I really can’t think of a title for this one. I’ve been trying, but I really can’t…
I thought this class would be an inspiration to my personal goals and the purpose I discern for my life. “Development Policy and Administration”… Now that sounds like a course which can provide some meaningful insight into the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to international development, and provide me with a solid overview of the risks and benefits we face as a global community. Although this course doesn’t seem to be technical, it should give me a good foundation of basic material upon which to build my ideas about infrastructure finance and development.
This resembles the type of thoughts I considered when first deciding to join the course. I knew it would take [substantial] time away from my research, but I felt it would definitely be worth it, and help me to make some career decisions as well. So far, however, all the course has done has deepened my doubts about our ability to pursue development on a global scale.
Well, maybe such language is too strong. Perhaps I should say that this course has only tempered my optimism about such a career choice. But it has made the development picture in my mind orders of magnitude more complex. My brother would tell me that common sense could have shown me that crossing cultural identities and values, bridging technological and educational discrepancies, and enabling autonomy and empowering communities in the face of divergent political goals of Western powers is a quagmire at best, not a viable career option.
I don’t know what it was that made me feel more and more like international development is a lost cause. Maybe it was the shaky economic foundations which premise much development theory. Certainly development professionals and aid organizations could have seen that pure profit maximization, rational-actor dogma, and all-things-equal assumptions would certainly be even more problematic in the developing world than they are in the industrialized world. It could have been realizing how short-sighted I was by not realizing the problems created by different perceptions of what progress is and isn’t; different perceptions of what ‘sustainable’ standard of living means and doesn’t mean. Maybe it was learning that development and international aid grew out of Cold War motivations to solidify world power and ideological supremacy. Or perhaps it was learning that the academics defining development agendas had no concept of how indegenous cultures, history, and geography would complicate the adoption of their recommendations. Certainly, no real development couldn’t come from instances where Western academics can’t recognize the intrinsic value of such diverse and fabulously sophisticated non-Western cultural interactions. In a way, I was a fool to believe that any meaningful development could have been instigated by Western administrators who believe in the inferiority of the people they are purported to help.
As I begin to read more and more into development, I am wondering if this isn’t a waste of my time after all. The jury’s still out on that. I mean, there are some positive things I’m learning. For example, development administrators are starting to identify and admit their failures, including the ones I’ve briefly outlined above. The importance of cooperation and diverse management and solution formulation in a global community are beginning to be more fully acknowledged. Western pride and arrogance are slowly being eroded as conditions in parts of the developing world fail to improve. Despite donor fatigue, new approaches to development problems are being undertaken.
So, should I continue along the path I’ve chosen for myself? Should I involve myself in the struggle for a coherent, international community?
Maybe I’ll just keep reading…