Foreign Aid: Is it effective?

It is difficult to judge whether foreign aid has been an effective strategy for encouraging “development” as there are somewhat hazardous definitions and assumptions floating around both concepts (aid and development). To determine whether the effects of foreign, or even domestic, aid leads to desirable outcomes depends on the circumstances to which that aid was applied and how the outcomes were defined and were to be measured.

The World Bank takes a round-a-bout way of defining “development” in terms of economic growth. Economic growth itself is related to a general increase in a society’s wealth. Wealth, in this sense, would imply a net decrease in poverty in an economy to its capacity to provide goods and services that directly contribute to, more-or-less, westernized ideals of a quality life (access to effective health care, sanitation, potable water, safety, education and economic opportunities, democracy and so on). [i] Thus, development is often associated directly to reductions in poverty and its associated chronic problems (health, sanitation, even an enabler of democracy).

But economic growth also has less desirable consequences. Growth can amplify class and economic disparities, lead to unmanageable urbanization areas, slums, environmental degradation, have no clear correlation to democratic forms of government (China is a stellar example) and, ironically, economic instability (take for example Greece, Spain, Portugal at the present time).

In general, thanks to economists as Banerjee and Duflo, the domain of development economics is finally trying to address its failure in alleviating the real problems human beings face. This is largely due to its insistence upon its own theoretical purity. Too often, economists are driven by ideology and resist challenging their honored assumptions (embodied in their models) by the insights from other sciences (psychology, anthropology, for instance). The work of Banerjee and Duflo evidences an effective challenge to ideologically driven economic assumptions by, in some ways, relating to us lessons that I recall were taught by the work of Marvin Harris several years ago. In his approachable, simple book, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, written in 1975, he showed to the lay public that what we assume to be irrational or bizarre behavior in an alien culture (and, most certainly, the poverty Banerjee and Duflo work with is indeed an alien world to most of us in America) has rational reasons to exist to the people in that cultural milieu.

For instance, Jeffrey Sachs believes foreign aid, if applied rationally and in large scale, can be effective in alleviating poverty. He presents a list of characteristics that aid programs should follow that are very optimistic and likely too unrealistic and impractical in today’s environment. Notably, Sachs believes aid should be centered on measurable outputs and less upon abstract ideals as democracy and economic growth.  There is value in Sachs’ arguments however in that he emphasizes understandable, readily available technologically adept inputs, achievable targeted outputs, adequate financing from coalitions of funders. We should take Sachs’ argument with moderate seriousness because his approach seems based upon the flawed assumption of economic rationality (a least from the point of the intervening agency; the happy-path assumption that if we apply simply technology smartly, we get smart results, is deceptive).

Representative of more-or-less Libertarian inspired economic theories, espousing that aid causes more harm than good, would be the arguments of George Ayittey. He rightfully criticizes the premise of foreign aid by pointing to disappointing, conflicting results in Africa. He claims aid is motivated less by practical, realistic planning but rather from emotionally (meaning, irrational) biased motivations on the part of the developed countries. Aid invites corruption, waste,  creates dependency and discourages innovation and empowerment for those to whom the aid is directed. But this kind of thinking is even more flawed than that of Sachs as it supposes the poor in foreign cultures are motivated by the same economic desires and goals as Ayittey himself.

Unfortunately, none of these authors define complete, realistic models that seem capable of providing a roadmap to a future of significantly reduced human suffering (which is the whole point of intervening with aid, or at least it should be). Banerjee and Duflo however have presented findings are based on very creative, informative experiments and meaningful data (or so it appears). Additionally, their sensitivity and ability to describe and understand “irrational behavior” is a very important example of critical thinking necessary for addressing this problem.

Banerjee and Duflo argue convincingly that common evaluation models for the effectiveness of aid is inadequate, or biased (if it is evaluated at all) and must be improved. The value of their work (aside from its successes, however limited in scale they appear), is to show that the so-called irrationality and short-sightedness of the poor that frustrates aid programs, or makes them appear to be so ineffective as to be ludicrous, has more to do with the blinders of culturally-biased assumptions of the aid granting countries.[ii] Banerjee and Duflo demonstrate an effective approach to researching and gaining understanding of how to address specific, small-scale improvement opportunities. They are also collecting valuable data.

Ignoring the potential ethical questions raised by critics (pointed out by Easterly in his NYR article) who observe, perhaps rightly, that aid is motivated by paternalistic assumptions, or even some kind of left-over colonialist collective guilt, of the aid granting countries, a interesting thought experiment is to imagine what the implications would be of a large scale replication of Banerjee and Duflo’s five lessons to “development” (leading to a significant alleviation of poverty).

For this experiment, suppose there are 1.5 billion “poor” in the world. Imagine if 30% of the world’s poor were effectively lifted from poverty (by whatever definition you have) in one or two generations (20-40 years). Now the world has about 450 million healthy, educated, intelligent people. Assume they have benefited from western-style prenatal care and their educational level has a mean of primary and secondary education (maybe up to our notions of an 8^th grade level).

Have our models of development outcomes aimed at alleviated poverty given any thought as to what happens next? What are those healthier, smarter people going to be doing with themselves? Will there be a social, economic, environmental infrastructure capable of carrying this new population? To assume that all of the younger, smarter, ambitious would aspire to stay in their rural or small city settings to be teachers and social workers is hardly realistic. Would they instead be compelled to migrate to urban areas to seek economic opportunity? Would those urban areas be ready for this new migration? The larger scale cities hardly seem able to do that now.

The point here is that models of development need to take a whole system-of-systems in approach in its design, its measurement definitions, and not stop their models at the point of desired outcomes. In the Evaluation Logic Model [iii]sense, Outcomes lead to new situations with new complications and potential problems to solve. There are unending chains of Situation-Target-Outcomes in development aid. Planning and execution has to be informed such that aid does not lead to unintended consequences. Therefore, it seems an approach like Banerjee and Duflo’s coupled with some kind of systems thinking methodology (approaches like Peter Checkland, Gregory Bateson) could be developed as our next step.

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[i] World Bank. Beyond Economic Growth: Student Book.

http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/beyond/global/chapter1.html. Retrieved 20110630.

[ii] Easterly, William. Measuring How and Why Aid Works--Or Doesn't. Wall Street Journal - Eastern Edition. 4/30/2011. Vol.257,Iss.100;p.C5.

[iii] Program Development and Evaluation, Univ. of Wisconsin, http://www.uwex.edu/ces/pdande/evaluation/evallogicmodel.html. Retrieved 20110623.

The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri. W. W. Norton & Company. January 2001

This was Manil Suri’s first novel, written in 2001. He is an applied mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. [1] He was the author of a few short stories prior to his first novel. When this book was published, the author had been away from India for about 20 years (he had in fact come to the US as a student at Carnige Mellon when he was 20). However, once it was published in India, some prominent critics there called it an “Indian novel”.  The novel takes place in contemporary Mumbai and is based upon some of the people the author knew of in his apartment building while growing up in Mumbai.

The stage of the story centers on the lives of people in an apartment building. The protagonist, Vishnu, inhabits a stair landing between the ground and first floors. He is very poor, somewhat of an alcoholic, middle aged, and lay dying on his landing. Vishnu gained this prized spot in the building (prized due to his standing or caste) by purchasing the right from the previous occupant. Additionally, in exchange for occupying on the landing as his residence in the building, he does odd jobs for some of the families (such as standing in line to get milk in the morning, washing dishes, and so on).

Life in the building goes on as he lay dying. There are two Hindu families living on the first floor, a Muslim family on the second, and a widower who rarely comes out of his apartment on the third floor. The two families on the first floor have an ongoing tension, rivalry, and bickering going on between the wives over several of things. For example, their shared kitchen (on the same floor) is a place of a sustained passive-aggressive arms race. Accusations fly from one woman against the other for assumedly taking more than her share of water ration from the cistern on the roof. This could bring on a reprisal in the guise of “borrowing” the other family’s ghee (clarified butter) or other, and so on.

As it slowly dawns on these women that Vishnu is ill (the novel begins with one of the women delivering Vishnu’s morning tea and finds him comatose and having soiled himself), they begin fighting over which family should take responsibility for doing something. This becomes an ever more volatile issue between them as the day goes on, both demanding of the other to pay for an ambulance to take him to the hospital. At one point, the two husbands, neither of whom have much control over their wives and generally keep out of the way of the conflicts and from each other, decide to arrange for an ambulance between each other without their wives’ knowledge or approval. Once the ambulance arrives, neither wife agrees to pay the ambulance attendant until after much arguing and struggle. Once the ambulance has been given their fee, he demands someone sign for the responsibility for Vishnu’s hospital bill. Neither family was prepared to go that far and the ambulance left, with Vishnu at that point either near death or having had actually died.

Much else of the narrative takes place in Vishnu’s mind as he fades in and out of consciousness and his memories of childhood, his youth, scenes of his lost love (who was a prostitute). Vishnu never married and had no immediate family in the sprawling city, his relatives living several hours away by train in the interior of India. Eventually, his soul begins to leave his body and he is able to hear the voices of the insects crawling around the stairway and within the walls, able to see the lives of the other residents go about their day, all the while continuing his fading from the present into the past. As he “climbs” the stairs, compelled by some urge to go to the roof of the building, be begins to believe himself to actually be the final incarnation of Vishnu, rather than being dead (which does not seem to occur to him at all). As he ascends to the top stairs, his visions become more and more laden with imagery of Hindu mythology until, at last, he enters the home of all the gods who are all waiting to greet him. His journey then rapidly takes him to the close of his story, into the company of Krisna who sits in a beautiful forest playing his characteristic flute. Vishnu, greatly puzzled at realizing he is not the incarnation of his namesake god, asks the boy ‘What now?’ to which is replied, ‘Why, you rest and then go back, of course’! Vishnu is then finally at peace after a long, very difficult life of poverty, struggle, and humiliating death (though appropriate for his station in life).

One of my favorite characters of the novel was Mr. Jalal. He was the husband of the Muslim family from the second floor. His story within the novel was significant as it became something of a flashpoint in one of the many subplots. Jalal was a skeptical, intellectual, and critical man, well read in western and eastern philosophies and religions. Mostly an agnostic (while other characters, including his wife, were obsessively superstitious and religious), he was at the time of the novel dealing with a spiritual crisis of his own. He was seeking for himself some kind of religious experience, or feeling, something that did not appeal to the intellect or the emotions but to the soul, and experience which he felt he needed but could not find. He believed the key to the religious experience was suffering and he tried several different methods to achieve the requisite amount. However, he was basically afraid of pain (‘why must pain be so painful’, he said to himself at one point) which further complicated his journey to arrive at a religious experience.

One of the acts of suffering Jalal attempted was to lie down with Vishnu on the landing, perhaps as an act of contrition to God (or gods) to be at a level of one so lowly as Vishnu, or perhaps to contract the disease that the residents assumed had had made Vishnu ill. Before doing this, however, the daughter of one of the first floor Hindu families and his son made their try at elopement. As the young woman went down stairs, she left an article of clothing on Vishnu as a keepsake.

Jalal had a fitful dream that he interpreted as an authentic religious vision of the Hindu god, Vishnu. He was awakened in the early morning of the next day by the other first floor family (rivals to the one whose daughter had run away with Jalal’s son). (Bear in mind Vishnu was likely very much dead at this point but the families were not all that interested it seems to verify this fact). Once awoken, he excitedly recounted his vision of Vishnu to them. He had, unfortunately, merely recounted a scene from the Bhagavad Gita that he was at the time not aware he had read years ago and had forgotten. But he was sure he had achieved his goal of a genuine religious experience and that he was now a prophet, of all things, Vishnu. It was his calling, he believed, to bring harmony to the two great religions of India, Islam and Hinduism.

When the vendors and others (all Hindus) who did not live in the building learned that the Hindu family’s daughter’s shawl had been left near Jalal, who was clearly crazy or drunk, and that his son was also missing, rumors quickly spread that the girl was a victim of foul play. A small mob formed, marched to the second floor, intending to extract justice. They beat Mrs. Jalal senseless and caused Mr. Jalal to fall from a balcony as he tried to escape.

What this novel portrays of a modern Indian city is quite exciting. All of the Hindu married couples had been arranged marriages. Each of these marriages started off on somewhat awkwardly but each had, it seemed, grew to be in love with each other. The daughter who attempted an elopement with Jalal’s son, was in fact having such a marriage arranged prior to the Jalal’s demise. It was interesting to see how she abandoned the younger Jalal later on the day of the elopement and after they left the city. Once she realized that they were to start a modest, humble life in a smaller city, she thought better of the arranged marriage: it was more attractive to her to be worshiped by the homely engineer her parents had arranged a marriage to. I had assumed that such marriages were mostly a thing of the past, not something in a modern, high-tech India (even pre-high-tech India of the 70’s and 80’s) would be common.

Next, the castes, or stations of life, the vendors and Vishnu had in comparison to the higher life of the building’s apartment residents was arresting: I had no familiarity of these separations of people other than a vague understanding of such a cultural condition. Further surprising was how the vendors who sold their wares to all the families with no apparent prejudice or ill will to the Jalal’s, and even in some cases had served that family for many years, would all succumb to being swept up in a religion-inspired violent act against them. 

There are also frequent scenes of how valuable space is to the lives of the characters. A stair case landing makes a legitimate home for someone. Some people of lower castes as Vishnu can take up residence on some of the lower stairs. The stair case itself serves as a metaphor for both spiritual journeys (for Vishnu certainly and then for Jalal, too, to a certain extent) and for caste, class, and rank (the higher floors were occupied by higher income families). Cramped, shortages of space also figures prominently to the two Hindu families whose rivalries and resentments emerge most often in the shared kitchen.

In one way, the novel could be a kind of social allegory for India. Vishnu embodies the interplay of earthly powerlessness but with a certain kind of spiritual power (through his progression from living to death). We see a vibrant, intense Indian city that is a crowded, noisy place. Your place in society, whether Hindi or not, makes up more of you than it would be made of in America. Tradition, religion, and superstitions (even spells, witchcraft and so on) are very important to many people (as it is here) that further defines the self in India for an Indian. This is a valuable, fascinating book and an impressive first novel.

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[1] Manil Suri, Biography. http://www.manilsuri.com/suri-bio.htm.  Retrieved 20110701.

Do we need the UN? Review of Weiss' "What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix it"

Weiss, Thomas (2008). What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix it . Malden, MA: Policy Press.  (Paperback).   ISBN-10: 0745642985.  ISBN-13: 978-0745642987

Weiss starts his book with a well founded critical view of the UN. He leads his readers to a set of positive course-corrections. However much his solutions make sense, they will require substantial effort and, perhaps, even more good luck (timing of changes, dynamic change-leader figures like Kofi Annan, shifting power centers, climate change crisis, and so on).

He begins his work by identifying the single most aggravating problem in the UN that of entrenched concepts of sovereignty among the member states. This Westphalian imprint condition may be the root cause of all the ills of the UN (Weiss likens it to an ill patient in some passages) as it seems a likely cause to the UN’s tendency to bureaucratic stasis. Whether or not Weiss’ characteristics of Westphailian sovereignty are the actual root cause to the UN’s global governance problems should require further study and consideration. For it is also possible that an organization as complex as the UN may not, by its nature, be functional in the conventional sense of what we (Americans) think organizations should be and how they should function. That is, the entrenched sovereignty problem may actually be more of a coloration or facet of something far deeper and less easy to define existing in the nature of human beings and their social functions.

Weiss’ analysis begins by identifying three UN’s: The first is a World Issues Theatre upon which state actors play out their vital roles for their constituents and the world’s stage (Castro, Kruschev, Gore, GW Bush, etc). Second, are the Secretariats, the work-a-day representatives of their nations, who could perhaps be characterized as the team players in perpetual, winner-take-all sovereignty scrums. And third are the NGOs, the nongovernmental orgs of committed citizens, idea mongers, and others.

Next, Weiss rightly identifies how the US has historically been a kind of competing global governance institution to the UN. As a result, much of the UN’s recent history (post cold war) has been one of how to curb the ambitions of its most powerful member and primary competitor. The UN’s governance structure, though, institutionalizes this problem; UN military action can only really take place with US approval (while US actions can always take place without UN approval).

Another important impediment to change is the Security Council. As a de facto board of governors, the council rarely makes consistent or swift decisions (Libya aside). Its membership is static, jealously guarded, and so resistant to change that doing away with it altogether may be the best remedy. At any rate, the need to change the make-up of its membership and processes is vital for the UN’s future. As Weiss shows, however, the debate surrounding this extremely important issue verges on farcical impasse.

Does the world need the United Nations, or any overarching global governance institution? One answer could be ‘If not the UN, then what?’ Given the web of environmental and economic interdependencies of our global lives, coordinated, intergovernmental-regional governance schemes naturally emerge due to one necessity or another. But whether the world needs a single, giant, monolith like the UN is something that the organization itself should be seriously debating –for its sake and ours.

For all the things wrong with the UN, Weiss does explain how it has been effective in some ways that maybe it had not intended or planned. For instance, the UN has been effective in small, out of the ordinary instances. For example, the Ottawa land mines treaties, World Health initiatives, global pandemic warning systems, The ICC, and some effectiveness in keeping human rights upfront as a global issue (or at least good theatre). The UN provides a vital institutional space for a North-South dialog (where else or how else could this happen to the extent it does in the UN is difficult to imagine). And even the outcomes of the development agenda goals, though largely ambiguous, have alleviated a certain amount of human suffering (and for that we should be grateful).

The changes in the structure and responsibilities of the UN that should be considered ought to require even further study. Fundamental to Weiss’ framing and description of improvements is that there is too much autonomy given to state actors. That is, he seems to be saying that UN membership should be a privilege with a set of responsibilities and expectations on state behavior. For this, Weiss proposes recasting state sovereignty in terms of “R2P” (the “responsibility to protect”). That is, states must behave with peaceful, responsible intent with other states and toward its own people. It is difficult to imagine states ceding the right to treat their own citizens in one way or another, let alone how they treat other states. But Weiss’ R2P may be unrealistic as it is based on the hope that such change can be driven by a romantic ideal of enlightened self interest.

The solution to balancing the military power of the US, for Weiss, is to simply have an equal military power player emerge, ideally in the guise of the EU. The fact that Weiss did not entertain that China is a more realistic candidate suggests, perhaps, a bit of a neo-Liberal stance exists in this suggestion. The EU would be more comfortable choice of course for an American. But if what better world governance needs is a military player to balance that of the US, then what we may have to live with is what evolves rather than what we wish, or are comfortable with.

After reading Weiss, it is still unclear whether the UN is a beast, a wall, a snake, or a spear. It could be characterized as a sick patient but then the next question is what constitutes a healthy version of this patient, or whether it has ever not been a sick patient is not to be found in this Weiss’ present book. It is likely that the UN is all those things and even more. More importantly to any discussion of change, is the likelihood that in the science of organizational studies there is probably no other organization in modern times quite like the UN. Its characteristics, complexities, contradictions, and innumerable systems of systems, may in fact defy the current range of understanding and explanatory power we have on how organizations work and, from there, how they can be improved. Thus, if we really do not fully understand, or have adequately models to describe the organized chaos of the modern UN, prescribing fixes will be unfortunately based on inappropriately applied organizational models. Treating such a ‘sick patient’ that way may bring on more harm than good (and there may be evidence for such incidents if we were to look for them).

In the end, Weiss’ text is positive and provocative as it should challenge readers’ assumptions of this strange, exotic organization. The world needs a coordinated, global governance organization but perhaps the UN has taken on more than it is capable. And this may be one of its major faults that it could immediately (meaning in 8 to 10 years) address. Perhaps the UN should look at what is working well and put resources into improving on and building up those institutions. In the meantime, those institutions which are proving less and less effective, such as the Security Council and military interventions, should be slowly disbanded. Clearly, desired outcomes from interventions (development or emergency relief) and certain initiatives (human rights or climate change) may have to come in smaller optimizations rather than the grand schemes of world government.

A Brief Review of The World Summit on the Information Society

This post reviews the information society development initiative of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), known by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). The post reviews the history of the WSIS and recent its development efforts. An analysis is offered as a short explication of the issues and debates regarding the efforts of richer nations helping “developing countries and countries with economies in transition, to become fully-fledged members of the Information Society” (WSIS 2005). It concludes with a recommendation for change.

The World Summit on the Information Society was launched by UN resolution Resolution 56/183 in 2002. The intent was to answer the “urgent need to harness the potential of knowledge and technology for promoting the goals of the United Nations Millennium Declaration” (UN Res 56/183). In general, the WSIS was to be a part of meeting MDG Goal 8, that being to Develop a global partnership for development. This MDG has a measurement target 8F stating “(i)n co-operation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.” (MDG Indicators). These indicators are “Fixed and Mobile Telephone Subscribers, Internet Users, and PC’s per 100 population”.

Even with the WSIS and other parallel, sometimes competing, initiatives from other bodies (the G8, the World Bank, the US, various NGOs, and Chinese commercial investments) the UN maintains that the so-called digital divide still exists. What this digital divide seems to generally mean is a lack of access to high speed and reliable telecommunications infrastructure and connectivity to the global information grid. There is also a pervasive assumption in such advanced economies as the US that information communications technologies should naturally enable poorer countries leapfrog over an industrial stage of development and into a digital, high-tech economy (Mansell 2011).

By any terminology, or measure, the ITU’s development policy, in light of this MDG, ties the WSIS initiative to basically addressing the physical connectivity to communications infrastructures.

The Roots of the WSIS: NWICO

Prior to the ITU’s WSIS initiative, from the late 70’s through the 80’s and up until the 90’s, UNESCO was the international forum for information technology issues for developing countries. The so-called New World Information and Communications Order (NWICO) was in large part agitated by the Non Aligned Movement of UN nations in the late 70’s (it was also the time of the New International Economic Order debates). UNESCO evolved into a champion for these concerns, becoming the key forum. The early debates were apparently fueled primarily by NAM nations and their concerns over cultural identity and sovereignty in light of the imperialist challenges from the US and Soviet Union.

The primary impetus for the NWICO, observed by Victor Pickard, a scholar who writes about global media politics, was that “(a)s new countries were integrated into the global media flow, they were undercut by structural inequities such as unequal media flow, foreign owned infrastructure, and prohibitively priced rates” (Pickard 2007). This probably marked the first practical policy issue foreshadowing the WSIS. It addressed such controversies as communications satellite control, controlled in large part by US and US companies. More heated debates were characterized by NAM unease over the ubiquity and power of Western media, content and the domination of Western technologies for the delivery of information flow: It all seemed very one-sided and unfair to many people. This imbalance put NAM nations, especially newer ones, at a great disadvantage over controlling media content (mostly from the west) and communications infrastructure (expensive to develop). Early policy debates over such matters were facilitated on the world stage by UNESCO and their funding of the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems in 1977. Irish politician, and former member of the IRA, Sean MacBride, led this commission. His commission’s final report, issued in 1980 and presented that same year during UNESCO’s bi-annual conference, led to UNESCO’s NWICO forums in proceeding years. By 1980, the tag of New World Information and Communication Order was introduced by Mustapha Masmoudi, then minister of Tanzania and the moniker stuck. (ICSCP 1978).

It might be said that these debates over information and media flow to poorer countries from a Western dominated media, the MacBride Commission report, and the NWICO forums, were in part responsible for the US and UK withdrawing from UNESCO altogether in 1985 and 1986 respectively (Karns & Mingst 2010). Indeed, in a State Department publication from that period, there exists is a clear statement of US dissatisfaction with UNESCO whose “programs and personnel are heavily freighted with an irresponsible political content and answer to an agenda that is consistently inimical to U.S. interests” with “endemic hostility toward the…institutions of a free society…free market…” and, it can be assumed, free speech (US State 1985). Media interests (including journalists) (NYT 1980). Bodies like the World Press Freedom Committee also attacked the legitimacy of UNESCO’s NWICO initiative.

With the US and UK often at odds with the spirit of the initiative as well as the MacBride Commission and its conclusions, the NWICO was always more controversial than being all that effective for developing nations. Among the complaints the US had were that NWICO was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union and thus a plot to undermine freedom of the press; it also purportedly favored a state-controlled over a commercially controlled media environment, yet another attack on the free press and free enterprise. However much this may have seemed at the time, it is clear that the motivation for the NWICO was for the most part an attempt to support the interests of poorer countries, recently de-colonized countries, and other NAM nations. After the US and UK quit their support of UNESCO, the MacBride report and the NWICO died an ignoble if not quiet death, found only in the graveyards of academic writing and internet archives.

The ITU and the WSIS

UN Resolution 56/183 also directed the ITU to facilitated the WSIS in two phases, which were embodied in two summits. The first occurred in 2003 in Geneva and the most recent in 2005 in Tunis. The policy output of these summits consisted of the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Geneva Plan of Action in 2003, and the 2005 Tunis Commitment and Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (among several other supporting documents). Other types of meetings and events of one kind or another have been on-going annually including one in 2010 that led to the publication of Measuring the WSIS Targets - A statistical framework this year. According to one of their recent websites, the agency claims that by 2005 there were about 19,000 representatives from 174 countries from an initial membership of 175 (WSIS 2011a).

The stated intent of the visionaries of the WSIS was “to build a people-centric, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information” (WSIS 2003). The Principles document consists of sixty-seven policy areas ranging from capacity building (that of poorer countries lacking what is seen as adequate infrastructure for fully-fledged members of the information society); relevant IT technical standards (issues more-or-less the purview of standards bodies such as ICANN, WC3, IEEE); IT security (an even more interesting area now that the Pentagon declared its Cyberspace “operational domain” [Alexander 2011]) ; and IT applications (accessibility issues such as cost-prohibitive or predatory licensing schemes), Mass Media (an historical sticking point leading to the demise of the NWICO); and other items including the ‘Ethical dimensions of the Information Society’. Generally, these policy areas were segmented into “Action Lines” in an appendix table in the 2005 Tunis Agenda document.

Table 1. Action Lines table (as-is) from the 2005 Tunis Agenda documentation (WSIS .

	Action Lines	Possible moderators/ facilitators
C1.	The role of public governance authorities and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development	ECOSOC / UN Regional Commissions / ITU
C2.	Information and communication infrastructure	ITU
C3.	Access to information and knowledge	ITU / UNESCO
C4.	Capacity building	UNDP / UNESCO / ITU /UNCTAD
C5.	Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs	ITU
C6.	Enabling environment	ITU / UNDP / UN Regional Commissions / UNCTAD
C7.	ICT Applications • E-government • E-business • E-learning • E-health • E-employment • E-environment • E-agriculture • E-science	UNDP / ITU WTO / UNCTAD / ITU / UPU UNESCO / ITU / UNIDO WHO / ITU ILO / ITU WHO / WMO / UNEP / UN-Habitat / ITU / ICAO FAO / ITU UNESCO / ITU / UNCTAD
C8.	Cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content	UNESCO
C9.	Media	UNESCO
C10.	Ethical dimensions of the Information Society	UNESCO / ECOSOC
C11.	International and regional cooperation	UN Regional Commissions / UNDP /ITU / UNESCO / ECOSOC

The 2003 Geneva summit also established WSIS Targets. These goals were meant to provide a “references for improving connectivity and access in the use of ICTs in promoting the objectives of the Plan of Action, to be achieved by 2015” (WSIS 2003). It can be observed that the character of these targets seem to apply to the Action Lines C1 through C6 and partially to C7. These measures were the subject of the most recent (2011) major WSIS document, Measuring the WSIS Targets: A Statistical Framework. They have been subject to a slight degree of revisions since their inception (notably the word “all” in Targets 1 to 4, leading to their following state:

• Target 1. Connect all villages with ICTs and establish community access points;

• Target 2. Connect all secondary schools and primary schools with ICTs;

• Target 3. Connect all scientific and research centres with ICTs;

• Target 4. Connect all public libraries, museums, post offices and national archives with ICTs;

• Target 5. Connect all health centres and hospitals with ICTs;

• Target 6. Connect all central government departments and establish websites ;

• Target 7. Adapt all primary and secondary school curricula to meet the challenges of the information society, taking into account national circumstances;

• Target 8. Ensure that all of the world’s population has access to television and radio services;

• Target 9. Encourage the development of content and put in place technical conditions in order to facilitate the presence and use of all world languages on the Internet;

• Target 10. Ensure that more than half the world’s inhabitants have access to ICTs within their reach and make use of them (emphasis added).

            The WSIS collects and publishes success stories of their initiative. This year’s WSIS Stocktaking: Success Stories 2011 Case Studies describes achievements lining up with the 2003 Action Lines and Targets. For Africa, an example is the Rural Internet Kiosk (RIK). This technology is solar-powered, provides satellite connection to access education and youth employment ICT training classes (WSIS 2011b). In a region of West Africa another project is underway to “empower small farmers, stockbreeders and fishermen through the use of ICTs to be more informed and sell their products better” (ibid). In Mali a project aimed at “reducing gender gap regarding ICTs” dispense ICT training for 20 women entrepreneurs who “created their own blog and e-mail address” (ibid).  In Bangladesh a project aimed to create telecenters from which farmers could access general agricultural information through a web portal and answers to specific requests delivered by an agriculturist; this project started in 2008 with 20 locations and by 2010 had 100. Other projects in this years report was one to improve WI-FI access in the Republic of Macedonia and some headline-sounding projects in Qatar, one of which is an Assistive Technology Center.

A sampling of the WSIS Stocktaking database for projects related to Africa (WSIS 2011c) retrieves a fairly narrow range of project topic areas given the ambitious and broad range of the Action Lines: a project for an Inter-regional Trade Information Platform; Electronic Commerce for Developing Countries; Empowering African Women to Manage 100 Multipurpose Community Telecentres in 20 African Countries; Building an Investor Environment for ICT Development in Africa; a partnership with Cisco “to help train students in the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) for jobs in the Internet economy”; a partnership with a British company in developing and “building ICT’s in developing and emerging markets”;  and a very interesting idea in “helping others create public intelligence (decision-support) in the public interest” known as the Earth Intelligence Network (“linking the one billion rich to the five billion poor through a Global Range of Needs table online, and a plan for educating the poor ‘one cell call at a time’ by using ICT…”).  The emerging picture of the WSIS since its inception, based upon these projects it has funded most recently, seems to be directed toward technology infrastructure building and enhancements or towards the enhancement of eGovernment and eCommerce capacity.

Analysis: Whose Information Society?

The vision and goals of the WSIS is impressive. Consider the following statement from their 2003 Geneva Declaration as an embodiment of their intention:

“The attainment of our shared aspirations, in particular for developing countries and countries with economies in transition, to become fully-fledged members of the Information Society, and their positive integration into the knowledge economy, depends largely on increased capacity building in the areas of education, technology know-how and access to information, which are major factors in determining development and competitiveness.” (WSIS 2005).

But whose information society is the WSIS endeavoring to bring developing countries into? Ignoring the fact any definition of the term information society is hardly concrete, having nearly as many definitions as there are stakeholders, it is telling that the emphasis in the above principle is on the and not an information society. In other words, the principle is subtly paternalistic, assumes that here is yet another level of social organization into which a developing nation must be matured into, and that the means with which to do that is through information technology. Thus, it seems very difficult to deny that it is the West’s information society being referred to in the above WSIS principle.

If the above interpretation of the information society promoted by the WSIS is valid then some interesting implications follow. The first obvious one is that the promotion of ICTs as an essential component for contemporary economic growth is a Liberal/neo-Liberal/Market driven assumption. Information technology investments, especially in infrastructure, are made primarily for commercial development. The internet itself is a domain in which companies, countries, organizations, and individuals may share ideas with each other to some degree but it is in the monetization of those technologies (through either eCommerce or through enabling productivity gains in existing businesses) which enable ICTs to contribute any difference in economies. In other words, ICTs improve the productivity of in-country and global trade and commerce easier (or, at least, it is assumed that they do to a great degree).

Based upon the WSIS documentation alone it is easy to see this is an exogenous intervention model: that is, the engine of development is in “the information society” which comes from outside the constituent country (Mansell 2011). Further, success measures are framed by an emphasis on the stark output measures of per capita access with little emphasis upon outcomes. Any change in policy formation or the scope of the majority of the projects in the Stocktaking Database from an emphasis on the information society towards one that appreciates the potential of a constitentuency creating and enjoying an information society of their own (using the tools of ICT) has not occurred. This is unfortunate as such exogenous models of interventions like this are challenged by the findings of Banerjee and Duflo. These authors showed in their arguments that such status-quo models, like membership in the information society, and the judgment of the effectiveness of aid based solely upon quantitative variables are inadequate and very often tragically biased in favor of the ethnocentric values and assumptions (or delusions) of the intervening parties (Banerjee and Duflo 2011).

And the evidence that ICTs have a miraculous or leapfrog effect on and economy, even an advanced economy, is hardly conclusive. Colecchia & Schreyer found that ICTSs  added only  0.2 and 0.5 percentage points per year on average to European and Japanese growth through the 80’s and 90’s. They concluded that “ICT diffusion plays a key role and depends on the right framework conditions, not necessarily on the existence of an ICT producing sector” (Colecchia & Schreyer 2002). For evidence of big economic impacts, it seems that the focus must occur at the firm level in which IT enables productivity gains through organizational changes (Dedrick et al, 2003). This puts output measures of ICTs effects on a developing nation very difficult to verify as the Western economist’s notion of the firm may not exactly exist in the same way in such a nation (thus WSIS metrics belie meaningful and consistent measurements of economic change due to ICTs).

Conclusion

The diffusion of ICT in poorer countries has been inevitable as such technologies became cheaper and easier to use. A singular result of the dot-com boom was the substantial increase in the investment in global physical infrastructure for telecommunications. At this time it seems that both devices and networks have become more responsive (from the user’s perspective) and more robust (connectivity is generally more consistent and reliable). As physical carrying capacities grow so have the commercial interests which own and provide them. In recent years, global telecommunications companies have been consolidating and merging bringing together internet, telephony, and entertainment media delivered not just to businesses and households but now to individuals who use sophisticated hand-held devices. For the short term, it can be assumed that the capacities of both the amount of data and its speed of delivery will increase along with an end-user’s relative experience of quality.

Irrespective of the incremental improvements to infrastructure and end-user ICT capabilities, to expect that investment and diffusion alone naturally leads to desirable development outcomes is at best shortsighted and at worst delusional. WSIS policies should be informed by an observation made by Simon Ramo, co-founder of TRW corporation, about such faith in technology as it is quite applicable here: “Efforts to improve the breed of racehorses did not lead directly to the invention of the automobile” (Ramo 1970).  So, too, efforts to improve economies by ITCs alone will not lead to a place like Jamaica becoming a global economic success story in the same category as China, India, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea or Taiwan.

WSIS intervention in developing countries seems limited by at least two apparent constraints. The first is the paradigmatic stagnation wrought by Liberal economic development policies (discussed above). Another is an extraordinarily limited budget (the budget information is not very transparent and difficult to verify). Funding is gained from stakeholder-member countries (The US was not one of contributors based upon the Tunis 2005 documentation) and other fundraising activities. The largest national contributor listed in the Tunis 2005 contribution was Japan (1.18 million Swiss Francs) and the largest commercial contributor was a Japanese company, NTT DotCoMo (90k Swiss Francs). The WSIS was allocated 1.2 million Swiss Francs, about 1.5 million US, in the 2004-2007 ITU Financial Plan. To “Connect all villages with ICTs and establish community access points” (Target 1) hardly seems possible under such financial means.

            Meanwhile, China’s investments in ICT in certain developing countries in reagions such as Africa far overshadow anything the WSIS has done in terms of straightforward connectivity building. Some of China’s ICT investments range from a $311 million (US) Nigerian communications satellite for the “Nigerian National Space Research Development Agency (NNSRDA)” in 2005 to $100 million to Huawei Industries to become Nigeria’s primary cellphone network provider. This same company also embarked upon a $200 million program to develop rural telephone networks also in Nigera. Such networks enable streaming media content over 3G mobile devices. This same company invested around $10 million in technology training centers in Abujua (Platforms 2011).

China was also involved in Uganda ICT investment in 2006 with a $120 million loan for a five-year national ICT infrastructure program. The growth in carrying capacity could have potentially increased download speeds and quality to at least that of what many US households enjoy today. Fiber cable in Kenya was contracted to three Chinese companies “creating a terrestrial network. . . connected to the planned undersea East Africa Marine System” providing Kenya's with an inexpensive alternative to expensive satellite services. Similar  infrastructure contracts the same Chinese tech companies (ZTE, Huawei) were awarded by Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation for up to $2.4 billion (Platforms 2011).

            An international player as China (or the G8 or the US) will always outdo the WSIS in infrastructure capacity investments but likely so only in those countries it has a natural-resource or beneficial economic interest to the investing party. This leaves any sort of ICT investment for people in developing nations which are resource-poor to organizations such as the WSIS. Therefore, it seems WSIS has a potentially vital role to play –but are the policies, actions, and budget appropriate to what needs to be done? Further, the most important question is not on addressing the almost meaningless abstractions of  “how do we bridge the digital divide” or how do we make poorer countries “fully-fledged members of the information society” but rather the WSIS should be crafting policies based upon what these poorer societies really need ICTs to do for them. And how can ICTs help create an information society for a poor nation’s people?

Today, in a region such as Africa, any sort of technology associated with the information society is about television, radio, and cell phones and not PC’s, laptops or even the Internet. ICT investment can positively impact poverty alleviation but in more indirect ways than is likely assumed. For example, medicine and health informatics are unquestionably improved with better connectivity and infrastructure investments. It is not an intellectual stretch to see that developing economies are not going to be transformed just by giving every poor child a netbook.

            What is needed for the WSIS and the study of ICT’s in developing countries is more research similar in vein to Banerjee & Duflo’s work. What is needed is more documentation and analysis of both the good and the harm done by such exogenous-intervention models of ICT investment espoused in WSIS policies.  Models of development intervention should take a whole system-of-systems approach in design with a careful understanding and monitor of outcomes. ICT’s dropped into poorer countries surely lead to potentially radically new situations with new complications and problems the constituents may not be ready to address. Therefore, it seems an approach like Banerjee and Duflo’s coupled with some kind of systems thinking methodology (maybe using approaches like Peter Checkland, or Gregory Bateson) should be developed by the WSIS, or by the next institution that takes up the work after 2015.

           

            Perhaps WSIS interventions could use such a framework embodied in the table below derived from Banerjee & Duflo’s 2011 book. For each proposed project, WSIS funders could determine as thoroughly as possible the following areas:

Table 2 Banerjee & Duflo Intervention Analysis Framework

Area	Known Patterns
Policy Intent of Intervening Body	Ignorance, ideology, inertia exists in policy making body. This should be honestly appraised by challenging policy-maker’s assumptions.
Market Realities of the Context for the Intervention	Some markets are missing in poorer countries for situated reasons (carrying costs, capacities of infrastructure and education). Does the ICT make any difference? How?
Constituency’s Decision-making Environment	The contexts for trade-off type decision making for the poor is weighed heavily toward their own demise (is based on our expectations) is often made. By what quality or by what degree would the ICT intervention make any difference?
Constituency’s Decision-making Habits	the poor lack "critical pieces of information" (and that's why) they believe things which are not true. Would the ICT intervention affect change to this? How?

If each intervention proposal is taken as a case to be studied as much as it is anything else, output measures and outcome results are be made more situated, grounded in the uniqueness of each case, then valuable data can be created for subsequent interventions (one size does not fit all).  Such ideas are probably already being floated and worked with (and, likely, vigorously worked against by entrenched interests) but do not appear on the WSIS websites or literature. But in any event, it should be reasonably clear from this short paper that ICT interventions in developing countries, through such approaches as the WSIS currently espouse, need to change and adapt.

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