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Arguably, the strong aid pessimism that persisted during the 1980s and 1990s had faded a little at the turn of this century. In 2000, at the Millennium Summit at the UN Headquarters (the only UN gathering in which all heads of state were present) all governments agreed upon the Millennium Development Goals as a grand strategy to markedly reduce extreme, deadly poverty. Its first goal was the reduction of the percentage of people living in extreme poverty by half until the year 2015. The other goals set targets for school enrollment, universal primary education, maternal health and a “global partnership for development”. The foundational thinking for this approach is to be found in what has been termed the “unofficial” book behind the goals, articulating the views of their architect – The End of Poverty by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Professor Sachs is a fervent advocate of the view that a drastic increase in development aid could achieve these goals, and the public largely bought these arguments.

It seemed like the days in which perceptions that aid would largely become embezzled, spent by gullible do-gooders or used by big powers to further their geo-political and economic interests dominated debates about development were numbered – a shift in perceptions that is has in recent years been incessantly challenged by New York University Professor William Easterly. His book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) left its imprint on the academic and public debate on development aid.

Easterly, a former World Bank employee, establishes two tragedies of the poor. The first is the dying due to causes that are entirely preventable in the 21st century, i.e. starvation and illnesses like malaria and cholera. The second is the inability of the multi-million dollar “aid industry” to deliver simple goods to prevent needless suffering. He argues that this is because of structural problems: The poor and desperate are not the genuine stakeholders. They are neither customers of goods in a free economy and can refuse a service and choose another one, nor do they have a relationship to aid organizations that resembles that of a voter in democracy towards a bureaucrat – if a service is not delivered in a democracy, a voter can at least ideally penalize a politician for it through the ballot box.

The feedback by the poor is not ultimately critical for aid organizations; it is the feedback from rich country donors and voters financing the programs. This explains why aid workers construct utopian goals to foster support in rich countries. Easterly refers to aid workers pursuing utopian goals as planners. Instead of assigning clear-cut responsibilities to one agency, many planner agencies unite behind one goal as well as individual agencies. This renders aid workers less accountable towards the implementation of programs, which cannot achieve tangible goals to the benefit of the poor. In the very foreign environment, in which aid agencies perform, donors have no possibility of holding the agents accountable for the merit of their services, something only the poor themselves could do. According to Easterly, such a constellation produces the least desirable policy outcomes, in spite of good intentions.

The utopian goals favored by planners do not deliver enforceable policies on the ground, are ignorant to local dynamics and embedded in the assumptions that Westerners know easy solutions to the problems of societies of “the Rest”, which are inherently complex. This arrogance towards “the Rest” must be put into a historical context pertaining to Colonialism. A neo-colonial mindset is still inbuilt in all of the West’s relations with “the Rest”, and also informed US interventions in the Cold War as well as later “humanitarian interventions”.

Easterly pleads to development aid that is influenced by a “searcher” mentality. Just like searchers in the free market look for solutions to problems in the expectation of remuneration by customers, searchers in foreign aid should abandon “golden bullets” and central planning to aid the poor, and instead work context-specific directed by the urge to find doable solutions for the poor. He cites a few examples of successful searchers and gives suggestions for possible new feedback mechanisms.

I recommend The White Man’s Burden to anyone interested in or practicing developing work. Development work should always carry with it a commitment to constructively engage with criticism. The book is very readable. It provides easy access to a myriad of case studies and an invaluable inspiration for further in-depth research of those studies that induced most interest in the reader. It reminded me on the many appalling inefficiencies of development aid as well as the often overseen, disconcerting historical progression from Colonialism to “Developmentalism” and the importance of humility in different cultural settings. Perhaps because I read the book while working with with the development NGO CARE in Ghana, dealing with its content became personally stimulating for me.

I also liked that Easterly did not concede to an overall pessimism concerning aid. He admits that aid focusing on basic healthcare and primary education yielded much more promising outcomes than initiatives to transform societies in political, economic and cultural terms. He cites examples of significant successes in healthcare, e.g. a significant drop in mortality before the age of 1 from more than 160 per 1,000 live births in 1960 to less than 100 per 1,000 life births in 2003 in Sub Saharan Africa, and education, e.g. the percentage of enrollment of primary school-aged children rose from less than 3 percent in 1960 to more than 30 in 2003 in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Before reading the book, I often dismissed small initiatives as being too piecemeal and insignificant in the achievement of claimable social and political rights. I still believe in the unalienable importance of claimable rights, but developed a far less pessimistic view on small-scale aid efforts because of the “can-do” kind of projects Easterly presents. Maybe Easterly is correct in pointing out that solutions for the immediate suffering of the poor can be blocked if one is forever concerned with basing all services on rights, however constructed, and big agendas, however unachievable. But I also have some criticism of “The White Man’s Burden”.

Especially when he describes the successes of development aid in basic education and healthcare, and calls for more investment of resources and political energy into these fields, the resemblance of his arguments to the basic premises of Sachs is stunning, and has been pointed out by commentators. Instead of delivering biting criticism of Sach’s thinking, as the author intends, he seems to point towards a new (or reiterated) consent in development aid as formulated in the Millennium Development Goals: The funding of basic healthcare and education projects. From all I understand about development aid, this newfound consensus makes perfect sense because it is based on a proven track record and addresses the most urgent needs of the beneficiaries.

It is too much to ask each adherent critic of a system to construct alternatives. However, Easterly tries to do so by providing examples of searchers and calls for a new form of development aid based on a “Searcher” mentality, which remains unconvincing to many readers. His understanding of the prototypical Searcher, and the conduct of aid a Searcher’s agenda would facilitate, remains vague.

I found myself asking many questions throughout the reading of the books, especially in respect to the alternatives he proposes. Easterly aspires a foreign aid system out without grand-scale planning, a phenomenon that remains ill defined by him. But how would an aid agency go about this? After all, they operate in the territory of another sovereign country and with the money of donors who want transparency on how that money is being spent. That is the nature of the beast. And because of it, aid agencies cannot simply operate without presenting what it is they exactly want to do in advance, in the form of a plan.

Easterly seems to be aware of the importance of domestic support for aid in donor countries, but not that changes in public opinions about aid can present development practitioners with impossible quandaries. When a public hospital in a rich country is mismanaged, a politician would ask for sweeping and quick reforms, and maybe for some heads to be rolled. Mismanagements in aid programs are all too often followed by calls for the termination of funding for the program. Or worse yet, by a shutting down of foreign aid in general. To be the devil’s advocate - What would be the incentives of development aid practitioners to present the entire factual context of an aid program even if he was entirely genuine and was only concerned about the welfare of his clients, the aid recipients?

While Easterly differentiates to some extent, essentially postulating that in development work one can also find some good apples among many rotten ones, he does present the entire “development industry” as one monolithic bloc. He depicts it as being well intentioned, but also as underlying generally arrogant and accountability-adverse mindset. In his chapter “Invading the Poor” Easterly characterizes military developmental invasions as the scariest manifestations of it, his meshing together of Colonial military and Cold War military inventions with current peacekeeping operations, humanitarian interventions, nation-building and ordinary development work seems to be methodologically incautious, and yet typical for his generalizing tone.

Clearly, a military engagement carries with it much higher risks and moral ramifications than most ordinary development work. Building a primary school in Ghana is morally less contagious than sending peacekeepers into the Sudan, even though perhaps less pressing from a humanitarian vantage point. I also think that peacekeeping operations, even if there are many legitimate reasons to disagree with them in general and about how they have been carried out, happen under different premises than instances of past military meddling in the Cold War, which were fundamentally geo-strategically motivated, and during the era of Colonialism, which served to extract resources and human beings from developing countries. In similar vein, I do not believe that one can simply assume, for example, that the detachment of peacekeeping missions, which are mostly consisting of soldiers from developing countries like Pakistan and India, lightly armed and always sanctioned by the Security Council, in the Congo and the US occupation of Iraq are basically motivated by the same underlying motivations, which the reader is led to believe after reading “Invading the Poor”. The latter suggestion reminds me on an interview of the neo-conservative William Kristol in the German newspaper “Der Tagesspiegel”, who challenged a reporter by asking, “Isn’t the German support of the UN mission to support elections in the Congo neo-conservative?” Despite the many parallels, I do not think one can simply put all military engagements into the same category, at least not without further discourse. The US’s history of support for guerilla groups in Nicaragua and Angola that is described by Easterly in length is just structurally different than, say Norway’s longstanding support for international peacekeeping, even if the latter must engender criticism too. Ignoring the obvious difference that some ill-financed UN missions serve at least some humanitarian interest while other interventions had obviously had chief non-humanitarian underlying rationales despite the rhetoric that legitimated them seems almost like an exercise in “manufacturing consent”.

Easterly quest for common denominators in the West’s relation to “the Rest” can become excessive. From my personal encounters with development workers, I would submit to a characterization of development work as a profession that is innately mired by innate contradictions, dilemmas and trade-offs, caught in its neo-colonial guise, dependent on an international system and elites with little interest in the world’s most vulnerable, and yet of high humanitarian significance. There are certainly also countless examples of development work that is informed by overly naïve and arrogant thinking. But without trying to sound like an apparatchik in the making… I do not think that this pertains to the psychological makeup of a majority of people who partake in development work, as Easterly seems to suggest in some of his blistering indictments. Of course, I have no proof for this insinuation, but neither does Easterly for some of those that he presents.

* Jonas Ecke is a Development Studies graduate student and can be contacted at j_ecke@yahoo.com.