Duncan Green's Blog, page 85

Some governments are stepping up on inequality – new Oxfam global index launched today

I am generally a positive kind of person. It is something Duncan and I have in common.  But I must admit, keeping an optimistic outlook can be quite hard in these dark days.  The seemingly ever-larger gap between rich and poor. The rise of racism, sexism and fascism in the US and Europe. It all casts a long shadow over my twitter feed.

So it was great to find some good news for once in the production of this years’ Commitment to Reducing Inequality index (CRI 2018).  To refresh your memories; this is a joint project between Oxfam and Development Finance International. It measures the policy actions taken by 157 governments in three areas that have been shown to be critical to reducing the gap between rich and poor. These are progressive spending (on education, health and social protection), progressive taxation and labour rights.   These are then combined into one score. It is a massive and complex project, involving thousands of separate data points, much of it from primary data gathered from national authorities.  It must be signed off by over sixty Oxfam offices, which is itself pretty complex….

Behind every score in the index there is a story, and some of these are really positive.  Take South Korea. President Moon, a human rights lawyer and son of refugees from the north, was swept to power on the back of massive protests against corruption and corporate capture of politics. He vowed to tackle the growing gap between rich and poor in South Korea and create a more ‘people-centered economy’.  In the last year he has really made good on his word, hiking the minimum wage by 16.4 percent, increasing taxes on wealthy people and corporations, and boosting social spending, including a universal child support grant.

Indonesia too is beginning to deliver on the promises of President Jokowi to reduce the gap between the richest and the rest.  His government has also increased the minimum wage and ramped up health spending, to help finance the move to a new system of universal health coverage.

Since the CRI2017, a surprising number of countries have been increasing taxes on the richest people, and we have seen big steps up in education and health spending.  Georgia increased spending on education by almost 6 percent in 2017. Ethiopia continues to be one of the biggest spenders on education in the world as a percentage of its budget, showing its commitment to get every child educated.

Of course, it is not all good news. Quite surprisingly, Singapore is now in the bottom 10 countries in the world, despite being among the world’s wealthiest nations. This ranking is, in large part, due in part to a new indicator we have added this year on the extent to which a country’s policies enable corporate tax dodging.  Singapore also has no minimum wage, except for cleaners and security guards.

Nigeria ranks last for the second year in a row due to low social spending, worsening labour rights violations, and poor tax collection. The ranking reflects the well-(or rather, ill-)being of the country’s population: one in 10 children die before their fifth birthday.

China spends more than twice as much of its budget on health than India, and almost four times as much on welfare spending, showing a much greater commitment to tackle the gap between rich and poor.

Denmark tops the Index thanks to a long history of policies that have delivered high and progressive taxation, generous social spending, and some of the best protections for workers in the world. However, recent Danish governments are rolling back many of these policies, especially support for refugees. I was in Copenhagen last week with Oxfam IBIS, and rapidly rising inequality and intolerance is a major concern. Other rich countries are also going rapidly in the wrong direction, notably Donald Trump in the United States with his huge tax cuts for the rich, but also countries as diverse as France and Hungary.  Hungary has slashed its corporation tax from 19% to 9%.

This second edition of the Index improves on the methodology used last year by including new indicators on tax dodging and violence against women and relying on more up-to-date sources of data.  The new indicator on violence against women reveals that despite the significant gains made in recent months by the #MeToo and other women’s rights movements, less than half of countries have adequate laws on sexual harassment and rape.

We are launching the CRI 2018 ahead of the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and IMF this week in Indonesia, to put pressure on finance ministers on whether they are doing enough to tackle the gap between rich and poor.

What the CRI 2018 shows clearly is that inequality is a policy choice, not some inevitable force of nature that renders governments powerless.  Clear and simple steps can be taken to tackle it.  Clear and simple steps that several governments are taking, putting others to shame.  Change is possible, and it is happening.  Now that is something to feel positive about and to fight for.

 

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Links I Liked

Oxfam’s new ‘Make Change Happen’ MOOC (free online course) kicks off next week. Register here.

Fox News TV presenter falls off chair. Colleague pretends nothing happened and goes into next segment. Weird.

Adding formulaic pro-diversity statements to job ads actually reduces the number of applications from minority groups. Other approaches like mentoring and dedicated college recruitment teams, work much better.

The countries with the fastest growing numbers of super rich (net worth of $30m plus). Check out the winner.

2 new podcasts: IDS has started the ‘between the lines’ series. First up is dev legend and all round lovely person, Robert Chambers 

Adaptive Management and how it applies to development and peacebuilding. Me on the new Adapt Peacebuilding podcast (34m).

Somebody have fun with Theresa May’s Dancing Queen routine

If a Banksy painting suddenly shreds itself moments after you’ve bought it at auction for $1.1m, should you get your money back?

‘Dear Young People: Don’t Vote’ Great voter registration exercise – can we do one for UK please?

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Audio round up of FP2P posts for week beginning 1st October (7 minutes)

Greetings from a sleeping Mexico City, where jetlag is the friend of productivity. Here’s my round up of the week’s posts. AMLO takes office on 1st December, not 1st September as I mistakenly say in the intro – maybe jetlag isn’t that great after all….

http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wb-1-Oct.m4a

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Whither Large International Non-Governmental Organisations? Smart new paper.

I’m glad to see Penny Lawrence, an Oxfam big cheese for 12 years before she resigned so publicly last February, has been busy reflecting and talking to other leaders (and me) about how large lumbering INGOs need to change. She has put together a useful paper on the topic (a source of endless fascination to INGOs, maybe not so much to everyone else). Some highlights:

‘Large INGOs have struggled, like many established large bureaucracies, to develop their capabilities, functions and structures to keep pace with rapid changes in the world, including technology, wider social demographic changes, and the greying of sector boundaries. The sands on which the sector was built have shifted. Many across the political spectrum believe that active citizens and charities are needed as much as ever, but that if INGOs cannot adapt to such disruptive change then they will not remain relevant or sustainable, let alone continue to influence in our fast changing world.’

‘A key question to start with is to ask ‘Can large INGOs be all things to all people?’ – are international structures, multi mandates (Humanitarian, Development and campaigning, working across the full value chain from

The INGO Trilemma

programme design to delivery) and being innovative and agile in our digital, challenging world compatible? Is this a trilemma where you have to choose two out of the three?

At the moment large INGOs seem to think it is possible to be all three. Oxfam is one of the most successful multi mandate INGOs struggling to be international – but neither of these lend themselves to being agile. WaterAid is single issue focussed, becoming increasingly international and is definitely more agile. There are plenty of local NGOs that are multi mandate and agile but by definition are not international in their reach or structure.

There may be a sweet spot in the middle for some of large INGOs’ work, but I would hold that there is very little in the sweet spot for any INGO. This trilemma may at least be helpful in identifying some tough questions to enable data to be mined differently to help make some tough choices. Do the gains from being part of an international structure or global family outweigh the challenges? What is the cost of the global family? Is it justifiable to supporters? Are you really the best at women’s rights programming/ humanitarian relief? How do you know? What benchmarks can you use or develop with competitors to find out? What evidence and data are there that you use your global reach to best advantage and to scale what works?’

Penny identifies three ‘structural options’ for large INGOs:

Fragment into ‘smaller, empowered, more independent, more agile, more manageable business units. (Examples include Whitbread, Scope, digital INGOs; Groups such as Dimensions, Coram Group, Virgin Group; PWC franchise model)’
Consolidate: use mergers and acquisitions to ‘acquire the skills or assets needed to respond to change (Examples include IKEA, Sainsbury’s/Asda, Housing Associations, Help the Aged/Age Concern, Cancer charities).’
Unbound: ‘organisations are not bound by traditional organisational boundaries. They provide platforms to enable others to connect, and add value through convening, triaging, or quality control: (Examples include. Wikipedia, Airbnb, We Farm). This is more of a ‘reboot’ or ‘start again’ option.’

She then applies these to the ‘3 pillars’ of large multi mandate INGOs: long term development, humanitarian and advocacy to generate a thought provoking 3×3 matrix, with thought-provoking recommendations for each (green = recommended, red = don’t go there, yellow = meh).

This is interesting. She seems to have tacitly given up on the idea that the 3 functions can be unified (‘getting out of our siloes’) and is arguing that each faces different choices over future directions.

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Dr Pangloss and Mr Ludd: Stefan Dercon revisits Technology and Development

Am I alone? Was I the only one who could not believe it when the World Development Report 2016 said that 85 per cent of jobs in Ethiopia could disappear due to automation? Am I also the only one who sighs when a young entrepreneur claims the app he has invented will “re-imagine health care provision” across in Africa?

I am very confident that there will still be jobs in Ethiopia in the future.  In fact, I am confident there will still be lots of small scale farmers in 30 years. And people working in factories. And women and men working in jobs whose job titles I cannot know yet. I am also confident that development will not happen one app at a time.

Dr Pangloss

In discussions on technology and international development, it

Ned Ludd

appears one has to take sides: we have to be either techno-pessimists or techno-optimists. Nothing in between. Dr Pangloss and Ned Ludd would have been pleased. Of course, they are fictional characters, the straw men of the debate. In recent months, I have been involved, with Benno Ndulu, as academic directors of the Pathways for Prosperity  Commission on Technology for Inclusive Development.  It hopes to turn the conversation towards developing countries conspicuous in their absence in prevailing narratives. Today, we bring out two reports, one on the impact of technology on jobs and livelihoods, and one on digital connectivity in developing countries. We hope we have added some sense, some hope and some realism to the conversation.

I have little time for Mr Ludd: a narrative like the Luddites’, that technology will destroy all, and should be resisted at all costs is not helpful. One of the weaknesses of much of the automation discourse is that it seems to assume that the only place for productivity gains and growth for a developing country must be through entering global manufacturing value chains: no shirts, no jobs. Of course, there is a very strong correlation between countries engaging in manufacturing exports and growth, as well as inclusion, not least from East Asia or Bangladesh. It was an incredibly successful route for job creation and even female empowerment. We argue that this had less to do with the intrinsic magical quality of manufacturing, but it was more about what could be produced remotely, given the state of connectivity. It became easy to send a sewing pattern by fax, but co-designing with remote teams was not possible.

Digital technologies, such as ever-higher-quality communications and remote management with virtual reality or telepresence, will make countries less reliant on simple products for exports: higher quality interactions will become easier over vast distances. They  open up scope for growth strategies that involve more complicated goods and especially services: not just call centres, but integrated design, or accountancy services, and even remote health or personal care. In the report, we identify five emerging tech-based pathways for prosperity, including some with more domestically driven growth engines, that go beyond past successful strategies.

Dr Pangloss may think he should be pleased. All will be for the best in this best of all possible future worlds. Actually, not at all. Just as Vietnam and not Kenya took advantage of global value chain opportunities in the 1990s, we will have early movers and those who lag behind in this next stage of global value chains. What happens locally, in terms of the politics and economics of development, matters a great deal, and will make the difference between further marginalisation and progress. In our report on jobs and livelihoods we give a sense what ought to be done. While global governance will have to be favourable (a topic our Commission will be addressing in the next 12 months), there is real agency for developing country policymakers here, working with business leaders and civil society to try to take advantage.  As discussed in more detail in the report, just as in richer economies, emerging technologies need work on taxation, competition and regulation – and there is scope for help with this by donors and others. There is possible world of progress – but it is by no means certain.

We also cannot take for granted that this world of emerging technology is necessarily inclusive – watch your back Dr Pangloss. One key enabler of these newer economic pathways is digital technology, in particular the internet. As is well known, access is still very unequal.  Simple calculations show us that three billion will not have access to the internet in 2020. They are often poor people, with low education, and women especially. This is not really linked to the lack of big mobile phone networks – 80 per cent even in low income countries live near masts. Instead, devices and data are still really expensive with prices not falling fast, and social norms biased against women and other marginal groups.

Our report on digital technologies articulates a concern that current business models and the nature of government action in most countries will not lead to a route to including these three billion. We will need new business models as well as better government action, including sensible regulation of tax and data. The market alone will not deliver inclusion: a libertarian view of the world as favoured by some in tech will not reach the poorest or unlock opportunities for the marginalised. Tech shouldn’t be scared of governance rules; it should definitely not behave as if the only alternative to a libertarian world of totally free markets, including for data, is a model identified with China in which the state controls all, including the on-off switch. India is interesting here. Despite its enormous potential, there has been a backlash on its digital identity system Aadhar. Recent rulings of the Supreme Court have rightly brought digital technologies where they should be: under the control of the rule of law. All developing countries will have to work out their governance of technologies – finding a local balance that favours innovation but protects citizens and promotes inclusion.  This is the time for government, business and civil society to work together.

Our main advice to policy makers is don’t panic but prepare. There will be jobs in the future, but don’t waste this opportunity, find ways to take advantage, as otherwise others will. Jobs and better lives depend on it.  Neither Dr Pangloss nor Mr Ludd can help here. Time for sensible people to step in.

We will be happy to debate more. Please read both reports and get in touch with us via pathwayscommission@bsg.ox.ac.uk

 

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Which Devspeak horror words topped the poll + some v interesting comment threads

generated such interesting comments that it warrants a follow up.

First up, the people have spoken. After 500 votes, ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘the field’ are the clear joint winners in the hall of devspeak shame, well ahead of ‘impactful’, ‘capacity building’ and ‘learnings’. Take a bow.

Some new categories and distinctions became clearer through the dozens of contributions on the blog and twitter:

Words that both reflect and encourage lazy thinking: Susan Watkins offered ‘communities’, talked about in reverential tones as if they are single, homogenous and devoid of power imbalances, when ‘they are often riven by acrimony, jealousy, and fear of witchcraft.’

To avoid such laziness, Margaret O’Callaghan suggested that ‘the important thing is to stop in your tracks and check for meaningfulness/appropriateness of such terms’, which brings to mind George Orwell’s wonderful 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English language‘:

‘What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally’.

[long paragraphs were apparently less of a problem before social media]

Words that appear neutral, but aren’t: ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are doubtless useful, but who defines them? As Moctar Aboubacar put it ‘the real problem is not the words themselves, but the practices that lie behind them (thinking that training is enough to solve a problem, being lazy about what participation means).’

Words that are potentially useful, but that become devalued and deadened by over- and mis-use, sprinkled into presentations and documents as a signalling device, rather than adding substance: ‘strategic’ (Lis Jackson) or ‘transformative’ (me).

Words that smuggle in bias and paternalism through the back door: Ann Swidler: ‘We need to think twice (or three or four times) if we are going to use “empower” as a transitive verb, as in “I (or we) empower you.” What in the world could that mean? Usually it means “we are going to train you so that somehow you will be different (no evidence this happens), without giving you any material help or doing anything to change larger structural conditions.”’ I would add the self-serving way aid peeps conflate ‘aid’ and ‘development’ – drives me bonkers.

Jargon can play both valuable and annoying roles, either as genuine use of technically specific words to describe particular concepts, objects or processes, or a lot of hot air designed to prove how smart and insiderish the speaker is. One test is ‘can you find a simpler alternative?’ None of the efforts to find an alternative to ‘stakeholder’ worked, but Remi came up with a delightful list from a booming and allied field of jargon – social entrepreneurs and their businesspeak. Here are the ones I understood:

Wins – Success

Learnings – Failure

Impact – It’s Good but you don’t usually invest in it

Ecosystem – Stakeholders

Zero in – Focus

Derisk – Scale up

BoP/Bottom of the Pyramid – Poor people

Sustainable – Breaking even

Pivot – Start again with the same name

C-suite – Overpaid white male execs

Blockchain – Database

Paradigm shift – Change

Deborah Doane came up with a great rule of thumb – would you use this phrase to describe something in your own life, neighbourhood etc? If not, then why use it elsewhere? Her example: ‘My 16 year old son is looking to achieve a ‘sustainable livelihood’ for half-term in Peckham. If any local ‘stakeholders’ have any opportunities for this ‘beneficiary’ please get in touch. It could be ‘transformative’ & even ’empowering’. Hopefully ‘scaleable’ to his friends.’

Just to prove nothing is ever 100% agreed, there were two heroic pushbacks against the winning/losing words. Ivan Tasic was politely baffled by objections to ‘the field’, ‘I use it a lot so it would be helpful to understand the issue. I’ve heard once that “field” is so nineties, but that is not an argument. I am thinking about community or outreach as alternatives but in my head these are only sub-sections of the field. Anyone?’ I have to say I agree a bit with Ivan – not quite sure what the problem is with ‘the field’ unless you think people mean it in the agricultural sense.

Phil Vernon even defended beneficiaries: ‘Odd that it’s paternalistic to identify the people who are intended to accrue improvements to their lives (aka benefits) from an initiative explicitly designed to help people improve their lives. It would be weird not to be able to articulate that surely?’

Finally, Hilary Footitt took us all a bit deeper: ‘It seems to be OK to take an ironic rhetorical distance from this Development vocabulary but then continue the discussion in a solely anglophone context. Can we really decolonize development in English?’

So thanks to everyone who joined in – will any of us use words differently as a result? For my part, I promise to try not to use ‘beneficiaries’ or ‘the field’ – please shout if you spot me lapsing. And to Tom Kirk: ‘my colleagues and I in academia can make them as fast as you ban them’ – bring it on.

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Book Review: Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

oil and gas planners asking a group of people to identify big trends (which often boil down to what they’ve read in the FT/Economist that week) and then processing them into a set of four plausible, but rather unexciting, futures. You then waste ages trying to come up with memorable names for them.

But in Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, Peter Frase injects new life into the exercise by drawing on an encyclopaedic knowledge of sci fi (novels and movies) and political/economic writings (a combo he labels ‘social science fiction’) to come up with a brain-stretching depiction of four possible future worlds.

Frase’s starting point is that waged labour will soon be a thing of the past, due to the job-replacing tidal wave of AI, robotics etc. Get over it and think about what comes next. To help with that, he sets out his two variables to get to the required 2×2: Abundance/Scarcity and Equality/Hierarchy.

Abundance/Scarcity is largely about climate change and other planetary boundaries. Will humanity find tech solutions that stay within our ecological limits, or will some kind of rationing be required (whether by diktat or price)? With Equality/hierarchy he brings in the politics that is often missing from these exercises – what kind of political system will drive the decisions as the species moves into the jobless age?

Here are his four scenarios (with their nicknames) – each gets a chapter:

Drawing on social science fiction, Frase illustrates what life might look like in each. By plugging into our cultural memes, Frase is able to use a discussion of, say, Star Trek v Star Wars to bring alive the different scenarios.

Each quadrant also emphasizes a pressing current issue: ‘communism dwells on the way we construct meaning when life is not centered around wage labour; rentism is largely a reflection on intellectual property; socialism is a story about the climate crisis and our need to adapt to it; exterminism is the story of the militarization of the world.’

The most striking futures are the extremes: communism and exterminism. For communism, he revamps Marx as a ‘stoner philosopher: just do what you feel, man (from each according to his ability), and it’ll all be cool (to each according to his needs).’ Turns out that Marx wasn’t a massive fan of the ‘dignity of manual labour’ – he certainly didn’t do much of it himself. Frase’s version of communism looks for self-fulfilment through action and a life well lived, rather than wages. Abundance and AI severs the link between production and labour – there will be enough for everyone, so we can trouser our universal income and get on with more meaningful stuff.

In rentism, IP becomes the chief vehicle for privatizing abundance – he quotes Richard Freeman: ‘who owns the robots, owns the world.’ The least well written scenario is socialism, which actually looks much more like Scandi-style Social Democracy, using resource pricing to stay within environmental limits in a reasonably egalitarian fashion.

But exterminism is the most striking (and disturbing) thought experiment of the lot. In a world of scarcity and hierarchy: ‘the rich will sit secure in the knowledge that their replicators and robots can provide for their every need. What of the rest of us?… Someone will eventually get the idea that it would be better to rid of [us].’

Frase quotes a 1983 article by Wassily Leontief: Workers could go the way of horses after the introduction of the

Searching for meaning?

internal combustion engine: ‘from the human point of view, keeping all these idle horses would make little sense.’ As a result, the US horse population fell from 21.5 million in 1900 to 3 million in 1960. For ‘horses’ read ‘workers’. He sees possible early signals in the privatization of public space (enclaves for the rich), the spread of private security and extra-judicial killing by drone. Ouch.

Then he goes further:

‘But suppose we stare into that abyss? What’s left when the ‘excess’ bodies have been disposed of and the rich are finally left alone with their robots and their walled compounds? The combat drones and robot executioners could be decommissioned, the apparatus of surveillance gradually dismantled, and the remaining population could evolve past its brutal and dehumanizing war morality and settle into a life of equality and abundance – in other words, into communism. As a descendant of Europeans in the United States, I have an idea of what that might be like. After all, I’m the beneficiary of a genocide.’

Wow. All in all, highly recommended if you fancy a short (150 page) visit to the brain gym.

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Links I Liked

I’m heading to Mexico this week to launch How Change Happens in Spanish (Como Ocurren los Cambios). Will stick up links to events as I get them.

Enjoyed talking to Frank News about what constitutes effective activism.

How to get down steps with style

They’ll be queuing up for this: Rethinking Capitalism – a new elective module for UCL undergraduates

Ireland solidifies its position as the #1 tax haven. US firms book more profits in Ireland than in China, Japan, Germany, France & Mexico combined. Irish tax rate: 5.7%

‘The unprecedented loosening of state control has been accompanied by an upsurge in ethnic violence and widespread lawlessness. Hate speech thrives on social media.’ Thoughtful photo essay on the Ethiopian Spring.

Make Your Research Known – 10 Tools to Increase Consumption of Your Research. Mostly standard stuff, until you get to the cartoon and the evidence card….

Public support for more EU aid has grown significantly in the last two years ht Simon Maxwell

… or Kavanaugh v Samuel L Jackson. Outstanding.

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The week on FP2P – audio summary for people too busy/lazy to read

Hi everyone, here’s my third effort at an audio round up of the week’s blogposts. It’s a bit longer (11m), partly because the week was unusually busy, and partly because of the dawning realization that some of you are seeing this as an alternative to reading the actual posts, so I thought I’d better include a bit more content! Happy listening.

Have a Good Weekend, everyone

Duncan

http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Wb-24-sept.m4a

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Which awful Devspeak words would you most like to ban? Your chance to vote on the Terrible Ten

‘empowerment’ (she’s banned it in Counterpart comms). In the end, we decided that the word had already got enough criticism, but I put out a tweet asking people to nominate other devspeak words we should ban, and my twitter feed was promptly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of gobbledygook (now that is a fine word).

I’ve put some of them together in an A-Z below (OK, there’s no Z), and a poll to identify the absolute worst, but first some overall thoughts:

First, there are clearly some broad categories

Mangling the language of Shakespeare (‘impactful’, ‘capacitating’, ‘learnings’)
Words that arrogant, patronising and/or neo-colonial (‘empowerment’, ‘capacity building’)
Good words used sloppily or badly (eg ‘technical’)
Straight out lies (Cambria Feingold: “empowering”/”participatory”/”demand-driven” when it’s anything but). See also, ‘country ownership’.
Words that are just outdated or wrong (‘The South’; ‘The Field’)
Words that are designed to baffle/make the speaker sound smart (‘Leveraging’, ‘business model’)
Words which are actually phrases, but I let them through anyway (theory of change, but it hurt)
Words that used to mean something, but have had the life sucked out of them by endless repetition and lip service (‘participatory’, ‘transformative’)

Second, as well as specific suggestions, there were some good overall comments:

Deborah Doane: ‘We should always ask ourselves: would I use this phrase in my own life or community? If the answer is no, then cease and desist!’ Good point: would I talk about ‘sustainable livelihoods’ in South London? Probably not…

Elise Legault: ‘Wish we could draw-up a list and create an ‘anti devspeak’ app you could run through any text and it would give you plain language alternatives.’ [any offers?]

Dan Simpson: Don’t ban the words; expose the bullshit artists who are abusing them! Sherry Arnstein’s ‘ladder of citizen participation’ is a genius example.

Adam Pickering: Agree with most of the suggested words to ban but would struggle without some of them – which possibly points to bigger issues. Maybe changing language because it has become synonymous with an inherent power imbalance makes us feel better because it obfuscates an awkward reality?

And for those that want to dig further, Jonathan Fox reminds us of Andrea Cornwall’s classic book all about the problems with devspeak, Deconstructing Development Discourse: Buzzwords and Fuzzwords

Then Carol Ballantine got me thinking when she observed ‘Funny thing about this thread is that, with the exception of resilience, I think it’s the same as when I studied devt 15 yrs ago.’ Is that true? If so, the churn and faddishness of the aid lexicon may have been exaggerated.

OK, here’s the list:

Accountability (when it’s not true)
Beneficiaries
Best practice
Business model (‘what does that even mean?’ asks Sophia Sprechmann – couldn’t agree more)
Capacitating
Capacity building: (Robin Perry: aka ‘how I learned to stop worrying and just fill the empty vessel with training’)
Catalytic
Co-anything (thanks, Nicholas Colloff)
Country ownership
Cross-cutting issues
Cross-fertilisation
Developing countries
Dignity (when you mean “rights”, Kevin Chang)
Dissemination – (‘communication that is one directional’, Caroline Cassidy)
Distributed ledger (Gawain Kripke is always a step ahead)
Empowerment
Enabling Environment
Failure
(in the) Field
Gender based violence (or even worse, GBV, when what we mean is violence against women: Emma Donnelly)
Global South
Good governance
Graduation
Ground-truthed
Growth
Holistic
Hostile Environment Awareness (eh?)
Human capital
Impactful (‘Seriously, it’s not even a word’, Chris Hufstader)
Innovation
International ‘Development’
Learnings
Leveraging (‘Used to make the speaker appear plugged into to ‘private sector’ and high finance, but makes them look an idiot instead.’, Dominic Elson)
Local staff vs international staff
Mainstreaming
On Mission (‘unless you are on Mars’, Ian MacAuslan)
Ownership (‘Especially when this needs a village management committee! Some villages must have 16 committees for water, wells, nutrition, schools, health, protection, etc… ’ Fenke Elskamp)
Participatory
PDIA (you know that’s not a word, right, Annette Fisher?)
The Poor
Pro-poor
Problematize
Projects
Resilience
Scaleable (which my spellcheck interestingly suggestions should be ‘saleable’…..)
Sensitising/sensitisation/sensitise (always done to a usually low income community, usually by people in a land cruiser and always with a large amount in the budget request – sorry, can’t remember who said that).
Stakeholder
Systemic Change
Success
Sustainability/”sustainable” when you mean either “we don’t have a plan for what happens after the project” or “sustainable income stream for my org” (Cambria Feingold)
Technical
Theory of Change (me: Nooooooooo)
Toolkit
Trade-offs
Transformative/Transformation/Transformational Change (‘and all the rest of the over inflated expectations about development aid’, Rick Davies)
Value for Money (Graham Wood: ‘when someone works out what value for money means I would ban that too.’)
Vulnerable populations
Workshop (when you mean a meeting, not car repairs, Kevin Chang)

There is of course a serious point here: proponents of aid and development do their cause no favours by using language that is sloppy, arrogant or just plain dumb.

I’ve picked a top (bottom) 10 from among the worst offenders – you only get 4 votes each, sorry!

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