Expatriate Leaders of International Development Projects

Creating Success in an Unforgiving Environment

Patricia J. McLaughlin

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781839096310
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839096327
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Drawing on the experiences of six expatriate leaders who, collectively, had more than 78 years of experience managing United States Agency for International Development (USAID) international development projects in 26 countries around the world, this book provides a scholarly analysis of their stories, identifies factors expatriate leaders experienced managing projects, then integrates the factors into a theory that explains and helps define the success, or lack thereof, they achieved, and provides recommendations on how to deal with and overcome the issues.

For decades, international development projects have played a crucial role in the delivery of U.S. foreign aid and yet, while considerable attention has been given to policymakers' foreign aid decisions concerning which countries receive U.S. foreign aid and how much each country receives, scant attention has been given to understanding the challenges encountered by the expatriate leaders recruited to manage the implementation of these international development projects, which unfold within a confluence of diverse multi-organizational contexts and culturally complex developing country environments. Even less is known about what factors these expatriate leaders experience that could explain, and help define, the success, or lack thereof, they achieve managing the implementation of these projects.

This book is essential reading for international development leaders, practitioners, and scholars, as well as foreign aid policymakers, as they seek to improve international development.

Chapter 1

Seeking to Understand the Unforgiving Environment of International Development Projects

The work of expatriate leaders of international development projects is complex. The projects unfold within a confluence of diverse multi-organizational contexts and culturally complex developing country environments that, along with the organizational functioning of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), impact expatriate leaders' efforts to create project success with the USAID projects they manage. As such, this chapter deals with two key areas of the complex context within which expatriate leaders work: the history of the USAID and its approach to planning and evaluating international development projects, and the multi-dimensional organizational context of international development projects that expatriate leaders confront when leading international development projects. The chapter commences with a review of the historical evolution of USAID as understanding its evolution illuminates how it became the organization it is today. Next, the complex multi-dimensional organizational context that expatriate leaders confront when leading international development projects is examined, with that section concluding with a critical review of USAID's policies, practices, and systems that, while designed with good intentions, produce unintended consequences that undermine expatriate leaders' efforts to create project success.

History of United States Agency for International Development

As mentioned above, it is impossible to make sense of the complexities faced by expatriate leaders managing USAID projects without understanding the history of the organization. Created in 1961 to manage the delivery of United States (US) foreign aid in support of United States foreign policy, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has experienced multiple reorganization initiatives throughout its existence with USAID career staff having lived within an environment where the prospect of change has been a constant workplace companion. As a result, the USAID organization that expatriate leaders interact with has been, and remains, an ever-changing, ongoing work-in-progress.

USAID's organizational changes are largely attributable to an ongoing struggle within the United States foreign policy community for control of United States foreign aid, with every president bringing perspectives to this aspect of their job that diverge from their predecessor, with each president's perspective shaped not only through the lens of their personal beliefs and partisan perspectives but also by world events and the impact of those events on US national security. A president's perspective is also shaped by how Americans perceive world events as impacting their safety and way of life as their support is crucial to a president's success in securing foreign aid funding. As such, USAID's ever-changing, ongoing work-in-progress organizational evolvement is an outcome of an amalgam of world events, presidential prerogatives, congressional whimsy, and partisan politics that finds USAID caught in an endless tug-of-war between the Executive and Legislative branches of government. While working faraway from Washington D.C. expatriate leaders are impacted, subtly or not so subtly, by this endless tug-of-war. For example, the USAID project they are contracted to manage may have been designed by a politician back in Washington, perhaps to assuage or reward a constituent, rather than by USAID mission staff and local leaders in the country. As such, the USAID project the expatriate leader is managing is not always designed with the recipient's needs in mind but may rather be with the US politician's reelection prospects in mind.

In order to understand USAID's organizational evolvement a basic understanding is required of aspects of the US Constitution that determine the dynamics around foreign aid, as the Constitution explains the roles of the President and Congress and the system of checks and balances that defines the relationship between the Executive and Legislative branches and the specific foreign policy functions for which each branch is responsible. For example, while the president is given authority by the Constitution to nominate ambassadors to represent the US to foreign countries, the Senate is given the authority by the Constitution to confirm the President's ambassador nominations. More broadly, the system of checks and balances outlined in the Constitution not only informs, but also inflames, the relationship between the two as they go about crafting United States foreign aid policy and the foreign aid legislation requisite to carrying out United States foreign aid policies. And, by understanding the complexity of that relationship, and how it is influenced by critical world events, such as the Cold War, post-Cold War, and Global War on Terror, one can better understand how USAID has evolved organizationally into the institution it is today and how that impacts the work of expatriate leaders within it.

Crafting United States Foreign Aid Policy

The United States Constitution is where the roles of the President, Congress, and the Federal Judiciary are defined, and from whence each of these branches of government derive their authority. In turn, understanding the role each plays explains the relationship among them and how the checks and balances system designed into the Constitution informs interactions between the three branches of government, because the source of many disagreements about foreign aid that occur between the President and Congress is an outcome of that system. Conceptualized in the 1700s as an office with its power balanced equally with the power of Congress, the Presidency, from former President Franklin D. Roosevelt's terms forward, when legislation created the Executive Office of the President (Calabresi & Yoo, 2008), the Presidency has transformed into what many argue today is “the hardest job in the world” (Dickerson, 2018, p. 1). This office finds modern Presidents living with the paradox that they are the most powerful person in the world and yet, they are powerless to achieve many of their goals, “thwarted by Congress, the courts, or the enormous bureaucracy” (Dickerson, 2018, p. 6) they only nominally control. Effectively navigating the domestic challenges arising out of this paradox in concert with confronting the challenges arising out the tumultuous global landscape has confounded presidents of all partisan persuasion in formulating a foreign aid policy that works complementarily with their foreign policy to preserve United States national security.

Two structural features built into the United States Constitution are critical to understanding the challenges Presidents experience in securing foreign aid. The first feature is federalism, which “refers to the sovereign authorities vested with the individual 50 states and the federal government” (Paterson, 2018, p. 23), which reflects the balance of power between states' rights and the rights of the central government. Said differently, federalism gives states considerable political and economic autonomy, thus limiting the range of authority federal government authorities have over states and individuals, and in so doing, empowers states and individuals. As Paterson observes, “the competition between states and the federal government continues to be a delicate point of contention for domestic issues, such as health care” (p. 6), but it is also a delicate point for foreign affairs issues too such as foreign aid. Specific to foreign policy, representatives elected to Congress by citizens residing in their states are expected to represent, first and foremost, the interests of their constituency, which means support for a President's foreign policy and foreign aid may or may not be forthcoming from those elected officials, as their support frequently depends upon how they perceive the President's foreign policy and aid programs benefiting their state. The Constitution grants specific foreign policy authority to the President as well as to Congress. For example, the Constitution grants Senators six-year terms with the expectation that they would take a more expansive view of domestic, as well as foreign affairs, issues, but even so they too will prioritize the interests of their state's constituents over international affairs, unless national security is clearly at stake.

The second structural feature built into the United States Constitution is the separation of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as a system of checks and balances, where “each of the three branches of government perform oversight on the other branches” (Paterson, 2018, p. 23).

Clear divisions of labor are outlined in the Constitution with regards to the executive and legislative branches, with those divisions further defined for decisions related to foreign policy, with the system of checks and balances evident in how the Constitution delegates foreign policy labors between the executive and legislative branches. For example, the Constitution grants Presidents the authority to formulate and implement foreign policy, as well as the authority to sign foreign treaties. However, treaties Presidents sign will not be enacted without their ratification which is dependent upon two-thirds of the Senators' approval. Additionally, the President's foreign policy authority includes nominating, in addition to ambassadors, other leading foreign policy officials such as the Secretary of State, with the Constitution requiring all of these nominations be approved by Congress, and, likewise, the President is required to secure approval from Congress for funding foreign policy initiatives, such as USAID's budget for international development projects. As such, the systems of checks and balances concerning foreign policy in the Constitution, has ensured that “foreign policy has been a source of tension through the years” (Johnson, 2013, p. 1) between presidents and Congress, with Congress' influence on foreign policy exercised primarily through the “power of the purse.” The tension and friction between the President and Congress is evident in foreign aid, especially when different parties control the White House and one or both houses of Congress, as conservatives and liberals generally differ on their preferred forms of foreign aid. These differences between members of Congress may be because of a conviction that one type of assistance is more effective, and yet at other times these differences are because members of Congress want to support an industry with presence in their state or district (Berger, 2012). Noteworthy too is that disagreements also arise because of differences of opinion regarding whether the United States ought to give foreign aid. As a result of these differing viewpoints, “foreign aid funds are often targeted for cuts because they don't have a domestic constituency to protect them” (Johnson, 2013, p. 3), as do domestic funds that directly touch the lives of the domestic constituency that senators and representatives are in Congress to serve. Said differently, to ensure they have support in Congress for their aid policy, Presidents must construct their aid policy understanding members of Congress vote for aid with regards to how their districts will, or will not, benefit (Milner & Tingley, 2009).

What is seldom understood about foreign aid is that while it is intended to benefit countries that are of strategic importance to United States national security and/or to support development in developing countries and/or to provide humanitarian aid, monetarily most of United States foreign aid remains in the United States as the majority of United States foreign aid is given conditionally. There are four main problems with this conditionality: congressional earmarks, tied aid, loans, and the fact that it does not work.

Congressional earmarks are funding allocations placed in the federal budget by members of Congress for special projects. Congressional earmarks place conditions on foreign aid such as not only requiring expenditures to be targeted toward a specific country but also specifying projects and the entities to carry out those projects, which likely benefits an American company, perhaps even one owned by a constituent. Earmarks, which are used by legislators to exert control over how aid is spent in a specific recipient country, tie the hands of USAID country missions' staff as they leave the missions without the flexibility to “spend money where it would make the most difference” (Insigniam, 2017, p. 60) in the recipient country. Unlike Congressional legislators situated thousands of miles from the recipient country and with no direct knowledge of the country's development needs, USAID's country missions are situated in recipient countries and as such they know the country's development needs, but are unable to address them because the earmarks leave little discretionary funding in the mission's budget to meet the country's actual needs. USAID country missions' frustration with Congressional earmarks and Presidential initiatives is evident in a USAID mission staff member's recent plea to Congress and the President, asking that they “Don't parachute in mandatory initiatives that may or may not have anything to do with what we have been doing for the past 5, 10, 15 years in country” (Insigniam, 2017, p. 61). Since its founding USAID has grappled with Congressional earmarks, with estimates suggesting that they account for 90% of available program funds in some USAID missions (Dunning & Leo, 2016). As such, after more than 50 years of Congressional earmarks and Presidential initiatives, USAID is “a hamstrung agency with limited ability to flexibly respond to partner-country priorities and needs” (Dunning & Leo, 2016) because “large Presidential initiatives and Congressional earmarks for health care, HIV/AIDS, k-12 education, microfinance, and the environment…crowd out other development interventions, such as anticorruption measures, agricultural assistance, democracy-promotion programs and infrastructure-enhancement measure” (Atwood et al., 2008, p. 127) that stabilize societies and produce sustainable long-term outcomes. Furthermore, because the process of determining the purpose and priorities of USAID projects that are funded by Presidential initiatives and Congressional earmarks exclude local leaders in the recipient countries, those projects will likely not be valued by local leaders and their constituents and without their valuing the project's outcomes they will likely not be committed to sustaining project outcomes after the project closes.

A similar scenario likely also occurs with USAID projects funded by US Economic Support Funds (ESF) which are given to countries of strategic importance to the US As with earmarked project funds, ESF offers an illustration of one of the conundrums of US foreign aid, which is that the expressed purpose of aid given to a country may subtly undermine expatriate leaders' efforts to achieve project success because, as with projects funded with earmarks, projects funded with ESF will likely not involve local leaders in determining the project's purpose and priorities. Expressly intended to move funds quickly to provide economic support, ESF “do not operate on a time-horizon that is commensurate with effective development outcomes” (Savoy & Yayboke, 2017, p. 9) and, as such ESF-funded projects managed by expatriate leaders will be challenged to create project success due to the short time-horizon and the challenging country context. And, if the expatriate leaders remain in the field of international development they will likely manage ESF funded projects more than once as ESF comprise approximately a third of the funds USAID is appropriated annually for programs (Tarnoff, 2015). However, although ESF-funded projects are less likely to experience project success, as with projects funded with earmarked funding, projects funded with ESF and earmarked funds will be measured for success by the same monitoring and evaluation system USAID uses for projects funded with US Development Assistance (DA), which are intended to “foster sustainable broad-based economic progress and social stability” (Savoy & Yayboke, 2017, p. 9). In summary, development projects funded with ESF, as with earmarked funds, are projects that in some ways can be labeled as “designed to fail” meaning they do not have a chance to succeed, because the recipients of the project outcomes are not involved in determining the purpose and priorities of the project and as such, they are unlikely to be invested sufficiently in the project to sustain whatever outcomes results from it after the project ends.

Lastly, destined-to-fail projects will likely impact negatively the expatriate leader’ job performance, and perhaps even their career progression in international development as the competitive climate of international development will cause technical implementing organizations to question the wisdom of hiring an expatriate leader to manage a USAID project who has failed to achieve project success managing previous USAID projects. And as such, expatriate leaders with project management expertise hired to manage a destined-to-fail project will likely abandon the field of international development. After all, who wants to stay in a profession when it seems you are set up to fail?

The second form of conditionality in addition to earmarking is tied aid, and it also has strong consequences for the developing countries where expatriate leaders manage USAID projects, as well as for the expatriate leaders. As noted earlier, tied aid is another form of US foreign aid that illustrates the linkage between US foreign aid and domestic interests. Tied aid is any aid that “requires procurement of goods and/or services from the donor country” (Kneteman, 2009, p. 1216) with food aid being a particularly weighty example of this and a long-standing form of conditional US aid that “Congress authorizes…in periodic farm bills” (Casey, 2018, p. 1), with the aid conditioned on the food being purchased from US producers. In 2016, an estimated 32% of US bilateral aid, meaning aid given by the US to a specific recipient country, was tied aid which is the highest percentage among wealthy countries, “reflecting the perception of policymakers that maintaining public and political support for foreign aid programs requires ensuring direct economic benefit to the United States” (Lawson & Morgenstern, 2019, p. 23), resulting in about 67% of US foreign aid funds in Fiscal Year 2017 obligated to US entities. Funding for US food aid is conditioned on the commodities being sourced in the United States with at least 50% of US food aid commodities required to be shipped to recipient countries on US-flag commercial vessels (Casey, 2018). Originally conceptualized in the 1950s to serve U.S. domestic interests while giving foreign aid in support of US foreign policy, the US food aid program, which USAID administers, was designed to provide food to undernourished people abroad while reducing US stocks of surplus grains that had accumulated under the U.S. Department of Agriculture commodity support program by the mid-1950s. Today however, the US “no longer stores huge agricultural surpluses but instead buys its food aid on the domestic market, mainly from large agribusinesses” (Kneteman, 2009, p. 1217), meaning US agribusinesses reap substantial benefit from US foreign aid funding allocated for food aid. While other major donor countries, such as Canada, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, have switched to cash-based assistance, the “United States remains one of the few major donor countries that relies primarily on in-kind [tied] aid” (Casey, 2018, p. 10). While the Obama administration created a cash-based food assistance program, the Emergency Food Security Program (EFSP) in 2010, which was revised when Congress authorized the new EFSP through the Global Food Security Act of 2016, “the US still relies predominately on in-kind [tied] aid” (Casey, 2018, p. 1) even though critics contend tied aid has “damaging effects on local agricultural production in developing country recipients” (Kneteman, 2009, p. 1215), due in large part to domestic political considerations.

Another form of tied aid, although more implicit and approximate, is the USAID's reliance on large technical implementing organizations that are hired by the USAID to implement USAID's international development projects. While not recognized as a formal form of tied aid, in practice it approximates tied aid, with the technical implementing organizations that expatriate leaders work for acting “to safeguard their interests in the light of procurement reforms, especially in relation to policies that stress untying aid and increased use of recipient country systems for managing it” (Nagaraj, 2015, p. 597). With the overwhelming majority of United States foreign assistance spent on contracts and grants with the for-profit and nongovernmental technical implementing organizations to implement USAID projects, “only 4 percent of USAID assistance goes directly to foreign governments” (Greenberg, 2017, p. 3). As a writer for Aid Network Africa recently complained, because aid their country receives is tied aid “local businesses will not participate in the fresh injection of capital from these aid resources” (Mauti Reality, 2019, p. 1). While sentiments like these may be left unspoken, they can subtly impact the enthusiasm of local national project team members in achieving project success, regardless of the expatriate leaders project management expertise.

Commencing in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s and onward, another form of conditional aid played a pivotal role in United States foreign aid and continues to be a “principal force in imposing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)” (Welch, 1998, p. 1) in the Southern Hemisphere. Imposed on low- and middle-income countries by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as loan conditionalities, when a country seeks a loan from the IMF, these SAPs are based on “a short-term, profit-maximization model that perpetuates poverty, inequality and environmental degradation” (Welch, 1998, p. 1) that makes a loan from the IMF conditional on a country undertaking a “reduction of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade; financial deregulation and increased opening to international capital flows; privatiz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Finding My Way into Expatriate Leadership and the Study of Expatriate Leaders of International Development Projects
• Chapter 1 Seeking to Understand the Unforgiving Environment of International Development Projects
• Chapter 2 Listening to Expatriate Leaders Speak
• Chapter 3 Summarizing What We Now Know, and Still Need to Know, about What Explains and Helps Define the Success, or Lack Thereof, That They Achieved
• Appendixes
• References
• Index