Rethinking Development

An article published in Cascade, the newsletter of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Summer 2005

Five years ago, as a 20 year old community development organization, Isles was a model of effectiveness.  In Trenton, the nonprofit corporation was building energy efficient homes, training high school dropouts in construction, addressing environmental contamination, promoting financial literacy and savings accounts and helping community groups complete neighborhood plans.  With strong management systems, diverse funding sources, and awards from the White House and United Nations, Isles was on top of its game.

The good news is, that Isles was able to improve upon that reputation, but only after learning what it wasn’t able to accomplish.

In the late 90’s, Isles began rethinking the question: “How do we know we are succeeding?”  With a mission to foster more self-reliant families in healthy, sustainable communities, how would we really know this was happening?  After developing measures for self-reliance (a real challenge), Isles looked to the Healthy Cities movement in Europe and Canada to devise ways to assess neighborhood and city “health”.  When we did that, vexing questions kept arising: even though Isles developed hundreds of homes, nurtured many family self-help successes and millions spent to redevelop Trenton communities, the population of the city kept shrinking.  Working class families continued to flee to the suburbs, leaving behind increasingly concentrated poverty.  In fact, the suburbs around the city were witnessing white flight out to the even further exurbs.

Could we be winning and losing at the same time?  We were successful at the community development game, but our work was growing more difficult as overall neighborhood deterioration worsened.  Once we mapped the regional social and economic forces fueled by sprawl, we were surprised.  It was as if we were making waves at the local level, but the tide was heading out on us.

Not only was our community development work not addressing the core forces of sprawl, but sprawl was undermining the important community work we had accomplished.   And participants in our training were weighing in: 85% of the 300 families that came to us annually to buy a home sought homes outside of Trenton.

Learning to be regional

We pulled together organizations in the area that might help us better understand - and address - these regional challenges.  They brought planning, research, racial justice, environmental and community development interests to the table.  Recognizing the common ground - that sprawl was deteriorating the social and economic life of the region (not just environmental) - we formed a regional coalition.  From the initial focus of central New Jersey, we quickly realized that an effective response had to be statewide. 

The New Jersey Regional Coalition (NJRC) was incorporated in 2003 and is now a statewide nonprofit, coordinating three organizations in the north, central and southern parts of the state.  As Chair of the board of the NJRC, I’ve had to learn how to look at the broader regional issues (property tax reform, regional land use decision making, suburban affordable housing and suburban white flight) in addition to our work on critical issues in the inner cities. 

The future of effective community change may lie in the capacity of organizations to tackle both local, development issues with an eye toward the broad regional forces that weigh in on distressed local communities, such as concentrated poverty. 

To do this, Isles is transforming itself from a CDC to a Regional Development Corporations (RDC).  This requires us to:

• Understand the limits to community development-type projects.  Bootstrap, self-help development projects are important, but they will be undermined if the poverty is too concentrated and other systemic reforms are not achieved.
• Challenge segregation and foster integration.  Racism is a powerful force that drives fear of affordable housing outside the cities, white flight in the suburbs, and countless other ills. 
• De-concentrate poverty as a program and policy goal.
• Build affordable housing in places with the greatest social, educational and economic opportunities within a region.  In New Jersey, these are almost always in suburbs and almost always where low income housing is not welcomed.  This requires a regional analysis to better understand:

•   Regional housing markes, tax base capacities, services, transportation, patterns of segregation, concentrated poverty and their symptoms – crime, poor schools, diminished services and jobs.

• Trends and projections in land use and transportation plans.

• Impact public policy.  Tax, housing, regional governance and other issues are best addressed by statewide policy changes.  It is not enough to be “right” on the issues though.  Average citizens must be educated, organized and able to support courageous public leaders that support regional equity.
• Connect to the suburbs.  Few organizations understand the markets, leaders, politics and development strategies needed to succeed in the suburbs.  Yet it is there where over 70 municipalities are in fiscal distress and at risk.
• Link working families with educational, economic and employment opportunities within a region
• Support lower income families that seek a greater voice and choice in moving to opportunity.
• Build relationships with organizations that use, organizing, advocacy and litigation to advance a regional housing agenda.
• Persevere when resistance comes.  Wealthier municipalities (those most able to absorb some lower income families) will most fiercely oppose building affordable housing.  Thus, a fighting spirit, capacity to challenge local zoning, discrimination, state funding policies and other institutional forms of segregation are important..
• Remain involved in and support inner city revitalization.  For New Jersey to prosper, maintain critical open spaces, public transit and biodiversity, cities must work.  Low income housing is now more needed in the suburbs because the private sector won’t build it and because the political establishment has erected barriers.

From an Article Published in The Daily Princetonian from April, 2006

Exactly 25 years ago this week, I was a Princeton senior in a quandary. Caught up in the ‘‘what to do with my career” dilemma, I watched friends interview and get the “high fives” for each job offer they received. I, too, was offered jobs that paid more than my father ever made. Since my family back home in Ohio had struggled financially for many years, I fantasized about the money.

But I never fantasized about the jobs. The companies that came to campus looking for us seemed predictable, safe and lucrative, but not supportive of the life I wanted to live. Yet it seemed everyone was accepting an offer or going to graduate school.

My friends urged me to take a corporate job, make some money, learn the game and then, perhaps later, try something different. The logic was hard to refute. But a persistent, small voice in my head kept telling me to try to create a career with more meaning, challenge and, well, risk.

Perhaps my experience researching in Northeast Brazil for six months during junior year gave me the confidence to forge my own path. After two months of language and cultural training in the city of Joao Pessoa, I traveled alone to the small, coastal fishing village of Suape, where I studied the impact of a proposed, massive industrial development project on the local community and the environment. I witnessed a nascent group of students, faculty and villagers gather the courage to speak out against the project and the military regime. With an energized sense of purpose, I wrote my anthropology junior paper and senior thesis on it. Jumping in to the theoretical and practical world of development of “poor” communities, I kept asking, “Isn’t there a better way to do it?”

One campus speaker also inspired my career decision. In the spring of senior year, I went to hear the Rev. William Sloane Coffin speak at the Nassau Presbyterian Church. Just when I doubted that small voice in my head, he pushed back, articulating the virtue of courage. Of all the virtues, he implored, this is the most important, for all other virtues require it as a starting point. (When I told him last year that he had a big influence on my decision to start Isles, he looked me in the eye and countered that it was my voice, not his, that won out.) Rev. Coffin’s prophetic voice was silenced this past week, when he died at the age of 81.

Resolved to make a difference, I and a few older students, with the help of two faculty members, decided to start a nonprofit development corporation. As for the money, well, I had been poor coming into Princeton, so it wasn’t a big deal being poor going out. After all, most people just spend what they earn anyway.

Isles, Inc. was incorporated in April 1981. We had a staff of three, a first year budget of $10,000 and lots of energy and ideas. Today, I head up a staff of 45, a $4 million operating budget and an additional $8 million per year in real estate development.

It is a hard but great job, with diverse people and projects that I believe in and want to spend time with. Everyday, I wake up knowing that on the grand, cosmic scale of things, we are weighing in on the right side. And everyday, I am grateful for the risk I took senior year.

But to be honest, I was very close to following, sheep-like, my mates. Deciding to turn down the offers and start a business was a rare decision back then, but (I think) unfortunately, it seems still rare today. But it may be getting better.

According to the Office of Career Services, over 54 percent of last year’s seniors employed by the end of May had taken jobs in financial services and consulting — numbers similar to those in preceding years. The good news is that the number of students choosing the nonprofit sector grew from 11 percent to 15 percent.

With all those crowded economic courses at Princeton, I know most students have learned the risk-return tradeoff: potential return rises with an increase in risk. For the sake of meeting some of the world’s, and their own personal, challenges, I wish more seniors would apply that principle to their first career choices.

Martin Johnson ’81 was an anthropology major and is president and CEO of the nonprofit organization Isles, Inc. He is a trustee of the University and father of Jeremy ’07, Lon ’08 and Colin ’09.

By John Richardson and Mark Hamilton.

John Richardson is Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Professor of International Development at American University in Washington DC. This essay draws from his recent book, Paradise Poisoned: Learning About Conflict, Terrorism and Development from Sri Lanka’s Civil Wars (2005).

Mark Hamilton is a doctoral student of International Relations at American University with development, research, and teaching experience in the United States, Latin America, and South Asia.

Recent global summits have generated a surge of public discussion around the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a multi-pronged, quantifiable blueprint with a host of aims to be achieved by 2015. Among them are goals to alleviate extreme poverty, promote gender equality, battle HIV/AIDS, prioritize environmental sustainability, and cultivate a global development partnership by the target date of 2015. A leverage point largely missing in the MDGs, however, is a nuanced political understanding of the ways in which development policy is linked to democratic process and governance failure to deadly conflict and terrorism around the globe.

There has been a wide gap between what most human beings seek from life and the products of global development interventions during the last 50 years. This gap explains at least some of the roots of protracted deadly conflict in South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond. In the post-9/11 world, the crafting of an early warning system and a prevention strategy for civil conflict demands a fundamental rethinking of what is meant by “successful development.” Policymaking must shift from a focus on the ivory tower economic formulas—favored over the last half-century of development interventions—to a focus on more participative and nuanced political, sociological, and anthropological analysis.

A Legacy of Policy Failure

Most residents of developing and developed countries share common aspirations for material sufficiency, personal security, and communal solidarity. Supposedly, development policies are designed to fulfill such aspirations with strategies and program interventions that improve residents’ standard of living and sense of well-being.

Spanning the globe from Sri Lanka, India, and Iran to Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Cuba, marginalized actors have offered ample insight on some of the reasons that development policies fall short of their promises. Programs fail because politically inflated rhetoric raises expectations beyond that which can be realistically fulfilled. Policies fail because they are rooted in abstract political and economic ideology from across the political spectrum, with performance criteria bearing scant relationship to what people express as their wants and needs. Development programs too often raise and then dash citizen expectations, delivering unsustainable benefits and politicizing already-present stakeholder rifts. A prime example is the case of the far-reaching Sri Lankan “standardization” plan of the 1970s that benefited rural Sinhalese actors at the expense of young Tamil actors. The plan thus set the stage for ongoing political backlash and a bloody separatist conflict. Development policies fail also because political leaders do not heed ominous indications, seek short-term solutions, and refuse to relinquish power.

The disappointment of these policies is manifested in escalating conflict and terrorism around the world. The outbreak of militancy in various forms, including that of fragmented gang violence in urban centers, warns of a failure of government and development policy to listen and to create political and economic opportunity.

Problems in Measuring Development

Development policy goals and performance indicators, constructed by capital city elites and donor-focused technocrats far removed from grassroots political realities, rarely take a holistic view that reflects a population’s socio-economic and cultural diversity. (See the critical work of development scholars Sunil Bastian, Robert Chambers , William Easterly, James Ferguson, David Mosse, and Norman Long for an array of empirical examples.) Policy mechanisms give insufficient voice to constituents’ grievances and alternative conceptions of well-being that place more emphasis on local needs.

Dominant performance measures utilized by the World Bank, the IMF, and Western governments remain based on economic growth indicators like GNP and GDP. However, these measurements are more indicative of their own intellectual and institutional history, drawn from available post-WWII national accounts datasets, than of actual “well-being.” They do not address political dynamics of development interventions (levels of inequality, communal boundaries, and differential access to resources), nor do they offer space for subjective input by a country’s residents.

Even UN Human Development (UNDP) criteria and the aforementioned MDGs are based more on expert judgments on what constitutes “human development” than on the feedback from the citizenry regarding local and regional priorities. This news, of course, is not so new. For years, Robert Chambers, an expert on participatory development, has challenged his peers to consider the underlying power dynamics of institutional interventions and to explore “whose reality counts” in such programs. On a similar note, a recent book by former World Bank economist Bill Easterly contains a scathing critique of aid programs for their legacy of prioritizing planning from afar over searching for unconventional answers on the ground. Participatory appraisal methods (even in rapid forms) add context and local legitimacy to broader policy interventions. It is hardly surprising that imposition from above of imperfect development models with related trade and governance policies can evoke feelings of alienation among supposed beneficiaries.

Bringing in the Subjective

Can “successful development” be defined in a way that takes human well-being into account, while minimizing the shortcomings of more widely used measures? An approach emphasizing subjective well-being seems far more promising than an exclusive focus on GDP or even human development indicators, especially when informed by political considerations of communal friction points along class, ethno-religious, or linguistic boundaries (perhaps even along age or gender rifts). “Successful development” might then be posited as improvements corresponding to the needs and aspirations of a country’s residents and political sub-groups. Success would be measured by feedback from residents about their lives, the circumstances in which they live, and future prospects for themselves and their children. Participatory approaches—balanced, of course, by geo-political realities and the pressing economic constraints faced by so many developing countries—offer concerned policymakers a base upon which to build local ownership and capacity, as well as legitimacy to head off threats of communal deprivation and militancy.

Until recently, subjective and participative tools for assessing development effectiveness were hardly debated, let alone seriously attempted. In the last decade, however, a host of diverse critics have brought to light the shortcomings of “top-down” development. Post-development scholars Arturo Escobar and James Ferguson, scholar-activists Robin Broad and Vandana Shiva, and reformist scholar-practitioners Robert Chambers and David Mosse have all been calling for more people-centered and participative approaches. Their warning to influential leaders is that the objects of development policy ministrations are, in fact, human beings with complex and distinct world views, and that ignoring these world views is a perilous enterprise at best. Far from “pie in the sky,” participative approaches seem to be the only way forward in situations from experience: in Sri Lanka with young members of the Tamil Tigers and Maoist-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front) activists; in Nicaragua with disillusioned Sandinistas, ex-Contra, and young gang insurgents; in Cuba with critics of both “la Revolucion” and the Miami diaspora; and in a host of US urban settings with young people searching for a way up in the world.