Why you cant eat rule of law but can listen and organize A - PDF document

Why you can’t eat rule of law… but can listen and organize A reflection on the practice of international development work CAIDP meeting, Ottawa, 22 January, 2018 Rakesh Rajani 1 When we get to peek or eavesdrop into the lives of others, we often get our thrills from stuff that is different, or unusual, or fantastic, or exotic. Perhaps that is why the internet and social media are replete with photos and videos of humans and animals performing impossible feats, of floods and tsunamis and blizzards causing havoc, and so on. If you are of a different generation and not much into social media, these thrills may come from old fashioned novels and travel writing and documentaries on TV. One of the reasons this is interesting and fine and safe is because we are mere spectators, with the privilege to observe but no obligation to participate – other than in token ways perhaps – and sound in the knowledge that we can count on what we know and who we are, and that the rules and circumstances that apply to us are the ones we know; that once the show or tour is over we can go back to our jobs, our homes, our families, to our familiar lives. The calculation changes somewhat when we are responsible for the lives of others, when we need to do things that are meant to help make a difference in other people’s lives and communities, such as when you work for government or an NGO or perhaps are a Canadian international development professional. If we are concerned and sincere, this can be feel incredibly daunting, because we are not just spectators but participants, with the responsibility and perhaps accountability for assessing options, validating and invalidating ideas, allocating resources and making other such consequential choices. Here the unfamiliar can feel disconcerting. So we search for patterns that are familiar, that which can explain things, that can turn uncertainty into recognizable tropes. Then, when we plan or approve plans, we similarly seek to establish those neat and tidy explanatory patterns. This is what the anthropologist Jim Scott has memorably called Seeing Like a State. In some cases, we construct that familiarity by matching it with our lives – such as we design schools like the ones we went to or our children did, with rubrics for things like lesson plans and teacher: student ratios and classroom construction standards – or design legal systems with laws and courts and judges and lawyers that mimic the ones that have served us well. We call it best practice . In other cases, we recognize that worlds are different – that Tanzania is not Canada, or that Bolivia is not Indonesia – and make sense of it by creating a model of difference –still with a coherent explanation of how they do things. So, for instance, Pakistan and Nepal and Zambia are patriarchal societies, the men are in charge and want to marry their daughters early, and that is why they do not see the point of educating them, and that is why we need both laws and public education on the value of educating girls. Or it can take a more benign form – those forest communities in Brazil or Nigeria, unlike us, are not as materialistic and much more closely connected to the earth, they protect their forests and live sustainable lives, and our job is to empower and protect them against the forces that threaten this way of life, such as multinational companies with names like Barrick and Shell, or their own dictatorial governments led by people with names like Mugabe and Musharraf and Uribe. 1 Rakesh Rajani is the Director of Civic Engagement and Government at the Ford Foundation. These remarks do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. 1

These narratives are compelling precisely because they have a lot of truth to them – the patterns are borne out by evidence, discrimination and exploitation are real and lived, the solutions have clear logic and clear merit. And they are doubly compelling when we can discern positive intention – such as through the stories in the Globe and Mail or Nick Kristof’s columns in the New York Times or the missionary or street children NGO newsletter in my inbox that provide moving accounts of lives lived in the service of others. As easy it may be for academics or smug critics to dismiss these lives as naïve or neo-colonial, I have found that most people tire of cynicism, and in fact find lives spent in commitment to a public purpose to be attractive and inspiring. These same features may also make international development particularly fraught. It is easy to see through blatant lies, unfeigned bigotry or ill motive. It is much harder when we are more than half right and generally well meaning. But I digress; more on this later. Looking back at my own engagement, and putting aside small-scale service delivery and community development projects for now, I see two main, familiar tropes of international development: • In one, the government is the problem and is failing to serve its people. These regimes may be military dictatorships or autocracies run by ethnic or moneyed or otherwise captured elites, but in either case they are illegitimate in the eyes of the majority. Here the work of the international development community is to empower civil society organizations to put pressure on the government and hold it in check, by doing such activities as monitoring government abuse, publicizing its failings in relation to its commitments, and to put pressure on governments to subscribe to a template of “good government” – such as rule of law, free and fair elections, free press and so forth. In short, the driver of change is civil society and external pressure. An example of the archetypal organization of this sort of work is Amnesty International or the local community watchdog, such as HakiElimu in Tanzania where I worked from 2000 to 2007. • In the other, the primary driver of change, while often fraught, is the democratically elected government who has signed on to global agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals and made national plans to make education universal and reduce infant or maternal mortality rate and promote good governance. Here the international development community seeks to support the government to bring about policy reforms, design and implement good development programs and projects, and make budgets both better targeted for development and more transparent. This vision for sure includes space for civil society and for things such as freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, but one is prepared to be patient and make compromises and turn a blind eye to some repression, as long as it’s not too brutal, in order to not burn bridges with the government. And since governments are not monolithic, and individuals vary in their progressivity, one seeks to identify and work especially closely with the reformers or liberal champions in government. The archetypal organization that does this is DFID and probably Canadian CIDA as well. In practice, of course, international development is the combination of some forms of these two tropes. In both tropes, however, the core model is the same, and familiar. One seeks to establish or reinforce a social compact between the state and citizens, marked by constitutional order, rule of law, liberal values and core ideals of the sort one can find in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are healthy debates, such as whether the driver of change inside or outside government, or in the best circumstances how the two can come together such as in the Open Government Partnership, a remarkable effort involving 75 governments and over two thousand civil society groups that Canada will 2