Last updated on January 9, 2014
Efforts by wealthy countries to help their poorer counterparts began in earnest after World War II with the Marshall Plan. By the early 1960s, Western powers were busy helping former colonies develop their agricultural and industrial sectors. These plans appeared to work; in the decades that followed, global poverty plummeted. But along the way, economic development morphed into something else: a multi-billion-dollar industry characterized by mission creep. Today, development has come to mean too many things — so many things, in fact, that development has become all things to all people so that by all possible means it might save some, to paraphrase the apostle Paul. The resulting scattershot approach, which dilutes resources, is harming the world’s poor.
That’s from my article (possibly gated; if so, please email me for a copy) in Foreign Affairs earlier this week about how mission creep in international development ultimately does more harm than good. It builds up on and expands a post I published in the fall also titled “Development Bloat.” That post caught the eye of the Foreign Affairs editors, who subsequently asked whether I’d be interested in writing a longer piece.
If I judge by the number of tweets and retweets this has generated, it looks as though there was definitely a certain demand for the thoughts I express in my article.