Why you cant eat rule of law but can listen and organize A - - PDF document

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Why you can’t eat rule of law… but can listen and organize A reflection on the practice of international development work

CAIDP meeting, Ottawa, 22 January, 2018 Rakesh Rajani1 When we get to peek or eavesdrop into the lives of others, we often get our thrills from stuff that is different, or unusual, or fantastic, or exotic. Perhaps that is why the internet and social media are replete with photos and videos of humans and animals performing impossible feats, of floods and tsunamis and blizzards causing havoc, and so on. If you are of a different generation and not much into social media, these thrills may come from old fashioned novels and travel writing and documentaries on

• TV. One of the reasons this is interesting and fine and safe is because we are mere spectators, with the

privilege to observe but no obligation to participate – other than in token ways perhaps – and sound in the knowledge that we can count on what we know and who we are, and that the rules and circumstances that apply to us are the ones we know; that once the show or tour is over we can go back to our jobs, our homes, our families, to our familiar lives. The calculation changes somewhat when we are responsible for the lives of others, when we need to do things that are meant to help make a difference in other people’s lives and communities, such as when you work for government or an NGO or perhaps are a Canadian international development professional. If we are concerned and sincere, this can be feel incredibly daunting, because we are not just spectators but participants, with the responsibility and perhaps accountability for assessing options, validating and invalidating ideas, allocating resources and making other such consequential choices. Here the unfamiliar can feel disconcerting. So we search for patterns that are familiar, that which can explain things, that can turn uncertainty into recognizable tropes. Then, when we plan or approve plans, we similarly seek to establish those neat and tidy explanatory patterns. This is what the anthropologist Jim Scott has memorably called Seeing Like a State. In some cases, we construct that familiarity by matching it with our lives – such as we design schools like the ones we went to or our children did, with rubrics for things like lesson plans and teacher: student ratios and classroom construction standards – or design legal systems with laws and courts and judges and lawyers that mimic the ones that have served us well. We call it best practice. In other cases, we recognize that worlds are different – that Tanzania is not Canada, or that Bolivia is not Indonesia – and make sense of it by creating a model of difference –still with a coherent explanation of how they do things. So, for instance, Pakistan and Nepal and Zambia are patriarchal societies, the men are in charge and want to marry their daughters early, and that is why they do not see the point of educating them, and that is why we need both laws and public education on the value of educating girls. Or it can take a more benign form – those forest communities in Brazil or Nigeria, unlike us, are not as materialistic and much more closely connected to the earth, they protect their forests and live sustainable lives, and our job is to empower and protect them against the forces that threaten this way

• f life, such as multinational companies with names like Barrick and Shell, or their own dictatorial

governments led by people with names like Mugabe and Musharraf and Uribe.

1 Rakesh Rajani is the Director of Civic Engagement and Government at the Ford Foundation. These remarks do not necessarily

reflect the views of the foundation.

2 These narratives are compelling precisely because they have a lot of truth to them – the patterns are borne out by evidence, discrimination and exploitation are real and lived, the solutions have clear logic and clear merit. And they are doubly compelling when we can discern positive intention – such as through the stories in the Globe and Mail or Nick Kristof’s columns in the New York Times or the missionary or street children NGO newsletter in my inbox that provide moving accounts of lives lived in the service of others. As easy it may be for academics or smug critics to dismiss these lives as naïve or neo-colonial, I have found that most people tire of cynicism, and in fact find lives spent in commitment to a public purpose to be attractive and inspiring. These same features may also make international development particularly fraught. It is easy to see through blatant lies, unfeigned bigotry or ill motive. It is much harder when we are more than half right and generally well meaning. But I digress; more on this later. Looking back at my own engagement, and putting aside small-scale service delivery and community development projects for now, I see two main, familiar tropes of international development:

• In one, the government is the problem and is failing to serve its people. These regimes may be

military dictatorships or autocracies run by ethnic or moneyed or otherwise captured elites, but in either case they are illegitimate in the eyes of the majority. Here the work of the international development community is to empower civil society organizations to put pressure on the government and hold it in check, by doing such activities as monitoring government abuse, publicizing its failings in relation to its commitments, and to put pressure on governments to subscribe to a template of “good government” – such as rule of law, free and fair elections, free press and so forth. In short, the driver of change is civil society and external pressure. An example of the archetypal organization of this sort of work is Amnesty International or the local community watchdog, such as HakiElimu in Tanzania where I worked from 2000 to 2007.

• In the other, the primary driver of change, while often fraught, is the democratically elected

government who has signed on to global agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals and made national plans to make education universal and reduce infant or maternal mortality rate and promote good governance. Here the international development community seeks to support the government to bring about policy reforms, design and implement good development programs and projects, and make budgets both better targeted for development and more transparent. This vision for sure includes space for civil society and for things such as freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, but one is prepared to be patient and make compromises and turn a blind eye to some repression, as long as it’s not too brutal, in order to not burn bridges with the government. And since governments are not monolithic, and individuals vary in their progressivity, one seeks to identify and work especially closely with the reformers or liberal champions in government. The archetypal organization that does this is DFID and probably Canadian CIDA as well. In practice, of course, international development is the combination of some forms of these two tropes. In both tropes, however, the core model is the same, and familiar. One seeks to establish or reinforce a social compact between the state and citizens, marked by constitutional order, rule of law, liberal values and core ideals of the sort one can find in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are healthy debates, such as whether the driver of change inside or outside government, or in the best circumstances how the two can come together such as in the Open Government Partnership, a remarkable effort involving 75 governments and over two thousand civil society groups that Canada will

3 soon chair. And there are debates about what’s the right balance between investments in social and infrastructural development (clinics, roads) and governance reforms (free elections, free press, free trade), and how the two can reinforce each other. But in all these variations the general scaffolding is the same, that of a liberal, democratic order where people chose their government and the government served the people. Importantly, even where there were contradictions or what some may call hypocrisy, such as when pesky protestors were locked up to make way for business or LGBTQ communities were stigmatized and harangued, those were tolerated by the mainstream international development community, seen as the price to pay for the greater good in the direction of the liberal order. Rarely, in my observation, did these chinks in the scaffolding be taken as teachable signs, not for armchair condemnations as aberrations, but as canaries in the goldmine, as opportunities for deeper reflection and learning about how treacherous it is to reconcile histories, interests, analyses, and visions, of how old habits persist and new ones struggle to take hold. Instead, in my observation, in the last two to three decades, we have stayed calm and carried on, aspiring to get our work to best approximate the familiar tropes in our mind, seeing patterns of similarity where we could, aided and abated by a plethora of indices that measured the progress of countries in relation to the template. To be clear, I do not at all mean to suggest that we are naïve or blind to the challenges of realizing development – every development worker worth her salt knows how hard it is for research to inform policy, for policy to be implemented, for legal reforms to translate into real accountability. What I mean is that the template of development of an idealized liberal social compact between the governors and governed has remained largely intact… until perhaps around now. In the last few years, some astonishing events have taken place that make it increasingly untenable to stay calm and carry on with our familiar template for international development. One illuminating way to make sense of this phenomenon is to look at events in the founding countries of the OGP. With the ferment of the Arab Spring as the backdrop, the OGP’s founding was predicated on the idea of the leading, one might say inspiring, democratic governments of the world, from both traditional Western leaders and newly emerging giants in the global south, working together with civil society to promote a different ideal of government, as partners, to restore and re-energize the social compact. The partnership was convened by President Obama, and initially involved the governments of Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, UK, Norway, and South Africa. These countries were carefully selected, using global indicators of openness and an astute political metric, with the understanding that they would serve as models of democratic, participatory government at home and in their engagement in the

• world. I was a witness and participant to this process, and as fraught as they were, can attest that some

truly important progress was made, such as establishing Brazil’s first freedom of information law, strengthening budget transparency in the Philippines, and getting the US to open-up over 200,000 public datasets and the UK to commit to reporting beneficial ownership so that corruption could be curtailed. So, then, how are to make sense of the fact that President Obama was replaced by Donald Trump? That President Rousseff was hounded out of office through a palace coup of sorts and lost a huge amount of public support? That India has elected a leader whose roots and supporters in the RSS openly celebrate bigotry and misogyny? That the progressive government in the Philippines was voted out of office and replaced by a man who prides himself for ignoring the rule of law and shooting suspects first? In my own country Tanzania, an early member of the OGP, in the past two years under President Magufuli, an unprecedented number of newspapers have been closed and journalists gone missing; opposition

4 politicians are often thwarted from holding rallies, frequently locked and at times short; etc., etc., etc., you get the story. We do not know how to deal with this trope. We know what to do with regimes that force themselves into power without popular legitimacy, and we know what to do with freely elected progressive regimes that are keen to expand democratic reforms. But the popularly elected authoritarian regime, where neither the majority of voters nor the people in power are interested in promoting the liberal democratic order is a real problem. It’s a problem because these authoritarian leaders are often so offensive in their word and their deed. But it is an even more troubling problem because the people who showed up at the polls voted them in. True, some have waned in their popularity today, but many others such as Modi and Magufuli and Duterte would likely be re-elected if there was an election tomorrow. After recent polls, two men who were indicted by the International Criminal Court are ruling Kenya. Uganda has, in effect, a popular life

• president. And, despite everything, the US Congress just voted in hugely regressive tax law that will

deeply exacerbate inequality and hurt the poor, including likely kicking out millions from accessing health care. How do we make sense of these phenomena? Our first impulse, holding on to our familiar trope of the liberal democratic order, is to suggest that the state has been captured or hijacked, or that the people are fooled. If only money did not play such a big corrupting part in politics, or if only we could avoid the lies and misinformation perpetrated by the Russians or Breitbart, people would know better, and not vote against their own interests. So, we rush to shore up public media, and electoral systems, and call out for greater civic education. And in international development, we push for rule of law, and transparency and accountability, and the freedom of association, assembly, voice. All these are undoubtedly important, necessary even. I believe in them, and at the Ford Foundation we continue to invest heavily in these areas. But I wonder whether, in seeking to find patterns that are familiar and resonate with our world views, in seeking to explain scary events, that we fail to be curious about what else is going on, that may, possibly, shed more insight than the truth that we know. I do not have a coherent, all-put-together alternate account of what is going on, and tend to be somewhat skeptical of confident, comprehensive explanations. I urge you to be similarly skeptical, because all fundamentalisms, probably even liberal ones, are prone to unhelpful over-simplification, and worse of all, patronizing. So then, what? I want to leave you with two ideas of what those of us who care about democracy development at home and globally could do. These are tentative suggestions, based on personal reflections, and I welcome your critique and reactions. First, the hypothesis that people do not care much for liberal democratic institutions and processes, whether in the US or Tanzania or much of the world, perhaps Canada too, is increasingly compelling. The

5 question is why? My hunch is that it has less to do with the fact that people on whole disagree with these values, and more with the fact their experience of things associated with that order, such as the effects of globalization on jobs and job security, the unrealized promise of education, and safety and justice have failed to deliver or have made things worse. These are empirical and deeply personal phenomenon; globalization has helped me land in New York City with a handsomely paid job with status; but not so for most Tanzanians my age; should my white mother in law hear something suspicious she will take comfort in calling the police, not so for my young black friends in New York nor Dar es Salaam; I get to argue points and seek promotions at work, and travel widely and enjoy walking in global metros and speak at conferences, and enjoy a drink at the pub, all in ways that are way more fraught for many of my women colleagues. These examples have a symmetry and moral clarity to them; easier to navigate for when we want to be open to seeing through our blind spots, and want to be truly fair and respectful. The more difficult ones are where there is no such clarity, where the differences are debatable, or ones where the other person has a view that I find abhorrent, and how hard it is then not to, perhaps justifiably, but self-righteously write off the person in a manner that is ultimately uncurious and unproductive. The remedy is simple. To listen. Better. Genuinely. With attention. And empathy. To seek understanding rather than to provide explanation. As I have gotten older and more secure in my station in international development, I find that these traits are much rarer. As I think of my professional relationships, now and before, at work, on boards, with community members, with politicians and activists, and frankly those of my peers, they could hardly be characterized as models of intent listening. The systematized form of listening in international development is of course research. But too often research becomes a rite, a performance that validates what we know, providing numbers and quotes to fill out the outlines of our models, rather than a truly curious exercise of discovery, that takes delight in what is surprising and that messes up our templates, even where this is comfortable. Doing research with integrity and using it to inform how we think and what we do is hugely consequential, sometimes literally a matter of life and death. Ruth Levine, who leads the global development program at the Hewlett Foundation, has a wonderful talk about the moral case for research and evidence; I urge you to listen to it. There are some terrific practical examples out there; such as my former organization Twaweza’s Sauti ya Wananchi mobile phone surveys in East Africa or the work done by the Listen for Good initiative. Second, throughout my entire talk, I have posited the challenge as how do we “international development people” can help make a meaningful different in the lives of “other people”. At one level this is totally fine; after all I am an international development professional working for a major global foundation speaking to an association of international development professionals – we all seek to help make change happen in the world. At another level, it’s a total ruse, because we know that lasting change comes not through projects and programs (of the sort that many of us advise and fund) but from collective, political action by people affected by how things are, banding together with allies and not-so- allies to form coalitions and movements for change. That organizing and movements– whether they pummel or compel governments – are true drivers of change has been a core belief of mine for a long time. But here is the twist. Recent research (by people like Hahrie Han and Theda Skocpol for instance) suggests that our intuition – that people are driven by views or positions, that they come together because they care about something such as abortion or the environment or road safety, and then pursue it collectively, may not be true. It turns out that the relationship may work in the other direction, that people come together first, because of some historical

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• r accidental connection – I moved to your area and joined your book group or church; or we connected

because we all went to the same school or speak Portuguese or were born to expat parents; or we get together in the video halls because we are fans of Liverpool Football Club. Once there and together we form views, those views become collective and strongly held, brushing out nuance and doubt, and then we decide to do something about it, like march or vote or send money to a cause or paint graffiti on a mosque… and in the course of doing so we construct views of both ourselves and the other, and explanations of whether the other are capable or weak, friends or foe, and how their lot is connected with our lot. And most importantly, we muster the courage and organization needed to turn affiliation into action. This probably does not mean funding more NGOs. In thinking about how we foster associational life, it may be helpful to remind ourselves of how international development, and perhaps particularly human rights mechanisms, have remained elite institutions, disconnected from most of the public. In reflecting

• n the work of Wictor Osiatynski, Chris Stone, the former President of OSF, notes:

As Wiktor explained it, “The idea of rights has seldom served the poor, destitute, dispossessed, and oppressed. Such people usually do not claim rights. Instead they ask for mercy, expect charity, and seek benefits from benevolent masters …. [R]ights have usually been claimed by those strong enough to demand them.” Wiktor did not need Brexit, the Trump election, or the refugee crisis to understand how globalization had opened-up a schism between human rights and people whose poverty seemed invisible to the masters of globalization. “The challenge for every advocate of democracy and human rights lies in restoring a sense of inclusion, dignity and self-respect to the millions of people who are considered ‘useless’ today.” How do we respond to the challenge that Osiatynski raises? My contention is that you do that, that people have done that, through support for organizing, for collective action. This is about small p, and at times big P, politics. Consider, for instance, the antecedents of the truly consequential moments in international development, such as banning slavery, the anti-colonial struggle, the fight against apartheid, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the LGBTQ movement, and the women’s movement, including its recent manifestations of the Women’s March and #MeToo. Why these are not thought of as the bright stars of international development, and why we understand so little of what animated them and what it took to make them happen, ought to give us pause. The question then, as we grapple with these large questions, is how do the things we know and do, our familiar templates, stack up in terms of enabling collective action? How does that effort contribute to rebuild trust in the power of civic action and in the promise of government for the public good? If we let ourselves be woke to it, ours is a terrifying, unfamiliar moment. Seeking to establish well- meaning templates of the rule of law while relying on Western pressure is a diminished currency, disconcerting, but probably for the better. Listening and supporting organizing are unfamiliar keys we can work with; hopefully, combined with a great deal of humility and moral imagination, they can help set us on the right path. It’s a much harder and contentious path. But it has the promise of greater

• wnership and sustainability, because its method requires it to be wrought through struggle and

adaptation, by authors writing their own stories, not us. Thank you for listening.