Top Five Critiques of Development and Humanitarianism

Originally posted on Just Means

Each fall, thousands of passionate students are thrown back into the chaotic jumble of classes, parties, and the great big dreams of changing the world that make up the American college experience. At the Center for Global Engagement, we recognize that students’ good intentions don’t always match their ability to act and design programs to help students develop the skills they need to address issues of global poverty and inequality.

At its best, education is about challenging you in ways that improve your ability to think and act. With that in mind, we regularly ask our students to read and reflect upon some of the toughest criticism of development and volunteerism available. It seems to us that the more critical voices you can add to a complicated worldview that still drives you firmly in the direction of doing something, the better suited to creating change over your lifetime you’ll be.

With that in mind, here are some of our favorite gut-wrenchers to challenge even the most determined optimists.

5. The Subtle Problems of Charity (1899)
Jane Addams
One of America’s foremost progressive reformers and social entrepreneurs, Jane Addams kept busy not simply founding Hull House and changing the way we provided support for the urban poor, but writing about the philosophical challenges of philanthropy and democracy. This article is important for its recognition that charity inevitably splits the world into the helpers and those to be helped and can, as such, become an instrument for reinforcing rather than redressing inequality.

4. White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good  (2006)
William Easterly
Easterly, the “anti-Jeff Sachs,” wrote this book to prick the swelled expectations of movements like the One Campaign that suggest that the key to ending global poverty is more aid money. While the work has been used as a bludgeon by the anti-aid political Right, Easterly’s focus on challenges like governance and bureaucracy should be required reading.

3. A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2003)
David Rieff
If this one doesn’t hurt your soul, you might not have one. Eloquent, pleading and brimming with barely-controlled rage, Rieff’s ‘Bed for the Night’ is a chronicle of an ever growing disenchantment with the hypocrisy of humanitarian intervention and a serious condemnation of the overreach of aid and development organizations.

2. “To Hell with Good Intentions” (1968)
Ivan Illich
In the late 1960s, post-development theorist Ivan Illich levied this scathing critique of the naivety of international assistance on a group of university students about to begin volunteering in Mexico. It cuts straight to the bone of the limits of ’solidarity’ and the difficulty of transcending class difference to create partnerships for change.

1. Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (1986)
Barbara Harrell-Bond
“Imposing Aid” is every bit as imposing as its title. Written by the woman who literally invented the field of refugee studies, this seminal work chronicles how the very programs created to support people forced from their homes end up undermining their dignity. Harrell-Bond takes the top spot not only for the incredible clarity and precision of her critique, but because she’s spent the last quarter century working to put her insights into practice, building refugee studies programs in London and Cairo and inspiring generations of change agents along the way.

Charity Still Matters

cross posted from JustMeans “All Things Reconsidered” blog

At the core of the social entrepreneurship movement is a rejection of the dogma of change-making. Social entrepreneurs recognize problems and attempt to find the best solution available – whether it’s nonprofit, for profit, or based on the barter system. Paraphrasing Mission Measurement’s Jason Saul at last weeks NYU Social Entrepreneurship conference, the social entrepreneur’s only allegiance is to impact.

Unfortunately, sometimes the conversation in the social entrepreneurship becomes a little self-referential and we forget that our “more business-like” approaches are still, at the end of the day, just one approach. Convinced we have the answers, we become trapped in our own dogma.

The lead article in the New York Time’s annual giving session is a dramatic reminder of why no matter how important our sustainable, long term solutions are, short-term relief and charity still matter.

“When the Cupboard is Bare” profiles the dramatic increase in demand for food relief, and the significant shortages at food pantries and soup kitchens around the country. According to the article:

“In the four months since June, demand for food aid has risen 20 percent in areas of the country with the healthiest economies and more than 40 percent in areas with the weakest, leaders of nonprofit food-distribution organizations say.”

More than 35 million people (including over 10 million children) sometimes go hungry. Perhaps most striking of all, “is not only the suddenness [of the new demand] but also the demographic that is seeking help. Most of the newcomers have been employed and have managed to survive dips in the job market. Many of them are couples and single parents who…had managed without handouts.”

Food relief is, in some ways, the antithesis of social entrepreneurship. And in the long run, this issue can only be solved by a more robust, equitable economy supported by a government willing to regulate to protect the common good. But there is an immediate need as well, one that we cannot conscionably let go unmet.

It’s not about hand-ups vs. hand outs or relief vs. social entrepreneurship. It’s a matter of social (in)justice when 35 million people in the richest country on earth can go hungry. Indeed, this is why Paul Farmer implored his fellow social entrepreneurs at last year’s Skoll World Forum to “get on the social justice train.” Charity is still an essential part of the safety net we provide to ensure that our society remains safe and healthy.

11-10-08: Interesting Philanthropy Links

A couple interesting stories about philanthropy in the New York Times in the last couple days:

• “Charity’s Share From Shopping Raises Concerns”
  This article flags the high potential for fraud that occurs when stores promise that a certain percentage of profits will go to a particular nonprofit. These promises are unregulated and sometimes, nonprofits don’t even realize they’re supposed to be on the receiving end of a donation.
• “How Long Should Gifts Just Grow?”
  A major piece that explores the increasing trend away from endowments that grow over time and a stronger imperative to spend down endowments on some sort of scheduled timeline. The incredible size of modern wealth contained within foundations (notably the Gates Foundation) has forced the conversation about just how much power private philanthropic foundations should be able to wield.

Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship (Repost from Change.org)

I wrote this column in the spirit of the election this morning. Read the full piece here.

Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published November 03, 2008 @ 08:21AM PST

In the late 19th century, Jane Addams saw Gilded Age America as plainly carved into two halves. On the one hand were “the favored, who express[ed] their sense of the social obligation by gifts of money,” and on the other, “the unfavored who express[ed] it by clamoring for a “share” – both of them actuated by a vague sense of justice.” Yet for the founder of Hull House – a social center providing the Chicago working classes with educational and political opportunity – this division rebelled against her very sense of American democracy. In 1893 she wrote: “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain…until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

As I have become more deeply involved with the social entrepreneurship movement, the ongoing presidential campaign has often given me cause to think of Addams. Perhaps more than any other social innovator of her day, Addams wrestled publicly with the relationship between our individual and collective moral action and its reflection on the state of our democracy. For her, America was not an ideal of equality to believe in, but a process of working towards social justice, in which everyone must take part.

A legacy of restorative social innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit in the pursuit of a more perfect union are at the core of Barack Obama’s appeal to the new class of change agents we’re calling “social entrepreneurs.”

Continued.

“CSR Doesn’t Pay?” You’re asking the wrong question.

A few days ago, Haas professor David Vogel posted an article titled “CSR Doesn’t Pay” on Forbes.com. The main jist of the article is that corporate social responsibility practices aren’t being rewarded in higher economic profits. This was the thesis of research released by a couple of Harvard Business School profs earlier this year as well. The problem with it these arguments isn’t that they while they might be right from a pure profit-maximization perspective, that perspective might just be part of the problem.

Vogel writes: “The belief that corporate responsibility “pays” is a seductive one: Who would not want to live in a world in which corporate virtue is rewarded and corporate irresponsibility punished? Unfortunately, the evidence for these rewards and punishment is rather weak.”

This is an interesting premise, and explains why most CSR budgets are housed in corporate marketing departments. The truth however, is that social value is both a part of and apart from economic value. One of the most pernicious myths of CSR efforts is that you can increase the human rights, salaries, benefits, economic sustainability of production, etc. and still have consumers pay the exact same price as something produced with borderline-slave labor. Its often not the case.

The real question is: if you give consumers a choice between two goods of equal quality and convenience but which have a dramatically different social and environmental footprint, are they willing to pay a higher price and how much different? Perhaps even more, how many of them are willing to pay something different.

Where I think Vogel errs is in looking at where things are now versus where things are going:

Part of the reason why CSR does not necessarily pay is that only a handful or consumers know or care about the environmental or social records of more than a handful of firms. “Ethical” products are a niche market: Virtually all goods and services continue to be purchased on the basis of price, convenience and quality.

Maybe right now. As Jeff Swartz of Timberland articulated on this blog, consumers respond to outputs – the quality and convenience of the product – not inputs – like the ethical production process, even if those inputs matter. What’s more, convenience remains a major issue. As I wrote about in this post on fair trade company Alter Eco, getting retailers to place socially-focused brands on the shelves is still a difficult task.

But I wonder what happens as more and more socially-focused companies are able to offer a product of comparable or higher quality to their competitors and are increasingly able to get their products in front of consumers? Forget a tipping point in any one industry – will there be a moment when consumers start to wonder why they don’t have a choice for the ethical, environmentally sustainable version of whatever it is they want to by? The way I (and frankly, a bunch of entrepreneurs) see it, every product that doesn’t have a version with a socially-branded option is a market gap and an opportunity.

We could be wrong, but the increased media attention on these products, more young people looking for jobs that have a positive social impact, the fact that socially responsible investing is growing far faster than the rate of the total assets under management, and the dramatic example of a Wall Stree crash caused largely by profit maximization with no focus on social impact suggests the timing might be right for a new conversation.

For more, check out the blog feed and other discussions at the Social Capital Markets conference, where this was THE underlying theme.

Extending the conversation: What does the fair trade consumer look like?

This week’s Question of the Week is focused on who takes the lead on sustainable consumption – producers or consumers? Incorporating some of the insightful comments, I’ve extended the conversation in a new post on JustMeans “All Things Reconsidered” blog. Read it here.

Scruffy. Sandals. Tie-dye. Granola. Grateful Dead. Fair trade?

Even a few years ago, most people associated sustainable consumption with a sort of neo-hippie San Francisco liberal archetype. Today, however, an increasing awareness of climate change, greater interested in corporate responsibility, and a growing roster of companies branding social good as part of the value they offer consumers is rendering this caricature obsolete (or at least, incomplete).

The question then becomes, what does the sustainable consumer look like?….

Question of the week: who needs to take the lead on sustainable consumption – producers or consumers?

This month’s Fast Company magazine has a great interview with Jeff Swartz of Timberland. Swartz has long been seen as something of a poster boy for how companies can incorporate values of human rights and environmental sustainability into their supply chain and remain succesful. But as financial pressure mounts on Timberland, the article asks how long he can retain his job if he can’t keep financial return callibrated with social mission.

There’s a lot of great stuff in the article – including his termination of Timberlands relationship with Chinese manufacturer kingmakers – but it’s a comment toward the end about the consumer that really grabbed my attention:

So the consumer shares the blame?

The consumer says, “I’ll have a conversation with you; it will be all on my terms. Your product is going to have to be visually beautiful, technically perfect, and distinctive. And it has to be available where I shop at a price I’m willing to pay.” Now, if it is all of those things, you gain the permission, in the one minute the consumer deals with your brand, to devote about 10 seconds to the issue of values. And if you miss any step along the way, you are talking to yourself, which is a terribly sad place to be.

Its a fair point: people are thrilled about the social values business can create, but only if the product is still just as convenient to find and (more or less) as cheap to purchase. In some ways, it seems to me like a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ mentality where we get the moral satisfaction of thinking ethically even though we’re not willing to make trade-offs (or, to use another word, sacrifice).

The flip side is, of course, while consumers are talking to each other more and more, businesses still have incredible power to speak directly to consumers and shape demand – whether its around a new product line or ethical production in general.

So here’s the question: how do we increase the correlation between the social value of a product produced ethically, sustainably and responsibly with the economic value people are able to put forth. And not just in specific but in general? Who has to take the lead – consumers or producers? And how do they do it?

Crowd-sourcing Crisis Information: one story of an emerging African IT renaissance

I’ve just posted an article about Ushahidi.com and the incredible creative energy pumping through African web development at Justmeans All Things Reconsidered blog. Read it here.

“…at its core, Afro-pessimism tends to underestimate the ability of average citizens to impact collective destiny. Right now, there is a creative explosion at the intersection of human ingenuity and cheaper, better communication tools that has the ability to dramatically change the African political, economic, and social landscape.”

Top Five Critiques of Development and Humanitarianism

I’ve just posted a list of the top five critiques of development and humanitarianism on Justmeans.com “All Things Reconsidered” blog. While there are some familiar titles, hopefully the list will provide some new ideas and important reflection! Read the post here.

Should donors pay to learn to do good well?

Sean Stannard-Stockton initiated an interesting conversation on his blog Tactical Philanthropy (later picked up by the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Give and Take blog) about the difference between “giving” and “investing” as a mental model for philanthropy. He notices a shift occurring in the way donors conceptualize their giving from a ’spending’ category to an ‘investment’ category, with a variety of positive implications ranging. Take a minute and read the whole list.

One skeptical commenter on Give and Take argued essentially that a shift to the language of investment had the potential to prioritize the needs of the giver over the receiving communities or organizations. It’s a valid point and always worth thinking about the positive and negative implications of giving philanthropists more control over their donations (as opposed to giving organizations and communities general funds).

I think, though, that the move from ‘giving’ to ‘investing’ has huge potential to improve the impact of philanthropy. Particularly, I’m interested in the idea that this shift makes donors more willing to devote time and resources to learning how to be more effective givers. In a follow-up post, Stannard-Stockton notes that consumers don’t like to pay for information about how to buy things, but huge industries exist around providing investors with tips and tools.

I think dynamic systems for engaged donor education are essential to better harnessing the qualitatively huge but divided and uncoordinated state of American philanthropy. We’ve experimented with this sort of education with our Youth Leadership in Connective Philanthropy program (run in partnership with the Chicago Global Donors Network). I’m even more interested in how web-based networks for social change communities (such as Change.org) could provide a platform for engaged philanthropic education.

So what do you think? Should donors be willing to pay to learn how to do good?