to study and experiment on their own
- Know-how and experience: tell us your own stories of how you developed and what was important for that development so that we may learn; don’t keep these stories just to the elite but work with media organisations to disseminate that information; asymmetrical control of information creates problems
- Governance: where any knowledge or money is given into an economy it will create local distortions as the immediate beneficiaries trade on that disparity – it is essential to ensure that everyone knows what the individual received and what they are expected to do with that benefit. Someone has to be tasked with ensuring distribution of a benefit and they should not be allowed to treat it as if it is a personal benefit. The only way to ensure this is through total disclosure: this is what was given, this is what was received, this is who received it, and this is what has been done so far.
Everything else must be bought and sold otherwise the shear advancement, sophistication and financial might of the donor will mean that every gift – no matter how relatively small on their part – will act as a colossal dumping of goods and services, distorting the local economy and putting local organisations out of business.
Development is the responsibility of the beneficiary. The donor’s responsibility is in communicating a path to development and allowing the beneficiary to build that path on their own.
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