I am spending the weekend in Ottawa, where I am presenting my paper with Tara Steinmetz on female genital cutting at the 2013 Research in Economic Development (RECODE) conference.
For me, this means that two mutually exclusive worlds will collide. I spent the 1998 and 1999 summers in Ottawa working for a Cabinet minister, and development economics is what I have been doing since I began my Masters in the fall of 1999 and found something I liked even more than Canadian politics.
The conference program is here, and I am especially looking forward to Michael Clemens‘ keynote during the Friday night reception at the Museum of Civilization.
Development Bloat
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: