Development Bloat

Last updated on September 15, 2013

I can’t even have a road built without including a nutrition component as part of the project. A nutrition component–as part of a road construction project!

That’s how a former student who works for one of the biggest development organizations in the world expressed his frustrations with development and aid work these days when I had dinner with him in Washington, DC last summer. In my student’s view, “development” had become too many things.

I was initially skeptical of his claim. After all, one of the first things I teach the students in my development seminar is that there are no silver bullets; the causes of underdevelopment are many, and tackling just one problem is unlikely to lift an entire country out of poverty.

But the more I think about it, the more I remember often having had a “That is development?” reaction when reading articles about development in academic journals, specialized magazines, and newspapers. For example, here is a list of things that are considered by many to be part of the process of development:

• Poverty and hunger
• Universal primary education
• Gender equality and women’s empowerment
• Reducing child mortality
• Improving maternal health
• Combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
• Environmental sustainability
• Establishing a global partnership for development

Sounds familiar? It should: Those are, in order, the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have been a fixture in my world ever since I began working in development in 2001.

The bullet points above constitute quite the laundry list, but things get worse when you start looking at some of the sub-goals among the MDGs. A sub-goal of goal 7 on environmental sustainability, for example, is to reduce biodiversity loss.

Those are all laudable goals, but is environmental sustainability (to take an egregious example) really part of the process of development? Let’s take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for a second:

Looking at the pyramid, a case can be made for many of the MDGs. My own research, for example, is concerned with one of the most basic needs (i.e., food) by virtue of being generally concerned with food security.

But environmental sustainability? Establishing a global development partnership? Should that really be development? I am not saying that policy makers should not be making a push for sustainability, or that researchers should not be looking for more sustainable policies and practices. Some of my best friends are environmental economists, and I totally understand why they are working on the topic.

But to lump that — and global partnerships — into what we mean by “development” for a practice of development that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Besides, the way I see it, sustainability is a normal good: the demand for it is increasing in income, and you need to be fairly wealthy for environmental sustainability to be one of those things you demand. Another, more concise and snarkier way of putting it, is this: #firstworldproblems.

Instead, the practice of development should perhaps be narrower and deeper. It need not be an inch wide and a mile deep, but focusing on increasing incomes would be a good start, since many of the development goals (better nutrition included) are byproducts of higher incomes.

I realize that some of this development mission creep — as per Wikipedia, the “expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals” — is the result of the political economy of the development-and-aid ecosystem. An NGO working on environmental sustainability, for example, might want to get more funds for its projects. Seeing that there is money to be had from development agencies, it might start making the case that environmental sustainability is a development issue.

If this happens with enough peripheral issues, development bloat can ensue, much like university bloat happens when administrators get it in their heads to fund their pet projects (see here for an example). I just don’t know how one would go about tackling these political economy issues; just making sure the trains run on time is not terribly attractive for bureaucrats working in development, in universities, or anywhere else for that matter. In the meantime, I suspect development will keep on being too many things to too many people.