blindpig
03-16-2010, 08:18 AM
[div class ="excerpt"]
Why Programs Fail
Richard Levins
Several generations of development programs have left the gap between rich and poor countries wider than ever. Decades of aid and foreign investment have extracted many times more wealth than they bring in. Seventeen years after the Earth Summit at Rio, carbon dioxide continues to increase. The non-proliferation treaty has left us with more nukes, more countries possessing nukes, more sophisticated nuclear weapons, more willingness to use them. The fanfare of the Green Revolution has died down, and farmers are still being displaced to cities that can’t accommodate them. The first homes of the Green Revolution are now importers of food. Agricultural yields have increased, but so has hunger. Millennial development goals will not be reached.
It is not that no programs work. There have been dramatic successes such as the eradication of smallpox, the near eradication of polio, the containment of plague. But meanwhile, new diseases have burst forth, old ones have returned, malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrheal disease remain the big killers in much of the world. The destruction of wetlands forces migratory birds to fraternize and share their viruses with domestic fowl. Industrialized agriculture has become the petri dish for antibiotic resistance, and big corporations are in a mad race to grab up the farmland of Africa. The Thames is now clean enough to allow salmon to return, but the Colorado River barely trickles to the sea. Forests are protected in Japan and Europe, but at the expense of forests of Indonesia and the Philippines. There are more urban clinics, but the megacity is a historically new environment, vulnerable to diseases too virulent to survive in small, sparse populations. We may get a fuel-efficient car, making it easier to commute longer distances, and if China achieves the automobile density of Euro-North America, the equivalent of one third of the area devoted to rice production will have to be paved over. Aquaculture moves into the niche left by declining oceanic fisheries, but the ensuing salinization threatens already stressed water tables. Increases in productivity, which could give us more tranquil lives, result in longer workweeks, faster pace, and industries designed to compensate for the stresses of multitasking and insecurity, while the pharmaceutical industry, which can’t wait for new diseases to emerge, invents them, turning any variation in human physiology or behavior into a market for its products.
Most of these problems are well known to you, reported in technical and popular journals and the more literate television and radio programs. The missing step is to put them all together, to focus on the system that makes all of our crises profitable.
There is a pattern of a sort: narrowly focused technical solutions reshuffle crises.
When one program after another fails again and again, and when the failures are not random but somehow always benefit the owning class, we have to ask, “How come?” When people, just as smart as we are, regularly design programs that fail to achieve their stated goals, what are they refusing to deal with?
There are several possible answers.
First, the problem cannot be solved. Abundance, justice, and sustainability are incompatible. This answer is a dead end, like special creation, and carries with it just a whiff of self-serving. If it is true that we are doomed, then what remains is to speculate as to what might be a successful successor species for us. But it is also commonly observed that those who see their own way of privilege threatened also see this as universal disaster.
Second, “we” are doing the right thing but have to try harder, with more investment, more aid, more free trade. In support of this is the observation that most international pledges of aid remain unfulfilled. But more important, the neglected places have fared better ecologically than where “development” programs have been most vigorously pursued, and economic recession seems to provide the only respite that capitalism grants to the forests and waters.
It is not that they (not “we”) want people to be without health care, but that they want accessible health care, subject to the constraint that it is controlled by a private insurance business whose primary goal is profit. It is not that they want to leave people without medicine, but that they want them to buy medications from a private, for-profit pharmaceutical industry. It is not that they want medical costs to rise, but that costs should be contained only to the extent that profit is not harmed. It is not that they deplore medical research, but that they want the fruits of intellectual labor registered as intellectual property, and prefer research that is at least potentially marketable.
The third type of explanation is systemic and operates on at least three levels: the political economy, the institutional organization of the knowledge industry, and the intellectual biases and constraints that can turn small-scale ingenuity into large-scale disaster.
Political economy: In a capitalist economy, goods and services are commodities. Commodities are produced for sale, to make profit. The important thing about commodity production for us is that there is no necessary relation between the usefulness of something and its economic value or profitability.
Agriculture is not about producing food but about profit. Food is a side effect. While the majority of the world’s farmers are subsistence farmers, the bulk of the world’s food is produced as commodities by a small fraction of farm operators.
Health service is a commodity, health a by-product.
Development is about investment opportunities and markets, not correcting decades of plunder and exploitation.
“We,” that is, “they,” are really trying to do something quite different from the goals stated at numerous conferences, and perhaps succeeding at it all too well.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100301levins.php[/quote]
continued
Why Programs Fail
Richard Levins
Several generations of development programs have left the gap between rich and poor countries wider than ever. Decades of aid and foreign investment have extracted many times more wealth than they bring in. Seventeen years after the Earth Summit at Rio, carbon dioxide continues to increase. The non-proliferation treaty has left us with more nukes, more countries possessing nukes, more sophisticated nuclear weapons, more willingness to use them. The fanfare of the Green Revolution has died down, and farmers are still being displaced to cities that can’t accommodate them. The first homes of the Green Revolution are now importers of food. Agricultural yields have increased, but so has hunger. Millennial development goals will not be reached.
It is not that no programs work. There have been dramatic successes such as the eradication of smallpox, the near eradication of polio, the containment of plague. But meanwhile, new diseases have burst forth, old ones have returned, malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrheal disease remain the big killers in much of the world. The destruction of wetlands forces migratory birds to fraternize and share their viruses with domestic fowl. Industrialized agriculture has become the petri dish for antibiotic resistance, and big corporations are in a mad race to grab up the farmland of Africa. The Thames is now clean enough to allow salmon to return, but the Colorado River barely trickles to the sea. Forests are protected in Japan and Europe, but at the expense of forests of Indonesia and the Philippines. There are more urban clinics, but the megacity is a historically new environment, vulnerable to diseases too virulent to survive in small, sparse populations. We may get a fuel-efficient car, making it easier to commute longer distances, and if China achieves the automobile density of Euro-North America, the equivalent of one third of the area devoted to rice production will have to be paved over. Aquaculture moves into the niche left by declining oceanic fisheries, but the ensuing salinization threatens already stressed water tables. Increases in productivity, which could give us more tranquil lives, result in longer workweeks, faster pace, and industries designed to compensate for the stresses of multitasking and insecurity, while the pharmaceutical industry, which can’t wait for new diseases to emerge, invents them, turning any variation in human physiology or behavior into a market for its products.
Most of these problems are well known to you, reported in technical and popular journals and the more literate television and radio programs. The missing step is to put them all together, to focus on the system that makes all of our crises profitable.
There is a pattern of a sort: narrowly focused technical solutions reshuffle crises.
When one program after another fails again and again, and when the failures are not random but somehow always benefit the owning class, we have to ask, “How come?” When people, just as smart as we are, regularly design programs that fail to achieve their stated goals, what are they refusing to deal with?
There are several possible answers.
First, the problem cannot be solved. Abundance, justice, and sustainability are incompatible. This answer is a dead end, like special creation, and carries with it just a whiff of self-serving. If it is true that we are doomed, then what remains is to speculate as to what might be a successful successor species for us. But it is also commonly observed that those who see their own way of privilege threatened also see this as universal disaster.
Second, “we” are doing the right thing but have to try harder, with more investment, more aid, more free trade. In support of this is the observation that most international pledges of aid remain unfulfilled. But more important, the neglected places have fared better ecologically than where “development” programs have been most vigorously pursued, and economic recession seems to provide the only respite that capitalism grants to the forests and waters.
It is not that they (not “we”) want people to be without health care, but that they want accessible health care, subject to the constraint that it is controlled by a private insurance business whose primary goal is profit. It is not that they want to leave people without medicine, but that they want them to buy medications from a private, for-profit pharmaceutical industry. It is not that they want medical costs to rise, but that costs should be contained only to the extent that profit is not harmed. It is not that they deplore medical research, but that they want the fruits of intellectual labor registered as intellectual property, and prefer research that is at least potentially marketable.
The third type of explanation is systemic and operates on at least three levels: the political economy, the institutional organization of the knowledge industry, and the intellectual biases and constraints that can turn small-scale ingenuity into large-scale disaster.
Political economy: In a capitalist economy, goods and services are commodities. Commodities are produced for sale, to make profit. The important thing about commodity production for us is that there is no necessary relation between the usefulness of something and its economic value or profitability.
Agriculture is not about producing food but about profit. Food is a side effect. While the majority of the world’s farmers are subsistence farmers, the bulk of the world’s food is produced as commodities by a small fraction of farm operators.
Health service is a commodity, health a by-product.
Development is about investment opportunities and markets, not correcting decades of plunder and exploitation.
“We,” that is, “they,” are really trying to do something quite different from the goals stated at numerous conferences, and perhaps succeeding at it all too well.
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100301levins.php[/quote]
continued