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Episode 2: Who does international development?
353 Plays1 year ago
I was a teenager in the 1980s and so almost all the images I saw of Africa were through news and Band Aid coverage of the famine in Ethiopia. For me then, international development was what we did for African women and children.
In the 21st century, with the rise of new powers like China and India, and the increasing prominence of investment and markets, the nature of international development has changed. But, in many ways, the way that Africa is imagined has not.
In this podcast I will be speaking with Professor Emma Mawdsley about the power of geographical images, the rise of new agents, and what the future might hold for how international development is done.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Beyond the Map'
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Beyond the Map, a podcast that looks beyond the obvious to understand the hidden geographies that make our world. I am Jo Sharpe, Professor of Geography and Scotland's Geographer Royal.
Renee Bach and Controversial Aid Work
00:00:24
Speaker
In 2007, when she was 19, Renee Bach left rural Virginia for the first time to volunteer to missionary-run orphanage in Jinja, Uganda. This was a transformational experience for her. She wrote on her blog that she loves Africa more than she can put into words and wanted to spend her life feeding the children there. She has said that she was responding to a calling from God that she should return to Jinja to help the African suffering from malnourishment.
00:00:52
Speaker
With the support of funds raised by her Christian community, she established the Serving His Children charity, bought a building and started to offer food for children. By the end of the year, she estimated that she was feeding 1,000 children per week.
00:01:08
Speaker
In her blog written about her experience and to let her supporters back in the US know what she was doing, she claims that her mother brought her very sick child to the Serving His Children Centre because she had heard there was a white doctor there. Bach writes that she could not turn the child away and in her posts describes the different medical procedures that she oversaw, despite having no medical training and not employing a single doctor at that point.
00:01:36
Speaker
In 2011, one-fifth of the 129 children taken in had died. The obvious question, of course, is how could it be that a young American woman with no medical training think that she should be caring for critically ill children in a distant country? Her supporters argue that Bach was simply trying to help out in a place where there was no other help. They argue that it is important that she try to do something in a place of such poverty.
00:02:05
Speaker
But her critics point to the damage her intervention has created. Parents of sick children came to see her, believing that she had medical expertise rather than going to hospitals. Even though there are shortages in hospitals in Uganda, her critics continue, there would at least be trained staff to respond to complications that might arise.
00:02:26
Speaker
We might also reflect upon how easily the image of Bach as a doctor travelled, even if, as she claims, she did not ever call herself a doctor. Locals perceived her as such. Certainly her habit of wearing a white coat and at the very least participating in medical procedures created this sense.
00:02:45
Speaker
But probably more important was that she was a Muzungu, a white woman in a town where numerous
Cultural Narratives and Geographic Biases
00:02:51
Speaker
U.S. missionaries had set up charities and within a global context where Africa is marked as developing or worse, underdeveloped, a homogenized space awaiting the lifesaving interventions of experts from the West.
00:03:04
Speaker
Lawrence Guston, a medical ethicist from Georgetown University, explains that far from being an exceptional case, Bach's attitude is shared by many Americans who work in developing countries. The American cultural narrative is that these countries are basket cases, he says, so that whatever qualifications they do or do not have,
00:03:26
Speaker
they will still feel that they will be of help. So while the case of Renébach is an extreme one, it is by no means unique. Indeed, this is something I have experienced firsthand. When I was in Zambia in 2009, I met a young American who was visiting. He had been sponsored by a US funding organization to teach Zambians farming techniques.
00:03:46
Speaker
but it transpired he had no relevant qualifications. And indeed his one attempt at farming thus far had been unsuccessful because he had believed that peanuts grew on trees and had arranged his farm accordingly. The alternative name for peanuts groundnuts might have been a clue to him here.
00:04:05
Speaker
But this is not a simple case of individual actions or even of individual motivations. It is this structural difference that's most important here, a deep geographical difference that overwhelms the good intentions of individual actors. Prima Kwagala, a Ugandan civil rights attorney who is supporting two women seeking justice for the deaths of their children at the heart of serving his children's centre,
00:04:28
Speaker
argue that those who defend back imagine a different geography. Imagine, they argue, if a young untrained Ugandan woman had gone to the US to set up a charity to provide the same kind of support to help poor American children who were not able to access the expensive health services there. She would have been prosecuted, says Quagala. She would have been behind bars.
00:04:52
Speaker
This of course raises really interesting questions. How is it that this particular geography of difference has emerged and why is it being perpetuated?
Perceptions and Stereotypes in Development
00:05:01
Speaker
I'm joined today by Emma Maudsley. Emma is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge and is Director of the Margaret Ansteady Centre for Global Studies at Newnham College. Emma's research addresses the politics of international development and she has particular expertise in the different actors that are involved in delivering international development.
00:05:21
Speaker
Her books include From Recipients to Donors, Emerging Powers, and The Changing Development Landscape. I started this episode thinking about what seems like quite a bizarre case of a young woman from America, no medical training, ends up in Uganda running a clinic where she more or less starts acting like a doctor.
00:05:47
Speaker
And as the Ugandan activist said at the end, can you imagine this if the roles were reversed and this was a Ugandan doctor in America? So clearly we have a particular imagined geography of the world that means that places aren't the same and that we aren't expected to behave the same way in each place.
00:06:08
Speaker
so that the developing world, the underdeveloped world is seen as literally a different kind of a place to the developed world. This is something that appears to be really quite embedded within our culture. Is it something you've experienced in practice when you've been working
00:06:28
Speaker
in the field? Yes, yeah absolutely. So I've done most of my work in India and I would say that where I've really come across it often is students who have or who want to go out and do good things in
00:06:46
Speaker
interesting places and places that they think are and are exciting and different but you know i think the first thing i'd say is very often and your ugandan example is quite an extreme but very often the impulse is good and we need to recognize it doesn't come out of a
00:07:03
Speaker
what people understand as a bad place or even a patronising place, but unfortunately it is really locked into these ideas because maybe we should ask ourselves the question, would you want your school toilet built by a bunch of Ugandan teenagers?
00:07:20
Speaker
I'm going to guess that the brickwork and the plumbing might not be all they could be. Or would you want a lovely Peruvian come over and teach your kids Spanish when they have no degree in teaching or no training?
00:07:35
Speaker
So I don't want to mock some of that stuff. Some of it is awful, unquestionably, and it can end up in a very bad place. But for many ordinary people, what we have to look at is not the impulse, but why they think the world is like that. And I suppose that's the question you might be about to ask me more about.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. It's not something that's done with any malice. And in fact, in most cases, and indeed the case that I started with, the intentions were good. And the sense that that story provided was, well, they have nothing. So me doing something is better than nothing.
00:08:19
Speaker
But as the as the Ugandan activists pointed out, well, they don't have nothing. These are not people that are just sitting waiting for us to do something. And I think.
00:08:30
Speaker
I think often about my own education about the world, and I was a teenager in the 1980s, and literally the only images I ever saw of Africa were through Band Aid and Live Aid. We were being told these were people waiting for us to do something. And so that sense of where change comes from, I think is really strongly embedded within geography.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, I was also a teenager in the 80s and watching Band-Aid, but of course worse. I grew up with a very old fashioned, lovely mother who got me reading Rajar Kipling and Ryder Haggard and all of these colonially inspired books.
00:09:13
Speaker
And at the time, I mean, I thought nothing of it. And there's no question, actually, Rudyard Kipling is a very fine writer in many ways. But he was peddling mostly some awful caricatures, stereotypes and so on, and which were disempowering, which were brutally violent and how they
00:09:37
Speaker
projected people around the world and also above all our capacity to save them sort of thing. So in many ways what's happening today is the grandchild of that colonial fiction that Britain and other countries were doing good in the world.
00:09:53
Speaker
And, you know, I'm just going to say this Kipling was slightly more complicated in his understanding that is sometimes represented. But that doesn't take away from the fact he was part of a whole colonial enterprise, building the idea that the majority world was inferior.
Emerging Economies and Global Development
00:10:11
Speaker
And one thing that we can trace and as we do in geography is look at how some things have changed. But some of those that sense of inferiority and superiority has evolved. And now it's taken on a much more, perhaps benign version of your gap year teaching English.
00:10:35
Speaker
And there are ways in which you can do that where the school in Hyderabad is empowered to say, OK, you don't have any teaching qualifications, but you'll be good at conversation with our kids. So where the school is leading it out, I think that's great. And you can be in solidarity. But there's an awful lot that we know. And if it's not just school, I've chosen that. But so one of the examples you've asked me for examples is
00:11:02
Speaker
watching overseas diplomats in India.
00:11:08
Speaker
saying to their very important peers using language and body language and verbal language that is eye-poppingly embarrassing me and they seem to be unaware of it. I mean it's not every diplomat all of the time but coming out with incredible statements about us teaching them and you can see some Indian official who has you know
00:11:37
Speaker
He can't believe his ears either and is deciding whether to protest or walk away. So it goes from the full spectrum. You know, it's not just about gap years. This is all the way up to to say geopolitics. Yes. And I think I think because.
00:11:55
Speaker
this form of imagining the world is embedded in Kipling, in the training that is given to diplomats in some of the education that I would like to say happened in the past and some of the images that we saw on the media that it really does become embedded in the way that we think and that we act. And it's interesting you say there has been change and I think
00:12:19
Speaker
we are beginning to see an awareness of this. And I think that one of the key moments was that debate between David Lamy and Stacey Dooley about an image that she'd posted on her Instagram feed of herself holding a black child in Africa. And David Lamy pointing out that this was reinforcing that very same stereotype about who's active, who's kind of mature, and which figure is
00:12:47
Speaker
is requiring assistance. And that broadening into debate around comic relief and the images that that perpetuated. And I think a beginning of change. I mean, there's a bit of a culture war around this at the moment, but it seems there's change.
00:13:03
Speaker
And I think at the heart of this, perhaps, and this is why I was so keen to speak to you for this episode, is that we're beginning to see different actors emerging in international development. So the way that I think about international development as a kind of idea and a practice,
00:13:20
Speaker
it emerged from the development decade in the new post-war era. And I think a real optimism that things were going to be different, that with the end of colonialism, the end of European dominance and a new American century, that there was a possibility for the transfer of ideas, the transfer of technology, and that was going to bring a brave new world of development.
00:13:48
Speaker
a number of academics, including ourselves, I think have become rather skeptical about that. It effectively hasn't changed. There's been all sorts of debates about how we get beyond this.
00:14:01
Speaker
But the story thus far has been very Western. It's been about Europe and America transferring their ideas. But increasingly, there's other agents, other agencies, other countries involved in development. And you've done, I know, a lot of work around the role of China and Africa and particularly India as a development.
00:14:22
Speaker
I guess, conventionally, we think of India as a recipient of development, but that now is changing. Yeah. And it, in fact, has been for a very long time. India was providing assistance of ideas and money and practical assistance in the 1950s. It was giving scholarships to Egypt in the early 1950s. So it's not new, but it has really grown. And of course, the big game changer is China. And China also has a long history, even under Chairman Mao,
00:14:49
Speaker
the 50s and 60s, it was doing remarkable things sometimes in Africa, for example. But it too has grown and it's grown. It's big enough and powerful enough now for the Americans and the West to be sitting up and taking notice. So yeah, it's been fascinating. This is really since the early 2000s. And it's been a game changer for thinking about development. And
00:15:15
Speaker
In some ways, upsetting this idea that development is the transfer from north to south, so whether you're very critical of it or whether you're very supportive, most analyses of global development have been on that axis of north-south.
00:15:32
Speaker
And most, some people have always been more attentive to what's going on, you know, east, west and, you know, in other directions. But now everybody is. And it's been very exciting. And one of the things that southern countries, I'm calling them southern countries, these are very problematic terms. There is no good term really.
00:15:54
Speaker
There's no term that doesn't have some kind of assumptions behind it. Particularly then the big, what were called emerging economies, I've said another problematic term because it sounds a bit patronising.
00:16:10
Speaker
So the China, India, Brazil, South Africa, but lots more. Indonesia, Senegal, Chile, Mexico, they've been doing some fantastic work, as well as being an alternative source of money, of technical know-how, of solidarity.
00:16:30
Speaker
What they say, and to some extent what's true, is that they also bring different ways of doing things and they don't bring that long colonial history. Instead of bringing an old-fashioned, evolved colonial mindset, what they say, they turn up and they say, listen, we know what it's like to be at the wrong end of the colonial relationship.
00:16:51
Speaker
we too have been subjugated, we too have freed ourselves, we too then face a world that is consistently still and fairly organised in the interests of the rich and the powerful, most of whom are located in the north. So we are going to act in solidarity and that's a much, much more attractive message and it's important. So on the one hand there's the message and the attitude
00:17:14
Speaker
And then there's the knowledge. So I spoke to a guy in the Indian Postal Service years ago, and he was great. He was telling me about projects that they were doing in three East African countries, helping them deliver the post in informal settlements, through the monsoon, on unpaved roads. And it's the sort of thing that can signal or whatever's left of our wonderful postal service.
00:17:41
Speaker
really wouldn't be very good at. So the argument was that not only were these countries coming together in a spirit of shared former subjugation, so they could share feelings and not simply kind of rely on, instead of relying on sympathy, they could rely on empathy. But also that they had the practical know-how and increasingly if you're China, you had the money.
00:18:05
Speaker
And that said, there are some questions to ask as well. Yeah. And I think it's I think it's really interesting. Absolutely. There's some questions I need to ask. And, you know, I've worked in in Tanzania and I started working there about 15 years ago and was very keen to learn as much as possible about about the country and read a lot about the the friendship
00:18:29
Speaker
the brotherhood, the supportive relationships at Tanzania's independence under Julius Nureri, the first independence president, and a great sort of friendship with China, partly because of
00:18:48
Speaker
I think a determination by Tanzania, like many countries at the time, of not falling into the Cold War rivalry, not following one side or the other, not following either American capitalism and that model of development or Soviet communism, because neither seemed particularly attractive. And Nurere talked a lot about how patronizing it was that each side thought they could tell his country how to develop.
00:19:17
Speaker
and was much more attracted to the more peasant-based agricultural model that was coming out of China, but also that the Chinese presented themselves very much, as you said, as understanding that process of imperialism, not wanting to replicate it, being part of a southern
00:19:40
Speaker
there really was a language of brotherhood. And there was all sorts of huge investments, even at that point in Tanzania. There was the Tanzan Railway that was to connect Tanzania and Zambia, and was going to transform the geography and the economy of both countries.
00:20:00
Speaker
Initially, when I was in Tanzania, and I suppose it would be about the time you're talking about this all taking off, there was great excitement about this renewed investment by China and the number of roads I saw that were being redeveloped by or built by Chinese companies.
00:20:21
Speaker
or the Chinese government, it was never entirely clear which this was and buildings. But laterally, when I went back, people were much more wary. And I think it's even fair to say there was the emergence of a kind of racism against Chinese people in Tanzania, which I believe is
00:20:38
Speaker
is replicated in other parts of the of the continent yeah yeah and it's it's not new i mean so notwithstanding all of this language of brotherhood and friendship which which is is real i mean i think that that has real purchase um
00:20:54
Speaker
There is still racism on all sides and some of that again is caught up in the colonial project of the way in which, for example, different communities of Indians were inserted into the colonial social system
00:21:10
Speaker
in Africa as small traders or engineers and car mechanics and so
Racism and Strategic Interests in Aid
00:21:15
Speaker
on. And often it was divide and rule. And so there's ongoing consequences. And often, of course, some of the history of in different parts of Africa is extremely violent between African Asians and so on.
00:21:31
Speaker
So so there's a bit of that. And then you have ongoing racist attitudes. So the the first independent president of Senegal, who was a great champion of the Negritude movement, which was to re seize things black as powerful, beautiful, cultured and so on. He very with a little bit of tongue in cheek
00:21:56
Speaker
cheekily suggested that South Indians should join the Negritude movement because at the South Indians, many South Indians are darker than North Indians and North Indians, some North Indians can be quite racist about colour. And he was making a sharp point that racism existed and it didn't always follow, as it were, black-white or black-brown lines.
00:22:23
Speaker
expressed across the world in different ways. And there've been concerns in China, for example, about very racist attitudes towards Africans and lots of lots of work on that. So I don't think we should just say, oh, the Chinese are racist, too. You know, I think we have to be careful of saying that. Of course, there's lots of different there are solidarities, convivialities, people fall in love, people work together, people learn the some brilliant
00:22:52
Speaker
work on that. But at the same time, in some ways, what stays the same is Africa becomes a mirror for people, different countries to reflect their nobleness. So China genuinely was a kind of contesting both the Soviets and the West in post-colonial Africa, recently post-colonial Africa.
00:23:19
Speaker
And its contemporary kind of surge of investment and politicking has lots and lots of rationalities, lots of motives, various, just like the West does in Africa, no different there. And they bring to it some often different people, governments, agents, businesses,
00:23:42
Speaker
it can be inflected with various degrees of racism and it creates it back and you can get, there's been some pretty bad examples of Chinese nationals being attacked in the country. So I don't want to say it's all around us, no one's particularly guilty, no one's particularly innocent because that's just relativising everything away. I think we have to look carefully at where different racist attitudes come from and where different solidarities
00:24:11
Speaker
can arise. But if certainly over time, the early optimism that in the early 2000s, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and others
00:24:24
Speaker
Some of that optimism has been tempered. And I think part of the reason for that is actually it's just difficult to do some of it, you know, and that if you're if you become visible because you're the country building the dam, then you're the country who's displacing people and you're the people who, you know,
00:24:41
Speaker
So lots of what China does say is really, really welcomed. I mean, people want roads, truthfully. Very few people who don't want a road somewhere in the vicinity, even though it brings mixed blessings, to put it mildly. And China's been good at building roads.
00:24:56
Speaker
But it's also built stadiums. It's kept presidents in power. It's turned up and had barrack-like looking buildings full of Chinese labor. So I think some of it is just about being visible. So in the 1960s, John F. Kennedy announced the development decade. We were going to do it in one decade.
00:25:19
Speaker
crazy optimistic. And I think in some ways, perhaps the Chinese felt like they were going to do the same and and both have become bogged down in more complex outcomes. Yes. So the ideas I mean, I still teach a class where I start with words from JFK because it's so easy to become cynical. And yet there was great optimism. And I think you're right that there was there was there's good intentions again,
00:25:48
Speaker
But again, my friends in Tanzania also pointed out the different intentions, the different culture, and the importance of what you've talked about as South-South development cooperation. Does it do things differently beyond just the language? It's the big question. So I think it does. But in some ways,
00:26:14
Speaker
What it's really done, I think, is open up the marketplace of development because it used to be the case that the World Bank and the donor countries like the UK, Norway, Netherlands, USA, they had so much power and so they could enforce an awful lot. So the real cause for some cautious optimism is that, well, what happens if African communities, municipalities, countries,
00:26:43
Speaker
can exercise more choice and can...
Critiques of Capitalism and Traditional Aid
00:26:48
Speaker
Now, this can be done in ways that are very detrimental. You can turn around and evade more democratic decisions by turning to X or Y partner. What we mustn't see, I think, is China as the ruthless extractive partner and the USA as the world-meaning angelic partner. This is absolutely not true.
00:27:13
Speaker
both have their interests. And neither should we just say, well, come on, African governments, you choose well, and it'll all be OK. Because African governments, that burden of responsibility isn't entirely theirs either. We still live in a world that's so unequal, so corporations transferring billions of dollars out of poor countries.
00:27:35
Speaker
through transfer misinvoicing, through tax evasion, you name it. So one of the sort of simple things is to say African governments now have the choice and they can be there more empowered and ultimately that's a much better way of looking at it because it's not saying who's going to rescue Africa, it's Africans who will make those decisions. And
00:27:57
Speaker
I'll go along, that's great, but we also have to recognise that African governments, individuals, planners, political leaders, they can't save their countries either if we live in a world where both Chinese finance and British finance are structured in exploitative, extractive and unequal ways.
00:28:21
Speaker
and actually this is one of the arguments of one of your now sadly late colleagues in St Andrews, Ian Taylor, who argued that the danger is that China is occupying the same place
00:28:37
Speaker
as the US once did or France once did. So I don't want to sit on the fence here. I think the words of brotherhood and solidarity do matter. They mean something. I think the knowledge and the
00:28:52
Speaker
the special the skills that are shared across places can be shared across places like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka can be really important. But I don't think we can be too neither too hypocritical when we criticize what's going wrong, but nor can we be naive about some of the realities of the the context within which these big powerful countries and corporations are are acting.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yes, it's a long answer. No, I think I think it can't be a simple answer. And there's there's so many structural issues as well as kind of the intentions. And I think that's what makes this such an interesting question, but also such a powerful one in terms of where we started in terms of the imagine the imaginary of different parts of the world and how they how they work together. But I think what's kind of what's what's particularly interesting is
00:29:53
Speaker
is that perhaps because in the last 20 years or so, the rise of Chinese investment in Africa is always presented as investment rather than aid, and it is supposed to be about partnerships. You're looking like you're going to disagree with me.
00:30:12
Speaker
No, so I think that one of the confusions was, and this is something Deborah Brottingham has brilliantly looked at, is that sometimes all Chinese investment was treated as if it was aid, and then it was treated like it was bad aid, because it was, in fact, commercial investment. I think when the Chinese do something that isn't straightforward commercial, it falls broadly in what has been called development cooperation.
00:30:39
Speaker
The Chinese do actually talk about aid, but in a slightly different way to say the British. But some countries like India say, no, we don't do aid at all.
00:30:49
Speaker
So it might blur and blend with commercial finance. So it can be fuzzy and that can make it hard to judge sometimes. But it includes concessional elements. It includes deliberate acts of solidarity and generosity and exchange and so on. But it seems that that's changing the debate in the West as well.
00:31:13
Speaker
I keep thinking of a book that came out in 2009, which was hugely influential by the Zambian economist, Ambisa Moyo, called Dead Aid. Don't you mean the PwC? Who did she work for? She's worked for the World Bank. She's worked for
00:31:29
Speaker
I think it was Goldman Sachs. Everyone says she's the Zambian economist, and of course she is, and that gives her a very particularly important voice, but I think the Goldman Sachs Zambian economist is just as important. I was going to come round to that, but you've rather taken the window at my sales.
00:31:44
Speaker
But and also one of the editions of her book had a preface from the historian Niall Ferguson, the great celebrator of Empire, who talked about Dambisa Moyo as the voice of Africa, which I think is deeply problematic. Nevertheless, the point that I was going to make about that book, because I think it's a really however wary I am of of her voice,
00:32:12
Speaker
You know, she she she asks what at that point no one was willing to ask because the end of the 20th century We had the millennium development goals and then the sustainable development goals We had the agreement in the UK across political parties that we would stick to our development commitments to the extent that some people started talking about development as being post political that it was something that we would all just agree was a good thing and
00:32:39
Speaker
I get very, very nervous when someone tells me something is post political. I think just by definition, it's like when someone tells me something is common sense. That sets off all my alarm bells. And so there was a sense that we all kind of knew what we were doing and why we were doing it. And again, it was all done for the right reasons. But she came along and said, we've got to stop with aid.
00:33:06
Speaker
And I think she would still allow for exceptional moments of humanitarian assistance, but she feared that a dependence on aid through these big structures, through the World Bank, through DFID, through government transfers and so forth, was basically
00:33:29
Speaker
anti-democratic for Africans in their own countries because it was now these big agencies setting the agenda. She talked famously about her voice not being able to compete with the guitar by which she meant she couldn't take on Live Aid and Band Aid and someone else called her the anti-bono.
00:33:52
Speaker
that it was increasingly celebrities from the West who were setting the agenda. Who's to say that Bono and Bob Geldof know anything about development? And yet they had become really influential voices in the field. So she was arguing, we've got to stop this. And she really appeared to look to China
00:34:17
Speaker
for the way to do this, which is why I'd kind of started that. And I think as a I don't know whether it's as a result of the debates that were going around about that time, seeing the influence of China, maybe some anxieties around the geopolitical impacts of China being so successful, being welcomed as a partner, being able to effectively use an argument of not being not following a colonial heritage, that it seems that the development from the West is also changing, that the agents
00:34:47
Speaker
the actors within, you know, Aidland are are quite are quite different now from maybe 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And again, this is something you've done quite a lot of work on. Yeah, yeah. Yes. So Don Bichiboyo's book was really interesting and, you know, hats off to her. She writes a lot better than most academics. And there's a reason she was, you know, got a lot more sales than certainly I ever have. So and, you know, and the funny thing is, actually,
00:35:16
Speaker
Of course, she was capturing lots of things that critics of aid said, myself included, and you too. Many of us would agree that there's many problems with aid in terms of dependency and lots of other things. So I found myself reading that book, agreeing with some, not all, but most of her critiques of aid, where I didn't agree was with her solutions.
Aid Dependency and Private Sector Roles
00:35:41
Speaker
And I think, so she in essence was saying, let's let capitalism get on with it. Capitalism as it exists today. This was very neoliberal capitalism. And capitalism, what she argued was, capitalism as it exists everywhere else in the world. Why are we treating Africa as a special case, as a case that needs to be protected?
00:36:02
Speaker
let it flourish the way that this is this is why that her background does matter. It does indeed. So and so and she saw China as being an example of that willingness to innovate, to take risks, to build roads to, you know, she saw China as a potential capitalist champion in many parts of Africa. And I think, you know, that she again, she was she was right that the Chinese firms were willing
00:36:31
Speaker
to take big risks now, partly because they had state backing, but they could do that. I think some of the geopolitics were interesting because this was before the election of President Xi and President Xi has taken a much more, I think, openly competitive and
00:36:47
Speaker
aggressive geopolitical line and has been more than matched by the idiocy of various American presidents and British prime ministers who've been willing to up the ante. So that's part of the geopolitics. So the fact the book came out in 2009 is important.
00:37:03
Speaker
The problem, I think, with Dambisha Moyo's argument, and this is something I am simply repeating, you know, the wonderful, wonderful theorists over the many, many years who have said this, for Latin America, for Asia, for Africa and elsewhere, is that capitalism, and particularly this form of capitalism, is just deeply unfair.
00:37:27
Speaker
It's unfair to ordinary workers in Britain, in Fife and elsewhere, and it's certainly unfair to whole countries that were colonised. And to this day we have economic structures that are not an even playing field. So, for example, the way in which
00:37:46
Speaker
Tax evasion is, if it's not actively sanctioned, it's overlooked. And if it's not overlooked, we just take away all of our kind of ability to do much about it. We cut back on all of those bodies that ought to be trying to ensure that people pay their tax, like certain rock stars that have been mentioned. So, you know,
00:38:12
Speaker
In a country where you depend primarily for copper or oil or the people who get diamonds, some things have been done about this. It's not all black and white, is it? There have been efforts made on blood diamonds and other things.
00:38:31
Speaker
But basically, all around the world, if we just left things to capitalism, well, it's not looking great, is it? Not environmentally, not in terms of equality, not in terms of the sort of quality of life. So we need to think things through differently. And it's bad enough in Cambridge. It's terrible in Malawi. And so that's my problem with Dan Bishop Moyo's argument.
00:38:58
Speaker
is to say that the raw unbridled creative powers of capitalism are going to save and ultimately lead to development is in a context where this is clearly not true. It seems, is it naive or is it self-serving?
00:39:15
Speaker
And yet, that's the direction of travel of AIDLAN, of the kind of key players or the development industry as she talks about it. It's not that the development industry has dissipated. It's just different interests have taken over. And we seem to be moving towards a financialization of development and increasing, I mean, they are
00:39:44
Speaker
Our own government is talking about, increasingly about bringing the private sector into development, whether it's projects or even academic research, we're expected to think about where the private sector might fit in. And this concept of making
00:40:02
Speaker
countries and communities bankable, investable, a term that you've used in your in your research. Yeah, yeah. So I'd like to say I don't think the private sector is necessarily the enemy. You know, I think you can build a brilliant fish canning factory with unionised labour, good jobs, you know, you can build where it can export freely without tariffs into the UK. You know, we could reform the tomato sector
00:40:29
Speaker
in Ghana so that at the moment what's happening is, you know, subsidies are being collapsed for tomato farmers, they are flooding north for work, they're going into Italy, they're working in terrible conditions and Italy is exporting its tomatoes to Ghana in tins. I mean, you couldn't make it up, right? It's terrible. So what we could do is make a much more fair private sector. I'm not against private sector development per se,
00:40:56
Speaker
I'm against the sort of private sector that is being envisaged in a world without labour rights and protection and in which you're inserted, you know, the European Union can put up tariffs against manufactured products or, you know, kind of tins of stuff coming in. So anything with value added. So it's the hypocrisy of the way in which the private sector is being talked about and discussed. But like you said, I mean, all of this has meant that
00:41:26
Speaker
What we used to think of is like who did development? Who was the development industry? It was Oxfam and it was the World Bank and it was Difit and they did development. But it's all changed now. Well, not all changed. That's not wrong. That's not true. So first of all, you've got lots, lots much. You've got Mastercard or the Gates Foundation, a philanthropy capitalist foundation or a company.
00:41:54
Speaker
You've got they have much, much more power in setting development agendas these days and running things. They're not just being they're not just working in partnership with the UN or the World Bank. They're running them. Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but not much. I'm not sure it is because the the most one of the most recent and kind of
00:42:14
Speaker
I would want to say shocking, but maybe I'll say prominent examples, is of the Oxford vaccine production, that their initial ambition was to make it freely available, make the intellectual property, or whatever you call it when you're talking about vaccines, available to also, it could be made in country, it was a cheaper
00:42:39
Speaker
alternative than the RNA viruses. And my understanding is that it was the Gates Foundation that convinced them that they had to use a capitalist model of distribution. And it was the Gates Foundation that basically pressured them into working with AstraZeneca. That's interesting. And of course, it was still produced at a lower price.
00:43:04
Speaker
than others, but it was being distributed essentially. And I know that caused problems in particular parts of Africa where there was anxiety about where drugs were coming from and so forth. And it also meant, of course, that
00:43:20
Speaker
African countries were very far down the pecking order in terms of when supply was getting to them. Not at all. On the one hand, you say, yes, this is philanthropy because Gates Foundation supported a lot of the production distribution, but there was another way of doing it, which, again, it comes back to the structures necessarily rather than the intention. That kind of forced a different model of production than the original intention of the vaccine providers.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I know that the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is a very interesting story and there is much more to it than the headlines show. But fundamentally, as I understand it, Oxford University were trying to drive a much more accessible model. And it partly succeeded, you know, they created a vaccine that didn't need cold storage, for example. And
00:44:10
Speaker
I don't know enough about it. Did you need to have AstraZeneca or a commercial company on board to move it to scale? I'm not quite sure, but I do know that the Gates Foundation has consistently championed, powerfully championed
00:44:26
Speaker
more capitalist and profitable ways of manufacturing and distributing medicine. It's largely, I think some things have changed, been against generics and so on. And it's got a model that has been overly influential in the world of global health.
00:44:42
Speaker
And I think an occupational hazard for you and me is that we sit here and we discuss the world's woes, and it's hard not to be very depressed at the end of a day at work. And there are reasons why that is. But I also think that one of the useful and important things that we should do as teachers and as scholars is
00:45:03
Speaker
say there are alternatives. So we're not trapped in this model. So there's all sorts of ways that we could raise money. We could close down transfer misinvoicing of corporations. We could work much, much harder at tax evasion in our own country and globally.
00:45:21
Speaker
We could make the terms of trade more fair for countries. We could use a Tobin tax on financial exchanges to fund vaccines.
Alternative Development Models
00:45:35
Speaker
We could commit to publicly accessible universal rights to water, sanitation, education and health.
00:45:44
Speaker
And to start off with, you know, in this I don't want to suggest a utopia utopia is a dangerous places. They rapidly get grabbed by somebody. But, you know, there are some of the things we work on is what we could do. And I suppose in my academic career, I'm increasingly thinking it's important not to think of it in utopian terms, but and like lots and lots of geographers and others working around me to look at things that work.
00:46:14
Speaker
to fight and to be involved. There's wonderful academic colleagues all around the UK and beyond who are working on things like affordable housing, different sorts of design, thinking about energy, degrowth, which is a very interesting one. But we're told over and over again by someone, you know, perhaps like Dan Biesenmoyer and many more that the choices
00:46:39
Speaker
you know, kind of unrestrained markets or, you know, the disasters of state led this that or the other. That's not the choice. You know, we do have other options in front of us. Yes, we do. And but I guess my the reason that I interrupted you there earlier, sorry, was that
00:46:58
Speaker
I guess I am anxious about this shift towards the market. You're absolutely right that there's all sorts of possibilities with the kind of ethical investment that you were talking about.
00:47:12
Speaker
but not by JP Morgan. Well, that's the problem. I mean, it's this idea of shifting to, I mean, I guess I kind of held on to the idea that when it's state led, I'm kind of old fashioned thinking that there's, you know, the state should be doing things and can do things that when it was state led, there is more of an opportunity to have particular outcomes privileged and prioritized.
00:47:38
Speaker
workers rights, you know, a right to clean water, gender equality, these sorts of things. But if we're moving towards more of a financial model,
00:47:54
Speaker
as you say, making places bankable, investable, that this is about maybe minimising the risk for investment to bring in the energy that the private sector can bring, that perhaps is missing from development, bringing in the amount of capital that's required to have these kind of transformational economies and societies.
00:48:22
Speaker
What is the incentive for companies to prioritize these things? And if states have failed to do it, what's the chance of the market delivering them? Because they certainly haven't delivered them in my lifetime, in my country. You look like Tim's water.
00:48:46
Speaker
I mean, Thames Water is a financialised company. It is not delivering very much that is good. It's taking a lot of money out and giving it to its shareholders. It's not investing in critical infrastructure and it's pouring sewage into our systems. And it keeps saying, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, we'll do something about it. But it's not. So we're talking about some of my work on financialisation and development.
00:49:09
Speaker
So the development industry is increasingly working. It's not just privatising or working with markets, but the development industry is increasingly trying to court private capital. So we're talking about the development industry trying to get BlackRock, for example, to invest in poor countries and poor places and poor people.
00:49:33
Speaker
And the argument is that what they need is money. They need investment. They need someone to build the canning factory, let's say. Let's return to our fish canning factory. And so now the difference is when the state builds or supports a fish canning factory, which is like Finland did with Nokia.
00:49:53
Speaker
You know, this isn't what we, you know, this is how, as Harjun Chang famously argues, you know, the Western states supported their infant industries until they grew and then flourished. So Finland did massively well out of Nokia. But it was this, it started with state financing. So imagine state financing helps an infant industry, a canning factory, it's nothing overly fancy.
00:50:17
Speaker
but it provides jobs, it provides profits, and those profits could get taxed and they go into the local schooling system and you name it. But when it's a BlackRock or a secret consortium of investment companies, including possibly one that has my pension in its hands,
00:50:35
Speaker
What their interest in that canning factory is not developmental. They might have to meet basic rules, which I have to say are easily evaded. But even if they meet the basic rules, their fundamental goal is to increase shareholder value, is to increase the rent they can extract from it, is to take as much out of it. It's like student housing
00:50:55
Speaker
It's like some of our hospitals and development finances, PFIs, and that's not going to work for developments. That is not a long-term proposition. Sure, you've got a canning factory, but if all your job is to extract the maximum rent from it or to upscale its shareholder value and trade it onto the next investment company, I don't know how anyone can treat that as a good model.
00:51:20
Speaker
So I am worried, you're right, about this new turn to the idea that what's going to rescue the majority world is more finance. And that's what something called the Sustainable Development Goals Finance Gap is all about. So the UN and everyone else is telling us we need to turn the taps on. We need more private finance because
00:51:44
Speaker
You know, foreign aid is only ever going to be a drop in the ocean. So what do we need? We need trillions and trillions from these big financial companies. The problem with that is it's all like turning the tap on in the bath. But if the bath's got a massive hole in it and that hole, his tax evasion, transfer, misinvoicing and corruption and other things, and you're not fixing the hole in the bath,
00:52:08
Speaker
you know, pouring in more isn't going to happen. And to be honest, it's not even actually all of these big companies that the amount of private finance that's come in to invest in development in poorer parts of the world isn't actually happening very much because the private companies are looking and they're saying, no, this is too risky. So the model is broken at different choke points.
00:52:34
Speaker
And I would much rather us, as a world, patch up the bath. And what's exciting about this idea is that this matters for a British citizen as much as it matters for a Zambian citizen. So your ordinary British citizen at the moment is being cheated.
00:52:55
Speaker
by the massive outflow of what should be paid as tax. We know about these companies who pay, for example, nothing in tax. I suppose I'd better not name them, but we know who they are. What's exciting about this idea, and it comes right back to this idea of development imaginaries and solidarity and who
00:53:17
Speaker
who cares for who and who thinks who needs helping and saving is I love the idea that some of the solutions for the Zambians are some of the same solutions for the British and we'd all have more public goods and the opportunity for well-being in a world where we weren't so unequal and that inequality wasn't being rewarded
00:53:41
Speaker
by a development industry that's actually trying to accelerate that inequality through financial instruments rather than slow it down. What a brilliant place to stop.