Margaret Grieco, of Napier University (Edinburgh) focuses in on the persistant problem of muzzling expert opinion within the international development community and singles out the World Bank for its internal problems. While the World Bank may be an example of this problem it is probably unfair to single out the World Bank, although it does manage to act as a lightening rod in such issues.The wider problem is a (willful?) failure to learn at a number of levels. One level is the effective muzzling of expert opinion within developing countries themselves. This is achieved in several ways.
One is the simple export of intellectual capital because of lack of employment "at home" and the fact that the industrial nations import that expertize (across a number of fields) as a cheap alternative to investing in their own people. In many cases the annual values of the outflow of intellectual capital (measured at its cost of production) is greater than the inflow of development assistance. Another way in which valuable expertize is "muzzled" is to marginalize it by not allowing it to participate in those very activities where its mix of expertize and knowledge of "context" (local conditions) would prevent many of the persistant shortfalls of international assistance. There is a persistant bias toward foreign expertise with numerous well documented shortcomings. As well, this practice drives the export of local intellectual capital, and prevents the building of local capacity. Lastly, when valuable local expertize does achieve employment in its field, that does not mean that the expertize gets utilized. When it is expatraiated, to work with international organizations, it is frequently both alienated from thinking about local context, as well as being muzzled by institutional policies. When it achieves employment within its "home country" and could contribute from both its expertize and knowledge of local context, it has to deal with the tremendous power imbalance between the external funding sources, and the internal development organizations. Argentina today is a case in point. There are many within Argentina who would have had the country take a different path, especially with regard to "dollarization" and pegging the peso one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. However, there were strong forces within the IMF and the U.S. Treasury Department who saw this as a great opportunity for an experiment. They - of course - thought it would work, and effectively had the power to force the experiment. However, only Argentina has to pay the price of failure. In the pre-IMF days at least the foreign debt holders were exposed to risk as well. There is an excellent recent book on these issues, published jointly by Kumarian Press and the Canadian International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and edited by Ian Smillie for the Humanitarianism and War Project. It is titled "Patronage or Partnership" and while its focus is on local capacity building in humanitarian crises, it is really about the willful failure of international development efforts to learn, both from their mistakes and from their successes. I can think of no other 200 pages I would rather have my development colleagues reading at this time. Sam Lanfranco, Chair School of Analytic Studies and Information Technology York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> tel 416-816-2852 fax 416-946-1087 ------------ ***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.globalknowledge.org>
