Understanding difference and building solidarity: a challenge to development initiatives

Mary B. Anderson

People — as individuals — differ, and peoples — as groups and societies — differ. Those of us who work within the framework of broad social movements, including the area(s) of international social and economic development, must acknowledge that such differences exist, even as we seek to apply encompassing solutions to large and comprehensive problems.

Development theory and practice of the 1950s and 1960s generally assumed that poverty was more or less homogeneous and that effective poverty alleviation efforts would, in a reasonable period of time, spread sufficiently to include most people. Experience showed these assumptions to be mistaken. Increasingly in the last thirty years, therefore, development analysts, policy-makers, and practitioners (very often responding to evidence brought forward by groups who found themselves excluded through development efforts) have identified categorisations of people who are 'left out' of generalised development processes and who, therefore, require special programming attention. Specifically, we have learned through practical experience, and through analysis of this experience, that certain groups — for example, women, the elderly, children, and others who are marginalised by their societies because of race, ethnicity, religion, or language — very often do not participate in or benefit from development programmes that are generally applied, even when these programmes are recognised as 'successful' in meeting their stated objectives. We have learned that awareness of the intrinsic socio-political structures that determine economic and social roles in any society is an essential ingredient of effective development programming.

The papers in this collection deal with a variety of categories of people and analyse the role assignments, both natural and socially-constructed, that make their circumstances of special concern for development practitioners. They raise and examine central issues of cultural blindness on the part of 'outsider' aid providers who fail to recognise the realities of 'insider' aid recipients. And they propose helpful and important shifts in thinking and programming that are required if development assistance is to serve all of the people it is intended to serve. The advantages and fundamental necessity of recognising differences and diversity are amply demonstrated through these articles.

In this Introduction, however, I shall take a somewhat different approach. I shall argue that the current emphases in international development assistance on recognising differences and appreciating diversity have both positive and negative impacts. In the first section, I begin by examining the gains in development programming that are realised from recognising differences. In the second section, I turn to the corresponding examination of disadvantages that have arisen both for programming and for outcomes when development practitioners misapply the methodologies that highlight difference. In the third section, I pull the two together and discuss the importance of programming on the basis of differences — but of doing so in ways that unite, rather than distinguish, people's interests and that advocate shared societal progress, rather than only special (albeit justified) sub-group empowerment. I conclude that those of us who work internationally must find a way to maintain a balance between appreciation of difference and affirmation of sameness, between programming according to special circumstances and programming for commonality.

The 'good' of recognising differences and appreciating diversity

Recognition of differences

As noted above, early development assistance efforts failed to take account of differences within communities and, thereby, failed both to integrate and benefit all parts of society. The result of this failure was that some people gained from international assistance, while others were systematically excluded and disadvantaged. Foremost among groups that were excluded were women. In country after country, through project after project, the evidence mounted during the 1970s and 1980s that development assistance benefitted male members of societies at the expense of female members of societies. Men gained access to technologies, while women did not; boys entered and completed schooling at rates that far exceeded those of girls; cash crops — largely in the domain of male farmers — were encouraged at the expense of food crops, which were the responsibility of women. Furthermore, evidence also emerged that the distribution of the gains realised through development assistance were not shared equally within families and households. Male family members were often fed before their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters; when family resources were scarce, parents chose to take sons to the clinic when they were ill, but waited, sometimes too long, to see if their daughters would get well without medical assistance; men who earned extra cash through wage labour or the sale of cash crops bought 'luxury' items such as radios and bicycles, while women, whose income sources were shrinking, remained responsible for household food, health, and education and, as they were pressured to meet increasing family needs with fewer resources, favoured sons over daughters, thereby reinforcing the cycle of advantage and disadvantage.

The importance of the recognition of these unintended but systematic consequences of economic change, often brought on and encouraged by external aid, cannot be overemphasised. So long as women, and their roles as producers and distributors in the economic sphere, were 'invisible' to aid planners, the damaging impacts of assistance on them — and, hence, on their families — continued. Many development projects failed because their designers and implementers did not recognise the relevance of gender analysis; as a result, scarce development resources have not produced the broad social and economic benefits that were intended. Attention to women and development, and the introduction of and refinements to Gender Analysis, have made a contribution to development theory and practice that should no longer be questioned by anyone with development experience.

As experience in analysing women's roles and circumstances grew, an appreciation of the importance of other differences also emerged. Development analysts and practitioners found that the assumption of homogeneity in any beneficiary population was a mistake which led to ineffective programming. In addition to acknowledging the differences of women's and men's roles and status, we found it useful to 'disaggregate' populations according to urban and rural contexts, by age groupings, and, often, according to sub-population groups defined by language, ethnicity, clan, religion, or race.

It is important to note that our motivation for identifying such groups was born, primarily, from negative experiences. We were alerted to the importance of differences, because we observed that programmes planned without attention to them did not reach everyone. The categories of people whom we identified were, in general, seen to be 'marginalised' or 'vulnerable'. We shall come back to this in the second section below.

The adoption of disaggregation methodologies resulted in several distinct benefits in development programming.

First, these methodologies overcame the exceedingly important problem of 'invisibility'. That is, they alerted development practitioners to the fact that difference does exist, and it led them to analyse both why it exists and how its existence interacts with the implementation of development activities. Both the recognition of difference and the ensuing understanding of its place and dynamic within societies were essential elements of understanding the context where any effort was to be initiated.

Second, knowing that some groups were excluded from automatic inclusion in benefits allowed development assistance to be directed and honed, so that it reached those groups whose special needs were identified or who would, otherwise, have been left out.

Third, understanding how exclusion of some groups occurs allowed development practitioners to develop more intelligent and accurate strategies for overcoming disadvantage through development assistance. If disadvantage were 'natural' — that is, the inevitable result of innate characteristics of a certain group — then programmes might simply be developed to meet the needs of such groups as an act of charity. However, recognition that the systems which marginalise people according to a 'natural' characteristic such as sex, age, or race, are socially constructed meant that one could devise strategies for altering and reconstructing systems to end marginalisation.

Finally, recognition of difference and the systems that reinforce it allowed development practitioners to set priorities among competing demands for scarce resources. From observing how existing systems lock certain people into disadvantaged positions, they could set priorities among various programme options in order to focus effort and resources on strategies that would most effectively address these systems and enable people to break out of the traps of impoverishment.

These advantages, gained through the recognition of difference, and its systemic creation and re-creation, are great. Development efforts (both international and indigenous) are remarkably improved when they apply the methodologies for disaggregation that have been developed in the past two decades.

Appreciation of diversity

Even as the development assistance community was learning to recognise and to programme in ways that incorporated differences, it was also moving towards an overdue and equally important appreciation of diversity. (The articles in this collection attest to both the importance and momentum of this movement.)

Again, in the 1950s and 1960s, international development assistance provided by countries of the North to countries of the South generally assumed a single development model, based on European and North American experience in the Industrial Revolution. And, again, evidence of failed development efforts in many places revealed the inappropriateness of this assumption. Development practitioners came to see and appreciate the fact that cultures differ and that models of development must take account of diversity if they are to succeed.

Socio-cultural diversity — the rich variety of ways in which people and peoples assemble their systems of belief and values, of working and surviving, and of living in relationships with others — has thus assumed a central place in the thinking and planning of development workers. The appreciation of diversity forces abandonment of formulaic development approaches. Local contextual realities assume priority in the planning of development strategies and programmes.

Distinct advantages are also realised in development programming when diversity is recognised and appreciated.

The first advantage, again, is awareness. Past (and present!) failures of development programming often reflect a misfit between expectations and values imported from one context and the realities of the context where they were applied. To see and to appreciate as valid the existing realities and capacities of people whom development efforts are intended to assist is essential for accurate planning and programming.

Second, when providers of development assistance appreciate local realities and directly incorporate these into plans for developmental change, this ensures that local people, those actually doing the work of their own development, assume responsibility and ownership of their developmental directions and processes. This is essential for what is now referred to as 'sustainability'.

Third, and probably most important, when development practitioners (especially those who act as 'experts') truly appreciate socio-cultural diversity, they undertake their work (whether it is a long-term engagement or a short-term consultancy) on the basis of genuine respect for the people with whom they work. There is strong evidence that such respect on the part of the aid provider for the culture and capacities of the people is a major, if not the primary, determinant of whether people are motivated to engage in the activity of development and, thus, of whether the aid actually achieves its intended outcomes.

Clearly, the case is strong indeed that effective development programming must be based on a recognition of differences and an appreciation of diversity. Much good comes from both. Unfortunately, experience also shows that a misapplied emphasis on disaggregating population groups and on appreciating cultural diversity in order to focus programming efforts may have negative consequences, as well as positive ones.

Possible negative conseauences of programming based on differences and diversity

Recognition of differences

As we noted above, attention to differences was initially motivated by recognition that certain groups were regularly disadvantaged by mainstream development. Thus, disaggregation methodologies are directed primarily towards identifying problem areas. That is, disaggregation is used to identify 'vulnerable' or 'marginalised' groups. What often occurs, then, is that development initiatives are undertaken only on the basis of needs and deprivations, and fail either to recognise or to build on the capacities of the groups to whom the aid is offered. The situation of women provides an example. As it has become commonplace to recognise that women are marginalised from economic and political power and that they are, thus, more vulnerable to poverty and crises than men, it has also become commonplace to assume that femaleness automatically equates with 'vulnerability'. While women are, indeed, more vulnerable to marginalisation and all of its attendant disadvantages than men, they also have immense strengths. They produce, they manage, they nurture, they maintain households and communities in the midst of hardship, and so on. While it is neither necessary nor inevitable that giving attention to differences and vulnerabilities will also result in ignoring capacities, experience shows that, too often, this does occur.

Second, among development agencies that recognise the importance of identifying differences as a way of focusing their programming there is a tendency to perceive and treat all vulnerable groups in the same way. We find, for example, repeated references to 'women and children', as if they comprise one group and as if their circumstances are the same. Of course it is true that women's concerns include, and hence overlap with, those of children. However, while children (at least very young ones) are dependent entirely on others in order to survive, women are not. Putting women and children into one programming category obscures, again, the capacities of women, infantilises them, and results in poor programming. It would be similarly wrong to aggregate different minority groups, or people in other categories of disadvantage, without careful analysis.

Third, the categorisation of people may obscure important differences within a categorised group. To use the example of women again, all women are not the same. In some situations, the fact that women are rich or poor, urban or rural, educated or not may be a more important determinant of their circumstances — and, thus, of appropriate programme activities to support their development — than the fact that they are women per se.