I’ve been reading a variety of treatises about proposed frameworks of understanding international development - the standard, virtually canonical literature such as Collier, Easterly, Krugman etc.
I’ve also examined the primary texts of the Millenium Development Goals and corollary literature, as well as the standard charter documentation of the World Bank Group and others.
What they, and scores of other institutions and organizations have in common is a pursuit of an abstract model for understanding the problem such that they can simulate it and thus test solutions which can then be applied to reality. The assumption, unproblematically accepted, is that an accurate simulation and abstraction means the reality is understood.
Often the solution predicates the model; such as the Marshall Plan becoming, however transiently, the model for international development amongst the western world.
There is a profound problem with this as any engineering student can tell you - abstractions don’t problems, and solutions built into unreliable or erroneous simulacrum are problematic, ineffective and often damaging. They build the scale models out of chip-wood and card-board, they construct the buildings out of concrete and steel, there is both a quantitative and qualitative shift.
International development is a combination design and engineering problem - both in the literal sense of technological innovation, but also in the philosophical sense of developing solutions and identifying principles of applicability.
Plain example, few people would dispute the utility of the hammer as a tool, and thus as a solution. It’s often seen as an indispensable tool for anyone who works in construction and thus should be taken nearly everywhere.
However, availability and implementation are often indistinguishable when it comes to solutions in international development. That is, it’s very costly to have a variety of solutions readily deploy-able within a nation and thus one must be judicious in selection in light of tightly limited resources. These resources, notably, are getting tighter in the contemporary economic climate.
So solutions, such as micro-credit, which thanks to Yunus and the Grameen bank have been a boon to legion Bangladeshis, must be seen as a hammer - a single isolate solution in a specific context.
A hammer, one can easily forget, is a extremely contextualized solution - it requires a nail, material amenable to nailing and stresses on the material amenable to nailing - the fixture of materials is the solution, just as providing means for entrepreneurship is the solution, not the credit itself.
That’s why micro-credit finds itself stalling elsewhere, such as Uganda or Sierra Leone. These places lack the population densities and the social norms expected of the model - the nails, materials and stresses.
On the one hand, international development practitioners, NGOs, CSAs, IGOs etc., develop contextualized solutions which frequently fail utterly to replicate outside the narrow conditions of the original. On the other hand, international development scholars identify global trends that frame the issue of international development is a unified homogeneous gestalt - which if taken as describe is beyond the capacity of a dedicated fraction of humanity to abate, let alone solve. As the Millennium Development Goals would indicate.
International development is plainly an engineering and design problem - more literally than figuratively. Amy Smith and her D-Lab’s solution for charcoal fires in Haiti, for example, demonstrates the kind of impact a combination of insight, education and technology can render on a community and then a nation. Solutions like the Solvatten, and yes micro-credit are profoundly important.
The issue is, there is little in the way of a catalogue, of problems and solutions. There’s no easy way for a agriculture engineer to look for descriptions of problems sorted say, by number of people affected with contact information of a stakeholder and immediately get to work developing a solution or to contact people who are already working on a solution to see how they can contribute.
Further, there’s no simple way for an aid worker with a particular problem to find a catalogue of solutions with descriptions of existing implementations and specifications for requirements. What education is needed? What are the pitfalls of this strategy? How long has it actually taken and what were the estimes? What was the scope and scale of deployment?
Such domains for problem and solution interchange, discovery and synthesis are sin qua non in software engineering, it is the primary and most salient virtue of open source development.
The average person cares little whom solves the problem and care tremendously more about whether the problem is solve and whether the solution is sustainable.
Programs such as Cameron Sinclair’s Open Architecture Network and Amy Smith’s courses at MIT are good starts. We need more and these meta-innovators need to form an integrated community themselves to share knowledge - and on it goes.
The issue isn’t that the information is hidden, it’s that it’s disorganized and massive. The amount of open Academic literature available is paltry, and what is accessible and recoverable is largely out of date. Most of the cutting-edge material is still controlled by proprietary academic publishing houses - keeping it out of the hands of African and South-East Asian academic institutions (among others). While open scholarship will go a long way to get the information to the people with the circumstance and motivation to act on it, I think simply churning out literature is insufficient since it doesn’t address the underlying issue of quickly identifying and resolving problems in a highly contextualized fashion, while keeping the “customization costs” near zero.
What exactly the tools would be and what form they would take elude me - but I think it’s an important question and I think part of the answer lies in the open source movement and the tools (both technological and social) it has developed to handle the informational and labour scope, complexity, diversity and atomicity.