Psychology of Aid

Stuart Carr, Mac MacLachlan, Eilish McAuliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134767090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Psychology of Aid provides an original, psychological approach to development studies, focusing as it does on the social aspects of aid and the motivational foundations. Designed as a practical tool for looking at development projects in a new and structured way, the authors bring many of the social apsects of development and aid together in one book; from the needs of the Northern donor to the public tensions between Third World host and foreign development agencies.

1
AN AID CYCLE

The case

Zeffe is a Tanzanian national who was granted an aid scholarship from a Scandinavian donor country to study geology in Europe. During the course of his studies, he befriended a classmate from Sweden, named Bjorn. Throughout their studies and many group projects, they worked well together. Nonetheless, Bjorn tended to rely quite heavily on Zeffe, who was more senior and had much more actual field experience. Each friend eventually completed their studies and returned home. In accordance with his scholarship contract, Zeffe returned home and joined the State Mining Corporation in Tanzania as a geologist, on a salary of 36,000 Tanzanian shillings. This was during the late 1980s, when 250 shillings were equivalent to US$1. In US dollar terms therefore, Zeffe was earning approximately $144 per annum.

Soon after commencing work in Tanzania, Zeffe was told that an ‘expert’ was being recruited from overseas, someone who would head the Geological Mining and Surveys Department. This new Head of Department would, Zeffe was told, provide new and innovative ways of conducting business operations. The position was being funded and created by a Scandinavian aid agency. It would therefore be filled by an expatriate from the donor country.

Because the expatriate had to be recruited from the labor pool in a relatively wealthy economy, pay and conditions would need to be quite good, especially by Tanzanian standards. The salary would be US$24,000 per annum tax free, plus company car, housing, and several other fringe benefits. These included private schooling for dependent children, furlough (paid home leave), free electricity, and security guards.

Three months later, Zeffe was instructed to join the entourage sent to meet his new Head of Department at the airport. When the newcomer finally emerged from the Customs Hall, both he and Zeffe were visibly shaken. The new ‘boss’ was none other than Bjorn, Zeffe’s long-time friend and (less competent) fellow student.

It wasn’t long before Zeffe began to feel increasingly hurt and bitter about the rift that had been created between him and his former friend. His work suffered, and he complained to his employers in the State Mining Corporation. They in turn protested to the aid organization, but to no avail. Zeffe soon felt compelled to resign his position, and he was promptly joined by several senior Tanzanian colleagues. Within three months of his arrival, Bjorn too had quit his job and returned home (Rugimbana 1996).

None of this powerful and moving case study is fiction. Moreover, as we shall see in later chapters, similar scenarios are still happening in other aid projects. In broad terms, this case illustrates what Sahara (1991) means when he says that the relationship between aid donor and host, such as expatriates and host counterparts, ‘is now seen as a critical process, which can decide the success or failure of development intervention’ (p. 6). Sahara’s point is that the human factor is increasingly being recognized as a vital component in making aid work.

At the same time, we are witnessing a growing number of reviews about aid effectiveness (for example, Cassen, 1994; German and Randel, 1995; Picciotto and Rist, 1995; Wapenhans, 1993; World Bank, 1995a). This increasing interest in evaluation reflects growing concerns about the success of aid, at the project level and beyond. Indeed, over and above variations depending on sector and region, these reviews consistently show that aid projects often fail. As Cassen puts it, in what is possibly the most comprehensive review to-date, ‘there is much that is already right with aid, but quite a lot to be improved’ (1994, p. 14). Thus, even in Malaŵi, where aid is reported to have been relatively successful, ‘the poor have not progressed and may even have got poorer’ (1994, p. 40).

The argument developed in this book is that the failure of many aid projects may be connected to a comparative neglect of, or naïveté about, the so-called ‘human factor’. Despite the convenient label, there remains a good deal of mystery in development studies about the contents of this particular behavioral box. As one aid consultant puts it, ‘the development literature has been ominously silent when it comes to describing what actually transpires with a consulting team in the field. Like one’s personal sex life, it is not a topic deemed worthy of public discourse. Yet it has engendered a rich, somewhat clandestine oral tradition’ (Gow, 1991, p. 1).

The purpose of this book is to unravel some of that mysterious tradition, to begin to lift the lid from the human factor box. We will present new research and theory, focusing on human behavior in development settings. Much of the material is drawn from the discipline of psychology, which, until now, has not had a great impact on development practice.

Past

While psychological thinking has made some contributions to development, we believe that its potential practical value, in the area of aid projects, has not been fully appreciated or developed. By way of introduction, we must briefly paint the historical backdrop for the changes described by Sahara and Gow. In that backdrop there is a pattern. Whether we are dealing with Primary Health Care (Stone, 1992), Human Geography (Craig and Porter, 1994), or Tropical Agriculture (Mwaniki, 1996), there is a cyclical pattern in the values that have often been promulgated as part of the ‘culture’ of aid.

Following the Depression of the 1930s, through the 1940s and 1950s, there was a somewhat patronizing ‘silver platter’ model of aid and associated development (Stone, 1992). During this ‘do to’ phase, as Mwaniki describes it, macro economists believed that the key to national development was imparting industrialization and modernization, from the fount of the donors’ technical knowledge. Human factors were not particularly high on the aid agenda.

The 1960s and 1970s however saw themselves as the decades of ‘cultural appropriateness’. During that stage, donors fell into two often conflicting camps. One party viewed traditional cultural practices as obstacles or constraints on aidfunded development. The other, led by early advocates of Primary Health Care (or PHC), construed culture as a ‘resource’. For all such ‘humanism’, however, the PHC approach was still heavily patronizing and demeaning. To Mwaniki (1996), donor developers during the 1960s and 1970s had an unconsciously paternal ‘do for’ attitude toward their ‘developees’.

The 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a return to macro-level policies. Monetarist and ‘structural-adjustment programs’ came to dominate theory and practice. During this period, economic rationalism became the primary beacon for development. This return to macro economics marks the first discernible cycle in the way that international aid has been conceived of and practised.

The 1990s and approaching millennium have in turn witnessed a growing sense of the power and significance of culture, an awareness that has undoubtedly been stimulated by the so-called ‘postmodernist debate’. One poignant illustration of this growing awareness is the realization that aid itself often represents a form of cultural invasion (for example, Ingram, 1994; Mansell, 1995; Stone, 1992). Thus, in what amounts to a re-cognition, the ‘human factor’ is once more back in focus (for example, Adjibolosoo, 1995; Moghaddam, 1996; Ridker, 1994).

Given that psychological science is the study of human behavior, it would be surprising if thinking from that discipline was not generally included among the social sciences deemed relevant to international aid. Yet it may be argued that this is precisely what has happened. Although non-economic social sciences generally have been somewhat marginalized in development assistance (Klitgaard, 1995), this seems to be particularly so in the case of aid psychology. The Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), for instance, does not employ any psychological advisors bar one token counsellor for visiting students (Jones, Reese, and Walker, 1994); while the British Overseas Development Administration (1995) excludes psychology from its list of ‘fundable’ disciplines (Carr, 1996b).

Such exclusion is ironic given the obvious scope for improvement in the success rate of aid projects. But more than this perhaps, we should ask why the study of behavior has become marginalized, to the point where it walks a tightrope between claims of irrelevancy on one side and neocolonial hegemony on the other. To answer that question, we must consider what went wrong the first time around, during that first humanistic stage back in the 1960s and 1970s.

During this period, at least one particular psychological notion seems to have captured the attention of social scientists; even to have created perhaps an indelibly negative memory. The notion in question is the so-called ‘Need for Achievement’, or ‘N. Ach’ (McClelland, 1961). Via a shared parentage in Western individualism (see Chapter 4, this volume), N. Ach is related to Maslow’s (1954) ‘self-actualization’, an idea which remains ubiquitous in aid today (for example, Porter et al., 1991), despite its arguably shaky foundations there (see, for example, Carr, MacLachlan, Kachedwa, and Kanyangale, 1997). Like Maslow, McClelland was a psychologist, who presented N. Ach as a psychological motive. The essence of this motive was seeking success ‘in competition with a standard of excellence’ (McClelland and Winter, 1971, p. 95). Thus, the high N. Ach person is driven by a need to compete, not only against others but also against her or himself.

Based on a wide variety of evidence, McClelland (1961) argued that this particular human factor was integral to national economic development. Moreover, it was supposedly learned, especially during cultural socialization practices. The implications were hard to miss. Owing to inferior cultural child-rearing practices, ‘developing’ countries had been deficient in the amount of N. Ach traditionally imparted to their young. By the same token, however, this could be remedied through (for example) aid-funded training projects. Thus, it seemed, McClelland had found both the ‘constraint’ on and the ‘resource’ for national economic development!

The difficulty we have with McClelland’s formulation is that his own cultural values were taken as ‘the solution’, while those of his ‘developing’ counterparts were labeled ‘the problem.’ Here we see an example of how psychological notions about ‘helping’ at that time were inherently patronizing, without there being an explicit awareness of this. The whole notion of N. Ach itself was culturally inappropriate and insensitive. Many if not most cultures in the world do not value individual competition and self-promotion at the expense of others (Smith and Bond, 1993). Quite the contrary, in most nations social achievement is more the norm. Psychology’s first foray into aid-related development efforts was therefore blinkered by its own behavioral assumptions; and the discipline, along with its way of thinking, have arguably been paying the price ever since.

Given what we now know about cultural definitions of achievement, it was inevitable that cracks would start to appear in the argument that more N. Ach would bring more economic development. McClelland focused much of his attention on training potential entrepreneurs to run small businesses. In such environments, as many economists today might assert, the motivation to compete is extremely important. McClelland’s best-known study of the impact of training in N. Ach took place in India (McClelland and Winter, 1971). This aid project, funded by a succession of aid agencies, compared the impact of a course of training in N. Ach with a control group which had had no such training. An example of the content of such training would be an exercise in which the participants were asked to prepare an inscription they would like to see on their tombstone, thereby stimulating them to think about their life goals (McClelland, 1987).

Two years after the initial training intervention, McClelland and Winter found an increase in entrepreneurial activity. This was measured by a combination of business indicators, including number of new employees, capital investment, and profits. McClelland thereafter concluded that N. Ach could indeed be learned, and that it could indeed translate into sustainable economic development.

Yet the project had ignored sources of possible long-term resistance to these ‘high achievers’, stemming perhaps from cultural norms favoring community struggle over personal aggrandizement at the expense, literally, of others (Lawuyi, 1992). Thus it comes as no great surprise that on close inspection there are some worrying discrepancies in the data, anomalies that were reported by McClelland himself (1987).

Firstly, only those who had no superior managed to profit from the training. In Chapter 4 (this volume), we see how many societies place value on hierarchy and the preservation of status or ‘face’, which may result in a comparative tendency (see Chapter 9, this volume) to ‘push down’ on those who destabilize and threaten the stability of that system. Then again, it is also possible that simply being in a position to implement decisions could also have explained McClelland and Winter’s findings. McClelland (1987) also points out, however, that those who respected non-N. Ach traditions, such as Rahukal (or taking a siesta), prospered more than their wholeheartedly N. Ach fellow trainees. Moreover, those individuals who did profit from the training were those who managed not to develop a desire to be recognized as a ‘success’. In Chapter 9, we discuss the centripetal values emphasized in many cultures, and endorsed by many individuals within those cultures. These may motivate co-workers to ‘pull down’ individuals who are aggressively attempting to promote themselves above their peers.

In fact, the level of N. Ach in a culture has since performed very poorly as an indicator of longer-term macroeconomic development (Hofstede, 1984; Lewis, 1991). N. Ach has lost out to other ‘human factors’, such as Confucian Work Dynamism, a pattern of traditional Asian values that emphasizes thriftiness and long-term planning, and which was correlated highly (.70) with average Gross National Growth (GNG) in twenty-two different countries, including what was then rapidly developing East Asia (Chinese Culture Connection, 1987). Other research has linked (a reduced) proportion of Gross National Product (GNP) allocated to foreign aid with cultural values favoring personal acquisition and materialism (Hofstede, 1980). Such research does clearly indicate the value of psychology to development issues. It is therefore unfortunate that the baby (a psychological approach) seems to have been largely thrown out with the (N. Ach) bathwater.

Over a decade ago, Sinha and Holtzman (1984) assessed the impact that psychology had had in developing countries. Their review was not particularly favorable, suggesting that, far from aiding development, the discipline had been having very little impact (for example, Melikian, 1984), and could even have had a retarding influence on development (for example, Mehyrar, 1984). As we have ourselves suggested, this self-directed criticism would fit some of McClelland’s aid-related work, on which so much seems to have turned. In what could have been an epitaph for the human factor in development projects, and helped along considerably by one of its own earlier advocates who took an extremely relativist position on psychological generalizations (Gergen, 1973), Sinha and Holtzman concluded that ps...