Talking about Development - an International Interview Series
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the interview below is part of the above project that can
be found at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fiatlux/td/
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I interviewed Nick Carter, during the symposium "Lifeline Media:
Protecting Civilians in Conflict," sponsored by ICHR (International Centre
for Humanitarian Reporting). Mr. Carter has a journalistic background on
environmental issues and has been working with development and
communications for many years. He is currently co-editor of the World's
Disaster Report and we discussed a variety of issues concerning
development and disasters.
Main topics: development, disasters, refugees, end of the cold war and
impact on development, aid/development agencies, North/South relations,
non-profits, privatization and government.
The interview has been divided into two parts for smaller file sizes.
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Part 1/2
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VB) Tell me about what you currently work in.
I run a small network consultancy out of the UK, called Words and
Pictures, and it's been around for about 10 years. Essentially what I do
is I have a network of people I regularly work with on a whole range of
different projects. We're a commercial organization, though the only
things that we do focus on are issues of environment, development,
disaster, human rights, education, this kind of thing. We've done some
work on AIDS. Usually with international organizations, although we've
done a certain amount of things with British charities.
VB) And when you say work, what do you mean by that?
Well, we work mainly in the media area, also management consultancy, but
we mainly work in the media area. So we do straightforward media
relations, we'll communicate their message to others, we can advise them
how to do it themselves, we write reports. The largest single project we
have at the moment is the World's Disasters Report which is an annual
global production. It's a 208 page book that comes out every year in
English, published by the Oxford University Press globally, but it also
comes out in six or seven other languages: Frech, Spanish, German,
Japanese, Finish, etc. In a sense we define disaster such as the kind of
thing the Red Cross movement gets involved in, it's supported by the
Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, I'm a co-editor,
it's every thing from diseases, we're doing a chapter on epidemics,
through to standard natural disasters in the Caribbean, into things like
war and crisis, and so on.
VB) A lot of these topics are intrinsically related to "development."
What's your idea of development?
If I have to sum it up in a single sentence: to make people rich. That
may sound a bit crass, we can come from the outside and get into some very
complicated definitions of development in terms of people's welfare, and
their health, and this and that... Rich people don't die young. Rich
people don't die in childbirth generally, they don't catch diseases, when
things happen to them, they recover very easily. And our problem in the
world at this moment is that more people are getting poor. People are
getting poorer and there are more poor people. I think as a percentage,
the amount of hunger in the world is going down, but the absolute numbers
are going up. So maybe we are getting a little better, but that's a
pretty crude way of looking at it. On the whole, bearing in mind the
usual caveats about rich people and environmental problems, if people are
richer, wealthier, that would imply a whole series of things about their
rights, about their access to land, about their general security and
welfare, and if we could achieve that where everybody had a reasonable
standard of living in terms of their income, leave it up to them what they
want to do with it. So I take a much more privatization-Thatcherite "let
people get on with it" view. I'm very keen on indigenous led development.
One of the great troubles I have with all of the development/aid business,
is that the great temptation to interfere, the great temptation to feel
we must be there, we've got to fly in... I was in a conference recently
where there was a guy from an Indian network of organizations, very
experienced in disasters, who said: "We love to have friends arrive, but
we're busy." Essentially what he was saying was don't come, you know,
just give us five minutes, no disaster tourism.
I think also in developmental terms, the longer I go in this business, the
more I am absolutely convinced that I know nothing about it all and our
level of ignoraance
about how societies work, how economies work, how people "develop" is
enormous and growing by the day.
The fact, the idea that we can come in into somebody else's society and do
things for them is ridiculous. And the idea that we even understand
what's going on is probably pretty futile. We would never expect the
average Indian, Chinese, Latin American person to come to this country and
tell us how to run, say, Boston. You just don't understand it! Or think
about getting into zoning discussions or planning... And yet we feel very
comfortable in going into Africa and start talking about the structure of
a village and how people should plan it and communal ownership of land
and this kind of thing.
In terms of my thinking and my work, I do focus much more on disasters,
but then disasters are very interesting ways of looking at societies, it
exposes a lot of things that are going on. Disasters are also
tremendously effective mechanisms for making people poorer. People who
were already vulnerable, insecure, with low income, in disasters they lose
out very badly. People who even have quite marginal levels of wealth and
security actually can do quite well in disasters, but unfortunately have
to do it by scraping the people at the bottom.
But disasters are also an interesting way of cutting the cake to
understand poverty and lack of development or underdevelopment. I was
recently writing up on Ethiopia and working with people who were saying
with the studies they were doing that they can now predict who will live
and who will die in the next famines in certain villages. And they worked
with people's security and land ownership and the fact that they had
trouble before. The same people are relentlessly being ground by disaster
after disaster after disaster.
So I find it hard to see development in quite the same smooth, rosy glow
that I suspect people who talk about development do: "it's very long term,
but there's a steady flow." I don't see it in that kind of way. I see
an awful lot of people have a series of cataclysmic events happening to
them, hundreds of millions of people a year are affected by disasters.
When we look at development we are looking at a massively interrupted
process.
One of the things when people talk about development, I get worried
because they don't factor in things like disasters. Even people at the
World Bank find it very hard to factor in that probably projects will be
interrupted by very difficult events and so on which will then upset the
whole thing and set it back.
Unless you've thought about it in advance, you're not going to be very
good in dealing with it, or managing the process, or thinking: we are
probably going to have an earthquake, or a war, or something like that,
which will make life very difficult. How will we cope with it? What do
we do? What structures are we putting into place that are not so
vulnerable?
This comes back to issues of sustainability, of durability. Again, if it
isn't indigenous led, it isn't going to work. If people haven't thought
through it in advance, they are going to have real problems.
VB) How have your current ideas of development changed over time?
I came from a very conventional view in the past. My whole background is
as a journalist and I spent 8 years in conventional journalism. I think
certainly that I moved from thinking that development is something that
you can impose, or that you can introduce, or you can encourage, to
seeing that development is something that people do for themselves. And
if you want to help them, that's a great idea, but it's a very difficult
thing, because the moment you arrive at a situation you alter it.
When external people turn up, the expectations go through the roof. No
matter what you say, the very presence of foreigners in a situation,
people think "any minute now, we're going to have this, this and this."
Despite the fact that in the every situation, people who have been
survivors of disasters or working in a situation, often report, "We see a
lot of foreigners come and they ask us a lot of questions and then they go
away again and another new group comes again and nothing happens!"
But the expectations are there. So, in that sense, over time, I have
ceased to be as naive, wouldn't everybody? I certainly see it as a
situation where the key issue, in my view, is it's very good to work in
immunization, child health, or rehydration, but fundamentally these are
treating symptoms. People in that sense die from being poor. They have
problems with disasters from being poor. Therefore, if you do things that
do not focus on making people rich, you're probably not going to get
anywhere. You could have the healthiest population in the world, but if
they are so poor that they cannot scrape a living out of the ground, or
when something happens to them, they have no reserves to fall back on,
they'll die! And we are making life more difficult for those people, we
are giving them less safety nets...
When I talk to people in Aid agencies, people still find it almost a
little bit rude when I say: What works? What did you do that was right?
What did you do that was wrong? How do you know?
Evaluation is still very imprecise. There's a lot of work done in
evaluation and people are waking up to the fact that if you keep doing
things and never know if it's any good, you could be wasting all of your
money!
I think we are beginning to learn that we have to be very careful with
what we do. I think it revolves around income, if people are poor it's
very hard for them to get anywhere, bootstraps and all that. and we find
an increasing number of people who are right at the poorest level.
The process of globalization, commercialization, privatization of land,
all of these are undermining people, and we are going to have to work
within those constraints. There's only one game in town at the moment,
there's only one superpower, there's only one ideology, so a lot of what
we do in the aid and the development business is soften the edges of
capitalism. Capitalism can be quite violent to people. We know that,
that's absolutely obvious, it can be very destructive because of the kind
of inequalities within it.
I remember hearing a former American from the trade sector saying they
were going to merge markets "with a crow bar." The crow bar open
markets... Now the imagery is very interesting. I'm not a believer in
holding back that process, it's probably inevitable. I think the
globalization of business and commerce and trade is not something we are
going to stop. We have to be very careful, though, in analyzing how it's
going to affect people.
I think we have to think about proactive ways, protectionism and this
kind of thing, in the end, it doesn't work. In the end the crash that
comes is harder. Somehow we have to think of better ways of working
within that ideology, within that dominant economic system, that are going
to let people have a chance to survive. So we have to do things like
microcredit, these other kinds of things. And we have to think about
issues of land tenure.
I've been a local reporter and one of the single biggest issues in any
community is planning, it's about land, it's about who's got the right to
do what, where, and so forth. I think this is the same for a peasant in
Latin America as for a villager in the North of England.
We have to think about people's fundamental access to land and the
security that that brings. At the moment what's happening is some very
fundamental changes going on in terms of land tenure in places like
Africa. And they are happening without a great deal of thought. A lot of
the time when people get into issues such as land tenure, they talk about
trying to establish land rights in a conventional paper manner. Bits of
paper very rarely are able to express an African or traditional context
the web of rights and benefits and responsibilities that people have. To
write down what's happening to a piece of land in Africa is a book!
Because people will have access to land, some people will own it perhaps,
some people will have rights to use it, some people will have access to
take some of its products, some people will traverse across it. A piece
of paper probably won't be very useful if we try to squash it down and
say: "you own it." What's going to happen is that you are going to have
that bit of paper and a lot of other things that go on the side. And if
the bit of paper doesn't reflect the rest of it, there are just going to
be more disputes. Because you will be crystallizing a situation which is
fluid and you will be preventing the ebb and flow of things.
So I think land tenure will be a very important issue in the future. If
we don't get that right, what will happen is that we will remove millions,
billions of people from the fundamental thing that can keep them alive.
We are already seeing that.
In one sense, when we look around the world, people who live in cities are
very vulnerable, they depend upon immensely complex systems. People who
live on the land are in many ways less vulnerable.
We have 18 inches of snow, the electricity goes out, the traffic doesn't
move, you can't get food into the place...
This comes back to if we got one dominant ideology and one economic
system,
we have to think about how that affects people, we have to work very close
with them, they have to understand what's going to happen to them, they
have to accommodate to it and deal with it. I'm not necessarily in favor
of, let's say, massive resistance movements, I think one has to be
realistic about what is possible. For example, yesterday we were talking
about how Freeport is working in Papua New Guinea. I'm actually quite keen
on Irian Jaya, I'm actually quite keen on this idea of American lawyers
doing class action suits against American companies on behalf of peasants
in whereever.
That seems to me like a good way to make the system work. I think the
idea of people who are existing on bows and arrows can run an effective
resistance movement against a multinational company which has got the
permission of the government and the back up of mercenaries or military
forces, I think that's asking people to go and get themselves slaughtered.
In which case, what we probably need to work on is to get laws right,
establishing good consumer movements, establishing good connections
between the North and the South and getting clearer on what we can do to
help each other.
One of the things I certainly think is happening is a trend in aid, a
shift of buying power South. The amount of official development aid,
ODA, has probably just about peaked, we're about 65 billion (bilateral,
multilateral, including disasters, it doesn't include all of the costs of
peacekeeping, but a fair amount). Of course the absolute amount of money
bears no relation to the actual GNP of the donor countries, the GNP of the
recipients, or the scale of the problems. But these are very small
amounts of money in real terms compared to
trade or financial flows. The amount of private direct investment in
developing countries, in developing economies, although very skewed
towards the Chinas and the South Africas of this world, I think it
overtook official development assistance about five years ago, and is now
way more important. And obviously trade flows, coffee or tea, or even cut
flowers, there is a massive amount of money these days. So aid is very
small, so it better be very catalytic, if it's going to have an impact.
The way things happen now is that donors give the money to Northern
friends, people they work with a lot. I would prefer to see it going into
Southern NGOs (non-governmental organizations), Southern institutions,
organizations. There are a lot of them out there, they are growing in
numbers and size, in professionalism. And the best way for them to grow
in professionalism, etc., is to give them a chance to grow, which is to
give them the money. Some of them will do it very badly, some of them
will do it very well, and everyone else will muddle through, and in that
process we will find out the people that can and those who can't, and then
you reward those that can.
On the whole, Southern NGOs are much more realistic, much more
entrepreneurial, they have to be, to survive. On the whole, generalizing
wildly, I suspect that they are much more of a hybrid between profit and
non-profit, that they will find ways to accommodate themselves to the
reality of the environment. If we give them the 70 billion, people who
have NGOs, consumer groups, action groups in the South, will then be able
to say what do we really need the North for: for fund raising, lobbying,
advocacy...
Now aid agencies don't really like this, to talk about working themselves
out of a job, i'm not sure they fundamentally find that a very easy
concept, because they are terribly bad at downsizing. Whenever aid
agencies have to sack people, there's an agony about it, they're not used
it, I mean, they are used to growth! We've had 20, 30 years of growth in
the aid agency field, development and disasters. In 1971, the entire
overseas development assistance was something like 200 million dollars!
And Rwanda in 94/95 cost 1.4 billion! Now having gotten to this stage,
we're coming down the other side maybe. So we've had massive cutbacks in
the UK, the UN is downsizing, finally, at last...
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Boston, MA - April 1997 - Original interview in English
