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Contents
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 5-6
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9 - Conclusion
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 259-274
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Summary
Development aid is the subject of heavy debate. In many ways the world has improved immensely over the past sixty years. However, the question is increasingly being raised as to what contribution aid has made to this development. Progress has primarily become apparent over the last few decades. In the past twenty-five years, life expectancy in all developing countries taken together has risen by ten years, and the percentage of children attending school has doubled. Poverty around the globe has also halved, to a quarter of the world's population. This success, however, has primarily been achieved in Asia, with China alone accounting for three quarters of the decrease. In Sub-Saharan Africa, real incomes have doubled over the past twenty-five years, but the percentage of people living on an income under the poverty line has not fallen. Can these successes be attributed to development aid, or should the lack of success be blamed on aid? The answer to both questions is: ‘No’.
Development aid definitely contributed to the massive leaps forward made in Asia, from the economic support to Taiwan and South Korea in the 1950s to the aid for agricultural improvement provided to India in the 1970s. However, these contributions were limited – all manner of other factors were important. Similarly, the lack of success – in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa – cannot unequivocally be traced back to the failure of aid. A lot of aid, particularly in the 1990s, had geopolitical objectives. Even today, much aid primarily aims to improve the immediate living conditions of the poor instead of bringing about structural development. Moreover, economic, political and social structures in African countries are of a very different order. These countries still clearly reveal the traces of colonialism, with their artificial borders and institutions that are barely rooted in society. Strong governments with a clear view of the future development of their country are rare in Africa, in sharp contrast to Asia.
Simple analogies between development paths in various parts of the world soon become misleading. For example, a parallel between development aid and the Marshall Plan is inaccurate because the latter started out as an attempt to rebuild Europe after the war. It was essentially a matter of reviving a formerly healthy patient, while many of the countries which need aid now have never had a healthy market economy or a functioning state system.
Frontmatter
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 1-4
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7 - Being more Specific: Professionalizing Aid
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 195-232
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Summary
What is required to make a serious contribution to development? As we have seen, there is no Big Answer to that question. Societies cannot be ‘fixed’. Development aid should aim to increase self-sufficiency, and be tailored to the specific situation and problems in the country concerned. Anyone who takes this as a serious starting point will not act on the basis of yet another grand, universal theory of development, but on a heterogeneous, better substantiated and targeted collection of local policy practices.
APPROPRIATE AID MODALITIES
Asking how to shape development is to ask not only what, but also how. The debate on ‘what’ is many times more intensive than the question of ‘how’. Aid presupposes a thorough reflection on which instruments to deploy, but that is a surprisingly neglected issue. There has been little systematic reflection on how aid can best be provided. To be more precise, there is a whole body of literature on specific intervention variants – for example, the various forms of microcredit have been evaluated extensively – but the question of how this aid relates to the ‘political economy’ of a country is almost invariably ignored. At micro level there is a wide range of insights into the exact design of aid projects, but the issue of whether aid can better be provided through NGOs or local government is much less systematically examined. Choice of instruments is often a matter of preference, with some people believing that governments are the best channel, and others placing their trust in multilateral organizations, NGOs or the private sector.
This neglect is partly based on the implicit assumption that all aid is worthwhile. As long as it is aimed at reducing poverty, every person who is alleviated from poverty is a positive result, no matter who provides the aid. When the objective shifts to increasing the self-sufficiency of countries and peoples, it is necessary to ask what kind of aid is best suited to achieving that. In addition to increasing selfsufficiency, it is also important to address ways of avoiding negative side effects of aid, such as the unproductive perpetuation of neopatrimonial structures. The existence of such structures is a reality in many developing countries, and it is important to determine how aid relates to them.
1 - Development Aid in a Changing Context
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 13-24
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In recent years development aid has become the subject of much discussion in the Western world. In the media, a passionate debate has developed which has addressed fundamental questions, but in which examples are happily quoted out of context and stereotypes are rife. Books on development aid have appeared in rapid succession and interviews with their authors have graced the front pages of the weekend supplements of the leading dailies. A fascinating genre has emerged. For most of the authors, the topic was clearly very loaded, as was evident by their cutting tone, their sweeping statements, the pamphlet-like undertones, the apocalyptic cover notes, the easy use of statistics and the degree to which their arguments were shot through with references to their personal lives, as if this were some guarantee that what they were saying was the ultimate truth. It would all have made a perfect topic for a thesis by a student of literature. In The End of Poverty (2005), Jeffrey Sachs invoked his wife, in Bad Samaritans (2007) Ha-Joon Chang his children, in The Trouble with Africa (2006) James Calderesi his friend, in The Bottom Billion (2007) Paul Collier his son, in The White Man's Burden (2006) William Easterly described his disillusions as a former World Bank employee, while in Dead Aid (2009) Dambisa Moyo called her parents as witnesses for the prosecution. In this way, criticism of development cooperation has itself become a million-dollar business.
It is time to thoroughly reflect on the future of development aid. Besides the tone of the debate, there are a number of fundamental reasons for doing this. After all, there have been a number of significant changes. Developing countries are not what they were sixty years ago, when development aid took its first cautious steps. Meanwhile, the nature of aid itself has also changed – under the influence of changes not only in the South but at least as much in the West. Western countries no longer automatically have the hegemonic position in the world that they held sixty years ago. Furthermore, thinking among policymakers and academics has evolved on what development is and how it can or cannot be effectively promoted.
5 - Designing Development Aid
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 105-152
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Development aid can be inspired by a number of different motives simultaneously. The existence of different and parallel motives does not, in itself, have to be a problem since social activities are usually driven by a variety of motives. The task facing the political system is to weigh up all these motives and combine them into a manageable structure for implementation. This is, however, tricky if the different motives give cause to engage in practices which continually diverge. In addition, as chapters 3 and 4 showed, helping with development is a tremendously complex job. It is therefore no surprise that the institutional system is running into all kinds of problems. In this chapter we discuss five persistent problems in more detail: the goals (the priority of poverty reduction), the organization (the proliferation of aid), the approach (the belief in social engineering and one size fits all), the view of aid (the absence of an intervention ethic) and the scope (the inability to involve other policy fields).
NARROWING DOWN: DEVELOPMENT AID BECOMES POVERTY REDUCTION
The image of development aid that is projected in the media is dominated by the idea that it primarily focuses on helping people in difficult circumstances to lead lives which are, in some way, dignified. The standard image of development aid is one of water pumps, latrines, schools and doctors. As shown in chapter two, this has not always been the case. This image emerged in the 1970s, continued in the 1980s and 1990s, and is now a global phenomenon.
Development aid was not always oriented around direct poverty reduction. When it started to take shape as government intervention in the 1950s, its primary focus was on the accelerated preparation of countries for a situation in which they would be able to cope on their own. The economic growth required for development was clearly the reference point. Providing loans – in particular for infrastructure – and technical support coupled to capacity building were the most important instruments. At the time, confidence in the role of governments was high and developing countries initially experienced substantial growth. The emphasis shifted in subsequent years, due to factors in both donor and recipient countries.
4 - Measuring Development
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 87-104
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Development is a complex business. While this might be a challenge to commentators and scientists, it is above all a problem for politicians and civil servants, who have the difficult job of explaining such a complicated concept to the man or woman in the street. It is equally difficult to formulate policy and evaluate whether that policy leads to positive results. The latter causes researchers all kinds of headaches. After all, it is their task to throw extra light on the question of where and when aid is useful. The question of how such a question can be answered is key to this chapter.
IS DEVELOPMENT TAKING PLACE?
Describing development is one thing, explaining it in measurable quantities is another. Nevertheless, this is what modern policy systems are expected to do. As a consequence, policy is being made ‘result-oriented’ in dozens of ways. What, on the whole, are the results? Demonstrating the achievement of development is easy if specific welfare indicators are taken as the criteria, but much trickier if other indicators are used. Welfare indicators, particularly in the field of healthcare, education, nutrition and political and social rights (including the position of women and children) present a predominantly positive picture. However, indicators which are socioeconomic in nature project a more diffuse picture. Although there are successes in this respect, these are very unequally distributed. There are major differences in both the degree to which poverty decreases and the level of economic growth, between both regions and population groups within countries.
The fact that specific indicators reveal substantial changes is one thing. The question of what causes these changes is another. The logical follow-up question is to what extent development aid was the decisive factor in bringing about those changes? Let us first examine the development indicators themselves. Anyone who wants to present successful types of development had better focus on healthcare, education and agriculture. In these areas the rate of change in developing countries has been substantially higher during the past half century than was ever the case in Western Europe (Maddison 2001). For example, life expectancy in developing countries appears to have increased by ten years between 1970 and 2005, and even by twenty years since 1950. That still leaves them twenty years behind Western countries, but they are making quicker progress.
8 - A Broader Perspective: Looking Beyond Aid
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 233-258
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Development aid can take the form of direct aid from one country to another. However, aid in this form will gradually decrease in importance in the years to come. As development questions become increasingly interwoven with broader global and regional issues, the focal point of development activities will also have to shift in the same direction. That shift does not have to be made too hastily. For a number of developing countries, bilateral aid is still of vital importance and can be useful under certain conditions. However, that applies to a decreasing number of countries. If the pace of development between 2004 and 2008 continues, by 2020 classical developing countries like Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and even Chad will be middle-income countries, at least according to current methods of measurement. The fate of these countries will then depend less on what financial support individual donors still wish to give them and more on how they respond to the opportunities they find and take for themselves in a globalizing world.
The question is how development issues can gradually be placed more and more in such a global perspective. Donors are still making heavy weather of this shift in focus, and most of them have not yet even reached the conclusion that it is necessary. This chapter describes how to achieve this change in three stages. The first is how more aid can be provided through multilateral channels, which offers greater opportunities to address development issues from a broad perspective. The second stage relates to how national and European policies in areas that do not belong to the classical development domain can devote serious attention to their impact on development-related issues. After addressing coherence for development, the third step is to examine how development issues fit within an approach based on international public goods. This also means examining the implications for global governance of the increasing need for coordination and strategic integration of policies with cross-border consequences.
MULTILATERAL AID
Addressing development issues in a way that goes beyond classical bilateral aid can first be achieved by placing aid in a multilateral context. That has a number of advantages, including less need for coordination, greater effectiveness, lower transaction costs for recipients and donors, but especially more opportunities to tackle issues from a broader perspective. We first examine the extent to which attention is devoted to the latter possibility.
Preface
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Book:
- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 7-12
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Summary
This book is about the future of development aid. In recent years there has been increased public debate in the Netherlands, as in many other Western countries, about development cooperation – in terms of both the media attention devoted to the theme and the intensity of the positions taken. In a country which liked to see itself as one of the pioneers in the field, the self-evidence of development aid – about which there had long been broad political and social consensus – seemed to have come to a definite end. It was for this reason that the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) undertook to examine this issue thoroughly.
The WRR is an advisory body to the Dutch government. Its task is to make proposals, based on broad analysis and scientific insights, on the strategic direction of Dutch policy. To this end, the WRR submits advisory reports to the government several times a year on issues which merit specific attention. At the start of 2010, an advisory report on development aid was published in Dutch under the title Less Pretension, More Ambition. Academics, practitioners, policymakers and politicians engaged in all manner of debate about the report's analysis and recommendations. The government started drawing up a detailed response on the consequences of the report for its policy, with the intention of debating it in parliament. In October 2010, the new Dutch government decided to use the report as the basis of a thorough modernization of the Netherlands’ policy.
To make the Dutch report accessible to an international audience, it has not only been translated into English, but also adapted and amended. Details referring to the specific Dutch organization of development aid that are irrelevant for an international audience have been removed. Only those from which wider lessons may be drawn have been retained. Secondly this publication has benefited from the responses to the report (more than 100 detailed responses were posted in the online debate organized by the website of The Broker alone; see www.thebroker online.eu). The changes made include coverage of new themes, more elaboration on specific lines of reasoning and more comprehensive analyses. The main argument has not been changed. The result is a book aimed at a wider international audience, even though the examples chosen and the emphasis laid will undoubtedly have a noticeable Dutch bias.
2 - The Development Aid Split
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 25-48
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Development aid aims to contribute to a better world. There are all kinds of motives for creating a better world and each has its own emphases and leads to a specific design of development aid. The roots of these different motives can all be found in the current practice of development aid, therefore making it the result of a blend of motives. The more divergent the motives, the more difficult it is to realize a productive whole when designing development aid. The fact that the motives – which each have their own value – are so different has brought increasing pressure to bear on the design of development aid in recent decades. This pressure is becoming more and more of a problem. With a view to showing that this is the case, we start this chapter with an analysis of the motives.
TWO BASIC MOTIVES FOR DEVELOPMENT AID
The history of Dutch development aid illustrates the way the Western world has regarded aid over the years. When, on 3 October 1949, the Dutch government first decided to make funds available for development aid – while still receiving aid itself via the Marshall Plan (!) – its policy was shaped primarily by the process of decolonization. The Memorandum concerning the Dutch contribution to the programme of the United Nations for technical aid to economically under-developed countries (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1950) must be read against the background of the Netherlands handing over power in Indonesia three months later, on 27 December 1949. The memorandum summarized the clear benefits of development aid for the Netherlands, such as an enhanced reputation, new export possibilities and, most importantly, finding something useful to do for all the superfluous experts in the field. “Now that Indonesia is going to lose its significance as an outlet for Dutch intellect, we will have to look for a field of activity in other areas like Africa, Latin America and Asia” (p. 7). All in all, the Netherlands decided to make 1.5 million guilders available, all with a view to transferring knowledge.
The processing of the post-colonial trauma initially had a strong influence on government policy in Western countries. In France, the Ministry for the Colonies was divided into two ministerial departments: one for “related states” and one for French overseas territories.
References
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 275-308
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Less Pretension, More Ambition
- Development Policy in Times of Globalization
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010
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On some levels, the accepted role of development aid has been supplanted by the increase of individual remittances and foreign direct investment, as well as by policies that focus on issues such as climate, migration, financial stability, knowledge, trade, and security in order to increase opportunities in struggling countries. This study considers such changes and examines the effectiveness of aid and its role in international power relations. The editors and contributors close the book by proposing new strategies for development aid in the era of globalization.
6 - The Task Ahead
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 02 November 2010, pp 153-194
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The history of sixty years of development aid can be described as a struggle during which citizens, governments and multilateral organizations searched, with only partial success, for ways of getting to grips with an extremely complex phenomenon. The question is what conclusions can be drawn from this with a view to future policy. A gloomy assessment about what has been achieved may lead to the conclusion that continuing development aid is not desirable or sensible, while the fact that development is a difficult task can quickly become a licence for continuing along the same, chosen path. The material presented in the previous five chapters implies, however, that we should neither give up nor blindly carry on. This chapter is devoted to formulating a more poignant conclusion.
LINKING WILL BECOME INCREASINGLY UNAVOIDABLE
Why do we provide development aid? In chapter 2 we discussed two types of motives: moral motives and motives which can be traced back to collective selfinterest. Moral motives have always played a major role for individuals, as reflected in the work of missionaries, modern-day benefit concerts and individual aid initiatives. The question is, however, to what extent Western governments should allow this motive to play a part in their policy. Although it can be argued from a normative perspective that governments also have a moral duty to show solidarity or charity, that argument makes allowances for political assumptions. Whether moral reasons are sufficient for granting development aid is then a political choice. This is less clear-cut in the case of collective self-interest: the government has to ensure that the interests of Western citizens can also be guaranteed in the long term, as laid down in the constitution. Western countries are becoming more and more reliant on the international order to realize those interests. Collective self-interest can therefore be a powerful argument for development aid. However, it does have to be clear where that interest actually lies.
An argument often put forward in this framework is that a more equal distribution of opportunities in the world would prevent large migration flows. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence for that reasoning – in fact, there is more to support the opposite argument (Bakewell 2008). It is a myth to think that migration will decrease as developing countries develop. It is precisely in countries which continue to develop that farmers gravitate to the cities, while city dwellers migrate to richer countries.
3 - Understanding Development
- Peter van Lieshout, Robert Went, Monique Kremer
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- Less Pretension, More Ambition
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 14 January 2021
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- 02 November 2010, pp 49-86
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Development aid – and this is sometimes forgotten – is about development. No matter what the motives for development aid might be, it is always important to have a clear picture of how ‘development’ should be interpreted. The answer to that question can provide a framework for assessing how ‘development’ might be stimulated and how this relates to the current organization and control model. This chapter addresses the question of what development is, and how the Western community has, in that respect, become sadder and wiser.
DEFINING DEVELOPMENT
What people mean by development often remains implicit. Nevertheless, there appears to be a common thread in public debates and academic literature. Development is almost always defined as a deliberate acceleration of modernization, interpreted as the synchronized fourfold transition of economy, government, political system, and society. Modernization is envisaged as what has been achieved in the West since the nineteenth century: the creation of a well-developed and productive economic system embedded in international trade relations, a government apparatus that is able to provide or help provide essential services in the fields of education, healthcare, housing, and security, a political system that ensures collective decision-making processes resulting in citizens feeling connected to the outcome and each other, and a society which is sufficiently open and offers space for various individual and collective ambitions.
Certainly not everyone will entirely agree with this description. Over the past twenty years, there has been growing resistance to an interpretation that implies that the Western model is the best, and the above formulation comes close to doing just that. However, closer examination reveals that there are not many radical alternatives, as shown by those who have studied the many attempts of countries and people from the South to produce their ‘own’ formulations. A wellknown variant of this non-Western perspective is the Beijing Consensus (Ramo 2004), but the list of ‘perspectives from the South’ is much longer (Matthews 2004). Anyone who strips these formulations back to the bare bones will see that they can largely be interpreted within the above framework. This is borne out by study of the Beijing Consensus.
8 - Innovation and Organisation
- Edited by Bart Nooteboom, Erik Stam, E. Stam
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- Micro-Foundations for Innovation Policy
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- Amsterdam University Press
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- 23 January 2021
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- 22 April 2008, pp 219-248
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INTRODUCTION
In this chapter we look at how to organise for innovation and how to innovate organisation.
In a review of the existing literature on organisational innovation, Lam (2005) notes that “(t)here is no single coherent conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of ‘organisational innovation’. This is partly due to the great conceptual ambiguity and confusion surrounding the term organisational innovation.” To begin with, there is no consensus definition of the term organisational innovation. Lam holds that this conceptual indeterminacy may reflect the fact that organisational innovation embraces a very wide range of phenomena. She notes that “at present, research on organizational change and adaptation is fragmented: the different levels of analysis are disconnected and often rooted in different theoretical paradigms that use different research methods.” She finds that “many innovation studies continue to be dominated by an economic approach that allows little room for the analysis of creative change and innovation within the organization itself”, and argues that “treating the organization as an interpretation and learning system directs our attention to the important role of internal organizational dynamics, actor cognition, and behaviour in shaping the external environment and outcomes of organizational change.”
As discussed in chapter 3, a fundamental problem of innovation processes is the combination and relation between exploration – i.e., the development of new ways of doing things (also referred to as second order learning) – and exploitation, i.e., improving on existing ways of doing things (also referred to as first order learning). The first is necessary for companies in order to survive in the short term, the second for their survival on a longer term. The challenge is to do both. That is not simple, because they raise different and sometimes contradictory demands. For exploitation, meanings have to be clear and stable norms, divisions of labour, and know-how are all necessary. For exploration, it is necessary to cut across existing denotations, norms, and divisions of tasks. This leads to tensions between control and flexibility, with consequences for the motivation and coordination of labour and the measurement of performance.