False Belief is Dangerous for Development

The movie Invictus tells an interesting story. In the days of apartheid not only did the whites of South Africa prefer rugby and the blacks football (soccer), but rugby was seen as linked to the apartheid regime and the black population actively wished ill for the South African rugby teams. Indeed, the team name, the Springboks, chose an Africaans word. Mandela when he assumed the presidency overruled the ANC supporting both the team and its name. The 1995 Rugby World Cup, held in South Africa, helped unite South Africans as a "rainbow nation". The South African enthusiasm for the recent Football World Cup brings back the emotion of the earlier event.

I find it unintuitive that a sports team and a sporting event would have a major political impact, as indeed did some of Mandela's supporters in the movie. Intuitive or not, that seems to have been a fact.

Social scientists will recognize that a culture contains a multitude of institutions and that those institutions are linked in complex networks. It is clear that professional sports have an economic impact, and indeed the World Cup events draw global television audiences in the billions, with comparable advertising incomes. As Invictus suggests, they can also have political impacts. Indeed the Iglasia Maradoniana suggests that sport may have a religious impact.

A corollary of the complexity and interconnectedness of cultural institutions is that development interventions often don't work if they don't fit the cultural matrix into which they are applied. Often interventions have unexpected repercussions. (See "Stone Axes for Stone Age Australians.")

Efforts to democratize developing nations may not result in democratic institutions similar to those in the donor nation, even when they are not imposed by conquest. Economic liberalization efforts may get bogged down in corruption, rent seeking or other unexpected dysfunctional outcomes.

This is an argument for knowledge for development. The more one understands of a culture the more one is likely to avoid predictable failures. Yet Americans often assume cultural homogeneity in geographic regions. Some Americans not only assume that Latin America is culturally homogeneous, but that Mexico is a prototype replicated in Argentina, Chile and Ecuador, or even Brazil.

The myths that are believed by the citizens of donor nations about their own countries' histories also interfere with effective donor programs. Americans tend to assume that the United States always was democratic, when in fact the founding fathers were patricians who were disturbed by the introduction of political parties. Jefferson overcame his belief in a weak central government to make the Louisiana Purchase, and Lincoln and FDR took huge almost dictatorial power to prosecute the Civil War and World War II. Similarly, the history of the United States is filled with disgraceful oppression of minority groups. Recognizing the complexity of American history might help U.S. development policy makers take a more humble and more realistic posture in foreign policy and especially international development efforts. Indeed, a knowledge of his/her nation's own history may be an important basis for a professional in international development.

It seems likely that the most effective intervention to improve the lives of people in a poor nation may depend on the specific cultural matrix of that country. It may be that the most effective development assistance expert is one who has a tool kit that contains a large number of alternative approaches as well as analytic capabilities to select that which best fits the needs and aspirations of the specific group he/she is seeking to help. In that respect, it seems likely that it is better to understand the development instruments and their successes and failures of many countries and societies. Governments based on profoundly unacceptable political philosophies have had significant development successes -- China's economic success, Cuba's successes in health and educational services, the Soviet Union's early successes in industrialization. It would seem important to understand these successes and their cultural contexts, rather than to reject them on ideological bases.

Certainly African nations are willing to explore China's successes in economic growth, and that serves as a challenge to America's influence. U.S. international development officers and those of multinational organizations should similarly understand Chinese successes, if only to deal effectively with those African leaders seeking to compare development approaches.

At least that is a conclusion from my more than 40 years of development experience, including working in more than 35 countries, studying a significant number of countries, an increasing interest in American history, and experience in a number of development agencies.