The development community can no longer “stick its head in the sand” when it comes to tackling the political, economic and social issues that lie at the roots of fundamentalism, conflict and inequality, the head of a leading research centre has warned.
Melissa Leach, director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), said the proliferation of crises – from Iraq and Syria to South Sudan and the Ebola outbreak – underlined the need for a more concerted, committed and holistic response from government departments, NGOs and academics.
“Development is about progressive social and economic change; development is fundamentally about how we deal with conflict and corruption; how we generate viable political settlements; how we organise our global financial architectures, and how we live lightly on a constrained planet,” she said.
“Development is about helping people who are poor – but it has to be about more than that if we’re not just going to be putting sticking plasters on.”
For a long time, said Leach, development organisations had focused on their own individual areas without taking into account their wider responsibilities. While the current emergencies showed the critical need for an emergency humanitarian response and those tackling poverty and improving resilience, she said, development had to go “much further than that”.
If the development community was serious about dealing with the issues at the centre of events in Iraq, Syria and west Africa, said Leach, it needed to become more involved with other, non-development players.
“[It] requires a more joined-up approach to policy and government,” she added. “[It] requires actors who would define their roles in terms of development – and government departments such as DfID [the Department for International Development], who have a mandate to do this thing called development – working in a much more concerted way with ministries of foreign affairs, with finance departments and with international systems that are working around things like international finance regulation, technology development and aspects of the UN system that deal with inter-state relationships.”
Put simply, said Leach, it was about more active participation in global governance and regulation. “If we look at what has straightforwardly brought about reductions in poverty, the big changes have come about much less through aid than through things like state action, taxation and business action shaped by appropriate state policies,” she said.
“I think development now simply cannot stick its head in the sand about what’s happening around fundamentalisms, around the breakdown of governance and the social fabric in conflicts and around real state fragility around the world; there’s a need to build political settlements in ways that really work.”
She also argued that development studies had an important role to play when it came to identifying the action that needed to be taken by governments, businesses and international agencies.
One of the stumbling blocks to greater engagement, said Leach, was the outdated and binary view that what happened in poor and distant lands had nothing to do with what happened at home. “If we look at the implications of climate change and land degradation and forest loss in the global south, there are going to be consequences for everybody here: rising sea levels and flooding in the UK,” she said.
“If we look at the fallout of massively declining and inadequate health systems in west Africa, one of the consequences is that we’ll have unhandleable epidemics which then create global threats – that’s one part of the Ebola story. Or if we look at the rise of fundamentalisms that emerge from people feeling disenfranchised from the political arrangements in their own countries, we end up with globally permeating conflicts, which again affect us all.”
Leach said DfID – which is IDS’s largest funder – was, like many development agencies, at a crossroads, caught between the need to respond to high-profile emergencies and the desire to tackle the underlying causes of poverty and inequality.
“I think DfID is grappling with the trade-off between seeing this as a very global, beyond-aid agenda and the need to focus aid on the very, very poorest, most fragile states, which has been the practice in recent years,” she said.
“They’re facing a value-for-money agenda, which is being pushed very hard by UK taxpayers and by a political system that’s putting the pressure on and saying, ‘OK, if you’re going to keep the [commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid], it’s got to be justified and absolutely clear to the UK taxpayer that [it] is being spent with the most bangs for bucks.”
Given that the public perception is that the most bangs for bucks come from responding to “the front end of poverty and crisis” rather than seeking lasting solutions, said Leach, DfID found itself in a difficult position.
“It’s going to be harder for DfID to be seen to be diverting aid money into things which arguably other ministries should be taking on,” she said. “Or into things that are less tangibly associated with development outcomes – things like international finance reform.
“It should be working even more strongly with other bits of government. But it needs to be the voice that is putting the moral and the political case for promoting the wellbeing of people who are poor and marginalised at the same time as recognising that there are mutual responsibilities and benefits for the UK in doing that. It’s a tricky brief.”
Leach said that while the private sector, which is playing an increasing role in development, had much to contribute to economic and social progress, its involvement needed to be managed properly.
EU proposals to boost the role of business in aid programmes and throw its weight behind the development agenda of private companies have met with concern and scepticism from NGOs. Meanwhile, the UK aid watchdog recently warned DfID that the private sector was “not a developmental panacea”.
“I think the private-sector approach within DfID hasn’t been as strong as it might, in terms of thinking through what it takes to make that happen,” said Leach.
“There’s been rather a headlong rush into a private-sector approach without necessarily seeing that for the private sector to operate effectively in development often requires proper partnerships and interactions with government, with NGOs, within a supportive policy environment. And there’s also always a danger of slipping into the ‘UK plc’ agenda there.”
DfID, she added, needed to ask which businesses were getting involved in development – and why. “There’s more work that DfID and others need to go through if we’re really to make sure that the business in development agenda is really working for development in a sensible way.”