10 Dec Ananya Roy on University of Washington Geography Blog
Ananya Roy came to the University of Washington Seattle campus this quarter. She gave a fantastic talk – strikingly different from the one she gave earlier this year (which i linked to in a blog post last month). It’s been embedded in our departmental website on the blog here. I hope it stays for a while.
I’ve been reading her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the making of development, this past week, preparing to use it for my dissertation proposal (and generals, i suppose). It’s a wonderfully written book that gently weaves together theory, data, and ethnography – a readable and enjoyable story of microfinance and the Washington Consensus.
I’ve been trying to get a grasp on this Post Washington Consensus over the past month or so.
When the earthquake occurred, Haiti was already known as the “NGO Republic,” with a reported 10,000 NGOs already in the country, the highest number per capita in the world (World Bank, 2008a). Approximately 20 percent of Haiti’s total public expenditures and 70 percent of capital expenditures and 70 percent of the investment budget from 2004-2006 were from external donor monies (World Bank, 2008b, 38). Of this, the majority was funneled through NGO’s that managed 80 percent of the country’s governmental services (Joseph, 2010). In some sectors, their collective budgets were larger than those of the governmental departments (Macnaughton, 2010).
In real terms, this points to the heavy influence that outside funders have on public programs in Haiti through tied aid, and to a lesser extent, untied aid; but, more pointedly, this manifested as a diminishing capacity of the state. This bypassing of what has been repeatedly deemed the weak or failed state of Haiti works in a self-informing cycle of donor distrust and weakening state power. This weakening of state power, further, has meant the exclusion of the Haitian people in relation to their own health as health care has been enacted on them from the outside, often through pointed health interventions through clinics that create artificial enclaves based on geographic or health issue parameters that are mandated by particular donor monies. Health citizenship, then, falls out of the purview of the Haitian government, and by extension, out of the reach of democratic processes and the very people whose articulation, according to post-Washington consensus policies, should be at the fore.
Today, there is a clear agreement that Washington Consensus mandates implementing neoliberal policies have deepened disparity across the board, both within countries and between countries (Stiglitz, 2002; Ricupero, 2000). Haiti was not only the “poorest country in the western hemisphere,” but also suffered from the greatest disparity between the have’s and the have not’s(too informal) and ranks eighth in the world in Gini coefficient, or somewhere between 59.2 (CIA, 2009) and 65 (World Bank, 2010). However, considering the call to recognize the possibilities, nine months after the earthquake, Farmer has noted that this is not yet being done (Clibbon, 2010). Indeed, there are those that believe this building from the ground up should be the purview of the World Bank and the United Nations as they have been suggested to take the lead in the actual management of reform and rebuilding programs (Dobbins, 2010).
Haiti may be interpreted as a distinctively “post-Washington Consensus” illustration of shifting approaches to development and international health. It highlights the new roles of NGOs and global agencies outside of DC, and also makes manifest the complex and fractured political geography of micro interventions, micro financing and micro management produced by the large number of non-governmental agencies involved. A guiding idea underpinning many of these micro-interventions is that development can be freed from macro control; in other words, development can be conducted “from the ground up.”
But so, we’ve seen little evidence of the actual move.
But what am i missing? I’m hoping that Ananya Roy can at least point me in the right direction. Nothing is black and white, cut and dry. I recognize that. I’m comfortable with that. But extracting and understanding those complexities is a big part of where i’m going and what i’m hoping to accomplish. It’s easy to try to hold a firm radical stance, but as things move forward, i’m recognizing that there will be a need for a more nuanced understanding of these processes – especially as the poor battered nation attempts to rebuild with any sense of self.
I suppose this is where the work on nationalism and identity will come into the story…
--Jason
Posted at 04:01h, 10 DecemberIs "tied aid" attached to obligations on the part of the receiver?