Episode 12: Rethinking Development Mixtape

In our Season 4 finale, we share a compilation of clips from our past 50+ episodes!

Transcript

Safa: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Rethinking Development podcast. My name is Safa and I'm your host. In the last episode of our fourth season, I'd like to celebrate a milestone with all of you. A few weeks ago, we hit our 50th episode! Over the past 4 seasons, we've had tens of thousands of listeners joining us for more than 160 countries. And we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. And of course, a big thank you to our guests who have each generously shared their personal experiences and insights with all of us. Our guests are the heart of this podcast, and I can't thank all of them enough.

Regular listeners would know that so far, there have only been 2 episodes where I have spoken to you in more depth, or shared some of my own thoughts and learnings. That was Episode 3.1, and then a bit in 3.13. That's because this podcast is not really about what I think - it's a platform for diverse development and humanitarian aid practitioners to speak honestly about their personal experiences and reflections on their work. Over time that focus on 'practitioners' has expanded, and of course, we've also been in conversation with academics, writers and activists working in the space or spaces that are jointly aligned. Throughout all this, our mission has always been to pass the mic and really listen to what others have to say. And I invite you all as listeners to do the same. For those of you who have visited our website, you might know that we quote Audrey Lorde, who wrote: "What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day? We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learnt to work and speak when we are tired." We invite you all to spend some time reflecting on that. What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day?

Most of our conversations on the podcast implicate power or power structures. But being intellectually honest with ourselves and our colleagues is not always easy, especially on a public forum. But we need to continue to visibilize, name, understand and overcome toxic dynamics. Guests have frequently reiterated how the personal, institutional and cultural work together to perpetuate long standing discriminatory and unequal power dynamics in our sector and of course well beyond. I'd like to share some questions that we can all consider in our day to day work. Number one: who has decision making power in your organization? Why is that? Does everyone know how decisions are made? Could it be more clear and transparent? Number two: who has control and influence over financial resources? Who doesn't? Why is that? Number three: how would you describe the work culture of your organization? How would the most marginalized member of your team describe it? These are just a couple of the many questions we can all consider in our efforts to rethink development.

But now let's switch from questions to reflections. So as a way of wrapping up our 4th season, I've gone through our past 50+ episodes and extracted a few memorable and poignant quotes. Of course, these quotes are not exhaustive. There are many, many more gems and food for thought that our past guests have each shared. And I encourage you to take the time to listen to what they have each shared in full. So for now, this is the end of our 4th season. If you get a chance, please leave a comment, click the like button and share with your friends. We appreciate all of that. And that's it for now. So I'll leave you with a compilation of clips for past seasons.

Karin Sham Poo: It is of course a very different world today compared to 1945, when the United Nations was established. But I think it is still very much needed.

Rita Thapa: I went through several aid agencies very quickly. And I saw the whole gamut of bilateral aid, bilateral agencies multilateral in terms of the UN, and then some really supposed to be good INGOs. And I just felt the structures were very, very flawed and came to a conclusion that you cannot really do good work from flawed structures.

Gary Burniske: When I started off in the business back in 1977, donors were much more hands off and recognized that international development agencies that were in the field, with people that were field driven, knew a lot more on how to deliver development assistance than donors themselves. But as international aid has become more politicized over the years, that has made it much more difficult for, I think, international development programs to be more effective.

Qi Cui: There will be different agendas and priorities will clash. So how this actually should be managed is always an ongoing challenge.

Sabina Faiz Rashid: There's all kinds of power dynamics: who controls the resources, how is aid given, the politics of aid, the assumptions around knowledge, the kind of sweeping generalizations of what development needs, right, that's one. Two, we also reproduce some of that when we work within communities being Bangladeshi in Bangladesh, right? So there's a paternalistic kind of approach, global, local, within local, across - and it's not always confined to just someone sitting in North America, it can be someone sitting in Bangladesh, who has these approaches, right?

Akiko Maeda: I really started to have serious doubts about the way things were being done. And not just in a day to day way, there's always problems and there's no perfect institution, so you deal with it on a day to day basis. But I felt a much deeper misgiving and others shared with me their concerns, and that is why I've decided to leave development organizations altogether, to rethink - as you were saying, rethink the way we're doing things, because just doing more is not going to solve the problem. In fact, we may actually be creating more problems, more divisions, sowing the seeds of destruction down the line. I felt quite alarmed about those prospects.

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda: I've never been a part of a conversation about such important topics in all the different organizations that I was a part of. And I think that as we are evolving as a society, we should be wanting to go towards these steps of better understanding each other, we also must as organizations be better at self criticism in a way that's constructive.

Paula Claycomb: I think that ethics is still very undervalued as a subject for training.

Jessica Alexander: It's still a very Western dominated model. It's a charity driven model, we've been sort of tweaking at the margins, I think, but haven't addressed some of the more structural issues that get at the root, or the heart of some of the reasons why people remain in crisis today.

Hugo Slim: People were talking about these things. They weren't necessarily describing them as ethics, or moral. They were just saying, you know, what's the right thing to do? And are we being instrumentalized? Are we being abused, whatever, whatever. So the conversations were all there, they weren't necessarily labeled as ethical at the time. And a lot of that persists. A lot of these conversations are just hard operational decisions and problems sometimes, which people don't bother to call ethical. And you don't have to call them ethical, so long as you're trying to work out, what is the right thing to do?

Shuaib Chalklen: I'm frustrated by the fact that we're just not doing enough to mobilize against the economic injustices in Africa. If I could do things differently, its to build alliances with other social movements, and continue to fight the real enemy. And the real enemy is poverty, or the causes of poverty.

Filiberto Penados: Often, when people talk about poverty, it tends to pathologize the people who are being perceived as being poor. And the approaches often tend to be ahistorical and apolitical. They don't take into account the history that has brought people to that point, or the broader structures that are creating this reality. I think, in order to address those issues, we have to tackle the structural violence, the structures that produce that, and also make repairs also for that historical process, there's no doubt that that is the case, I don't see any way that we can really move forward without taking a historical and political kind of approach at addressing these issues.

Gary Burniske: A lot of the development funds come with a lot of strings attached, as you might say. And those strings often tie your hands in terms of being able to respond to the real needs within those different sectors, right.

Giorgos Kallis: We have to stop thinking in terms of growth, and we don't have to beautify growth by calling it green, inclusive. We have to liberate ourselves from this ideology and one way thinking of economic growth, and then consider the alternatives that right now, they're not considered.

Kaveh Zahedi: I think that we have to completely reject inequality. I think that's at the heart of so much. We have come to accept levels of inequality that are simply unacceptable, right. And it's inequality in every sense. It's not just about wage differentials, it's about inequality of access - we just talked about ICT - inequality of access to ICT, inequality of access to education, to healthcare, to opportunities. We've really come to accept extraordinarily high levels of inequality. And of course, they lead to not just under development, but they lead to, in a way, social pressure.

Kamla Bhasin: We have a hierarchy between North and South, we have a hierarchy between whites and non whites, we have a hierarchy between men and women. And this hierarchy reaches the international organizations, from our families . In my family and your family, there is perhaps a hierarchy between your brother and you. And if that brother becomes a UN person, I mean, he's not going to change his whole life training at home that he is superior to his sister, Father is superior to the mother. So my focus Safa, has always been that we have to begin with ourselves, we have to begin with our families - only then will these values of gender equality, class equality, caste equality, race equality, only then will it permeate up. Only then will it get into the government services, only then will #metoo not happen.

Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda: I constantly, constantly - even as a black woman, ask myself: am I also applying or perpetrating the saviour complex, because I believe that nobody is exempt from it. And I think it's so central not to be motivated by this false belief, almost Godly belief that we can go and save people. But to better combat that or how to better address it is to begin having conversations about it. Making sure that even if it does make certain people uncomfortable, because they feel that maybe we're pointing fingers at them or so forth, it's only uncomfortable conversations that actually lead to real change of the way we think and the way we operate.

Mahrukh 'Maya' Hasan: I think one of the common sentiments has been in our sector that we do good, therefore, we are good. And that is completely wrong, right. And so one of the things that I say a lot is the question about racism, for example, it's not a question of: are we racist? It's: how racist are we. So all of us have these biases that we've grown up with, because we live in a society that is inherently biased.

Jessica Oddy: There's some real gaps in understanding or even labeling or naming racism, racism. And it manifests in all areas of the work.

Angela Bruce-Raeburn: Here's the thing, women like me, black women, we not only have to navigate the academic structure to get the credentials to do the thing - that's on one side. But we also have to navigate structural racism in the work that we're trying to get into. Whether that be a law firm, whether that be an international development organization, whether that be journalism, it doesn't matter. We have structural racism in all of these sectors. So not only are people like me, and people like you as well, navigating the getting all the right degrees. But once we're done with that part of it, we now have to navigate the structural racism in the sectors, and that's a whole different game. And there was no education for that - there is no credential that you can take, now you're coming in with your lived experience, your understanding of the world, and that's where you can fail, despite whatever education that you have. Navigating toxic white women culture, for example, I'm sorry, there's no credential for that. You don't know how that's going to manifest itself when you get into that workplace.

Andrea Cornwall: In a context where so much violence had been done to people in the name of development, all the violence perpetrated on people's bodies, in the name of development, I think it was quite an important political moment for me, a sort of education about the violence of development, and also about my own whiteness and my own complicity with it, insofar as I was trying to do something, and I'd gone into that context wanting to help.

Qi Cui: I think accountability is really mutual. Being mutual means we share the risks and we actually hold each other accountable. It should not the way that I give you money, then you do, what I tell you. That is probably very wrong. We always need to negotiate and monitor and to actually push each other.

Noaman Ali: Pragmatic thinking is really a way to avoid challenging power, it's really a way of saying we've compromised ourselves with power. Because challenging power is too costly, it's too expensive. Maybe part of that is that so many of us who are involved in thinking about or practicing development come from, you know, middle class or even upper class backgrounds. Maybe we have this kind of unconscious bias where we're invested in power, because we have it. And we may not have as much power as business people or as much power as landlords or international politicians. But our power derives from that system. So maybe that's part of the the bias that we have. But at the end of the day, what we're saying is: we are more concerned about preserving that system, through the logic of pragmatism and incrementalism, then radically up-ending that system. When politics is determined by the interests of the poor, when it is determined by the interests of the have nots, that is when their lives will get better. That is what history tells us. But as development practitioners or as people who think about development, generally, we're thinking about how can we change this policy and move this lever from here to here? Rather than asking a more fundamental question: what would it look like if development meant power to the powerless?

Sabina Faiz Rashid: If we're going to polarize in to global south and global north, I think it's often been accepted that we learn from the north, and we have our capacity built, right. But that's not the reality. There's a lot of very successful models - Vietnam, Taiwan, Bangladesh, that many other countries can learn from.

Palwasha Hassan: My thinking is that even development is used as a tool of putting other developed countries under the pressure to go with the same thinking, which has been decided in some other capitals of those countries which have resources. Ownership is very much important, which is often forgotten in the development processes.

Jessica Oddy: Often, the design of the program is done by a very different set of people who will then be tasked to deliver the program. And what that results in is somebody perhaps, who has very little understanding of the local context, the language, the cultural and spiritual dimensions, the contextual knowledge of being in a position where they are then designing a program which will be rolled out, which is extremely problematic, and also quite ineffective.

Arbie Baguios: I think what people sometimes don't realize is that somebody invented this tool, somebody has written that project template, somebody has written that report template, and that somebody has some power. Who is this somebody? What are they trying to accomplish with this. We should be more reflective about the tools and the ways of working that this sector has imposed on us from proposal stage to grant management stage to reporting stage, in all these stages, it's very much sort of like designed and driven by donors from the global north.

Jeanette Gurung: There is an understanding that bureaucracies are neutral, that is not at all true. It's a very dynamic process to see how power is used to maintain and recreate the processes of gender discrimination. So what was happening was these powerful men were allowing gender and women’s agency on terms that they themselves dictated.

Patricia Omidian: What became very clear very quickly was the western model of individuation and self actualization was contrary to their own cultural perspective and their own community perspectives. And I had to understand how wellness was defined by them. So, for example, to be able to make your own decisions and step out sort of into the world as an individual was not a goal. The goal really was how are we well together rather than how am I well by myself.

Magnus Saemundsson: The government and the Ministries of Finance the general public and media, they want to see results and they want to see results from the Swedish or US or British money, or whatever. And then you want to have your flag on things and be able to say, okay, we supported this and then this was the result. This is actually in most cases very difficult to do. And as you say, social changes, changing behavior, behavior changes take a long time.

Kaveh Zahedi: Ultimately, you know, it is the countries that have to believe, it is the countries that have to want to bring about that change, it is the countries that have to amend their legislation, it is the countries that have to monitor the implementation of the new legislation, it is the countries that have to change the kind of investment that are being made with public funds, and to help redirect the private investments. So it's imperative for the countries to believe and to be fully on board.

Qi Cui: The country does not equal to government agency only - the country should really represent the different stakeholders.

Giorgos Kallis: There is a necessity for collective action. And the political will, I think, reflects and follows a collective action in the best case of scenarios. But in the worst case of scenarios, you can have political elites that do not respond to the demands of the collective.

Noaman Ali: Social movements are necessary, social movements, I think, have been the biggest drivers of change in the 20th century, for sure. And even prior to that. If it was not for the workers movements, trade unions, which I spoke about earlier, then we probably wouldn't see increases in workers incomes are the dramatic workers incomes increases that we saw in many developed countries, and even in many developing countries or third world countries, if it wasn't for peasant movements in the 1940s 50s 60s, then I think the situation of many people in the countryside would be much worse. But because these are movements, because these are political movements, they ebb and the flow, the ebb and the flow. And when they're ebbing, when they're moving back, it's not simply that they ebb and flow according to some kind of natural cycle of gravity. The ruling class or ruling powers are also studying how social movements work, they're actively developing, literally developing counterinsurgency tactics.

Paula Donovan: In principle, the UN and multilateralism are absolutely essential. The problems arise when you put people in place, people who are nominated by their governments, or elected by a group of governments that have decided to get behind a particular candidate, and put that person or those people in leadership positions, even though they have no leadership skills, and they don't have the courage of their convictions, they don't have the courage to stand up and say: I believe in the UN, I believe in what's on paper. And I believe in the UN Charter, and the Declaration on human rights and so forth. And I'm going to speak up and speak out whenever I see violations of those principles, and fulfilling the goals of ensuring that the UN's best ideals are fulfilled.

Haroon Akram-Lodhi: All development practice has to refract through the interplay between the development process and climate change going forward. Climate change, COVID-19, and development. These are three sides of a triangle, which cannot be undone anymore, we have to view them as a whole going forward.

Akiko Maeda: Technology is not the solution. It's another instrument. But now that it's in our hands, we really, really, really have to work on social mindfulness, and become deeply, deeply engaged and rooted in that - otherwise, we're creating so much toxicity that we will be having centuries of trauma down the line. That's what I'm afraid.

Andrea Burniske: It seems the lines between what is called the 'developing world' and what is called the 'developed world' are blurring a lot now. People are understanding that the big challenges that are out there are really things that are challenges for us all.

Andrea Cornwall: Just keeping on funding projects, and funding programs, and funding deliverables, without taking the human dimension into consideration and thinking about how are we nurturing and supporting the people that are doing this work? What things can we fund that will allow those people to recuperate, that will allow them to laugh, and to connect, and to feel looked after? And what would it mean to think about development in that kind of much more rounded way.

Filiberto Penados: Sometimes I feel like I alone, I can change this. I'm going to take it on my shoulders and change it. And then I have to realize that, you know, I'm just a little grain. A little drop of water in the ocean, but its all of these drops that make the ocean, so it's not only for me to carry, so don't become disillusioned by the fact that maybe there are setbacks and that progress is slow. Despite the fact that we are just a little grain of sand, or a little drop of water that we can.

Wafaa Saeed: I think there are so many people from different, different walks of life, whether from the civil society, or even the young people with amazing skills, ideas, competence. And I think also for me, I take with me a lot of humility whenever I'm reaching out to other actors, to engage and what I bring to the table.

Ousman Umar: Be the change you want to see in your community. Be the change yourself. I am the Minister of Education of my country. I'm the President of the United Nations of my world. It's my responsibility, no matter how big or small - take action.