A Pragmatic Approach to Foreign Aid: Easterly

It is clearly in our own interest to aid poorer countries. We are all interconnected, and more so now than ever before. Disease, terrorism, and wars in those places can end up affecting all of us. How should we respond? In his book titled “The White Man’s Burden”, William Easterly discusses two opposing answers to that question: the response of “Planners”; and the response of “Searchers”.

Easterly says that “A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve…A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions.” Easterly suggests that Planners represent the traditional [“White Man’s Burden”] approach to foreign aid, and he faults them for

• announcing good intentions, but failing to motivate people to follow through;
• imposing global blueprints and fixed objectives that lack knowledge of local conditions;
• raising expectations without accepting responsibility for meeting them; and
• deciding what will be supplied to recipients, but never determining whether the recipients got what they needed.

Doesn’t this sound regrettably like the neo-con approach to Iraq?

By contrast, Easterly says that “A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation…A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.” Easterly argues that Searchers represent a superior approach to foreign aid, because Searchers

• determine first what is in demand by recipients, looking for any opportunity to relieve suffering;
• get to know local realities, “find things that work and get some reward” involved as an incentive to meeting those demands;
• “find out if the customer is satisfied”; and
• accept responsibility for their actions.

I would point out that the Searcher approach is also more in keeping with the philosophies of pragmatism and democracy as discussed in this blog, whereas the Planner approach smacks of authoritarianism.

Easterly comments that only an elite few can be “Planners”, but anyone can be a Searcher, looking for ways to make “piecemeal, gradual improvements in the lives of the poor”. He comments that Searchers could work either at the local level, directly with poor individuals and communities, or at a higher level, evaluating the effectiveness of various agencies and programs.

As an example of a Searcher organization at the local level, I give you “Ecobamboo”. An organization mentioned by Easterly, GlobalGiving.com, may facilitate the higher order Searcher approach in line with his thinking.

The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly, Penguin Press, 2006