Error and myth

Abstract

The history of international development is replete with errors of knowledge and practice and self-sustaining myths to which they have given rise. Often these are generated, propagated with passion, and acted on in good faith, by people who mean well, only later to be recognized as wrong. Examples are presented from policies and programmes, beliefs about rural realities, supposed and asserted scientific and medical 'facts', and heresies which later proved to be true. Analysis of these and other evidence identifies three clusters of actors and forces which alone or in combination generate and sustain error and myth. These are, first, relational and personal (power, interests, mindsets, and ego); second, data-related (misleading data, extrapolating out of context, and overlooking history); and third, behavioural and experiential (embedding narratives and beliefs; distance and insulation; selective experiences through visits, presentations and perceptions; repeating narratives, stories and statistics; repetitive confirmation bias; public relations, soundbites and speeches; and reimagining and rewriting history assisted by the self-serving malleability of memory). Combined variously in different contexts, these factors and forces stand in the way of knowing better. To confront them, an agenda is proposed for reflection and action.

Keywords: error, myth, beliefs, heresies, mindsets, data, narratives, repetition, memory, ego, self-delusion

To err is human. (Seneca, Roman stoic philosopher, c. 4 BC–AD 65)

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)

Adults are obsolete children. (Dr Seuss, psychologist and cartoonist)

Prologue

International development is replete with errors, myths, and omissions. To know better, we need first to understand how these come about and are sustained and to reflect on what can be done. In this chapter I describe some errors and myths and try to tease out some of their common characteristics.

We all make mistakes. We can all learn from them. But whether we actually do learn from them, and our speed of learning, are things that decline with age. As infants and children, our trial, error, and correction are continuous: falling over or mispronouncing words are ways we learn. But as we grow older, know more, and are more in control of our actions, we become more responsible for what we do and do not do, and errors of commission or omission become increasingly matters of shame to be hidden or denied. Learning is less instantaneous and automatic: the time between actions and effects extends with longer causal chains. We know much more, and it is more embedded. Feedback from which we can learn takes longer and may be distorted or rejected. Power, social relations, and ego more and more influence how and what we learn, mislearn, and do not learn. From a learning point of view, we can ask ourselves, do we become, have we become, as in Dr Seuss's aphorism, obsolete children?

What has this to do with development? I ask this question both for development in the sense of 'good change' everywhere, and for international development in its past usual sense. For these, as I shall illustrate in later chapters, changes are accelerating in the conditions we experience, in what we need to know, what we need to learn and unlearn, and how we do that. One major shift is reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the past development and international development referred to less developed and developing countries, but in 2016 the SDGs have made development objectives universal. SDG 10, for instance, to reduce inequality between and within countries, applies to the USA, UK, and Russia as much as to Afghanistan, the Philippines, or Zimbabwe. The old distinctions of North and South, of developed and developing countries, make less sense than ever as we all recognize that we have much to learn collegially from each other.

On the positive side, enormous progress has been made with outstanding contributions to understanding and action. Among scholars, Amartya Sen stands out for his revolutionary insights and thinking, and among international organizations, UNICEF for its leadership and contributions to the welfare of children and women. And across the board, innumerable past errors have been corrected.

So learning, learning to learn better, and learning from each other become opportunities and priorities for us all. We cannot return to childhood: the causal chains between actions and effects are often uncertain and feedback missing or misleading. But what we can do is ask how we 'know', and how we learn, and how we can know and learn better. Can we 'embrace error', to use David Korten's phrase from the 1980s? What can we learn from failure, from what has not worked, and what lessons can we draw that are applicable across countries and contexts? And what can we learn from the resilience of myths, of beliefs that are false?

In searching for answers to these questions, I have chosen to focus on examples and evidence with which I have some familiarity. This gives a bias towards rural development, agriculture, and sanitation. The reader will make her own judgement whether this distorts the inferences and conclusions I draw, or whether and to what extent they have general validity.

The costs of errors and myths to those who are 'last', those who are poorer, weaker, and more vulnerable, have been horrendous. The environmental, social, economic, and other costs in damage done and resources misallocated have been beyond counting. These errors and myths have often been generated and propagated with passion and acted on in good faith by people who meant well, only later to be revealed as ill-founded and wrong. Like others, I have myself been seriously wrong (see, for example, chapter 1 in Chambers, 2014) and have done harm when believing that I was doing good. This has led me to wonder how I and others could have been so misguided and made me curious about error and myth, how we know and do not know, and how and why we so often get it wrong. So in what follows there is no 'holier than thou'. My hope is that if we can understand how and why we – the collective development professional 'we' – have been so wrong so often and for so long, perhaps we can learn to do better.

With this in mind, this first chapter is empirically based on cases of error and myth (for more detail on the examples, see Chambers, 1997: 15–32). If we accept that all knowledge is contingent and provisional, this applies also to 'corrected' versions. There is no simple, final or complete truth and there will always remain the residual question of who debunks the debunker.

Being wrong: clusters of errors and myths

The errors and myths I shall consider cluster into three domains: policies and programmes; professionals' beliefs about rural realities; and rejected heresies which have later been recognized as well founded. I draw on these for insights. I describe some of these briefly. The impatient reader may wish to skim or skip to the analysis which starts on page 7.

Policies and programmes

Policies and programmes are conspicuous because of the vast scale of their impacts and the many deficiencies of feedback to those responsible.

Internationally, the most conspicuous is structural adjustment. This was imperiously forced on indebted countries in the 1980s, requiring them to cut budgets to education, health, infrastructure, and other services. Many millions of children were denied education and many millions will have suffered and died younger than they otherwise would have done. The costs to poor and vulnerable people were unseen by those responsible for the policy. Later debt relief reduced the burden but only after irreparable harm had been done on a vast scale.

Two other international policy errors imposed by the World Bank compounded countries' debts. For Integrated Rural Development Projects the Bank lent poor countries $19 bn over 13 years. These untested projects were driven rapidly to scale. Top-down, conceived and planned without participation, most of them especially in Africa, the projects were disastrous failures which, to its credit, the World Bank itself exposed (World Bank, 1988). Another disaster promoted by the World Bank in the latter 1970s and much of the 1980s was the Training and Visit (T and V) System of Agricultural Extension (Benor and Harrison, 1977). This rigid, routinized, top-down system of agricultural extension was a paradigmatic misfit for agriculture. As Asian countries saw this and rejected T and V, its proponents moved on to Africa. Hailed as a breakthrough, it was a catastrophic and expensive failure with the costs borne by the countries at the receiving end.

Passing to national policies and programmes, three catastrophic failures are sources of lessons that I shall draw out later. First, the village collective farming of the Ujamaa programme in Nyerere's Tanzania was believed nationally and internationally to be widespread. Research by political science students at the University of Dar es Salaam on vacation, edited by Proctor and published with the ironic but diplomatic title Building Ujamaa Villages in Tanzania (1971), revealed that it was deeply unpopular, with extensive coercion, resistance, and non-implementation. A second massive failure was the attempt in India to spread the warabandi system of irrigation water distribution from north-west India to the rest of the country. But the warabandi system of fixed, timed rotation of canal irrigation water is only feasible in the special physical, climatic, and social conditions of north-west India (Chambers, 1988: 92–102). The Seventh Five-Year Plan (1980–1985) set a target of 8 million hectares to be covered, all over India. The programme was an almost total failure, littering rural India with metal boards listing distribution times, remaining rusting for the delight only of scrap metal merchants and archaeologists of error. Third, the Indian Government's rural sanitation programmes were comprehensive and sustained failures over some three decades to 2014, to an extent and on a scale to which there may be no equivalent examples outside totalitarian regimes. For instance, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) launched in 1999 had a target date for an open defecation-free rural India of 2012. In 2011 the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation reported rural sanitation coverage of 68 per cent. The census of 2011 found 31 per cent, indicating that over 8 million more households were defecating in the open than 10 years earlier (see p. 12).

Professionals' beliefs about rural realities

Here by way of illustration are four:

Woodfuel gap theory led to predictions of acute fuel shortages in rural Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s it was believed that much of sub-Saharan Africa faced a severe fuel crisis and that in many areas fuelwood would run out. The pattern varied but in general the crisis did not happen, and in quite extensive areas woody biomass became more plentiful, for example on farms in much of Kenya (Tiffen et al., 1993).

Post-harvest losses of harvested crops were for many years cited as 30 per cent. A major source of this figure was not farmers' fields and practices, but a time-of-harvesting trial for rice on the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) research station (De Padua, 1976, cited in Greeley, 1987). At least 10 projects of careful field research showed these post-harvest losses to lie most often in the range of 4 to 7 per cent.

People destroy trees. Through colonial times and into the 1990s, scientists and administrators in Guinea and latterly also donors believed that the forest islands in the forest-savanna transition zone in West Africa were relics of a much more extensive forest. Human activity, including burning, had turned forest into savanna. Sustained and meticulous field research drawing on many sources, including travellers' journals, oral histories, time series aerial photographs, and analysis of forest species composition and age, showed the reverse to be true. Through cultivation, judicious burning, and planting and protecting trees, people extended the forests around their settlements (Fairhead and Leach, 1996a, b). This was also the case in the same eco-zone elsewhere in West Africa (Fairhead and Leach, 2003).

Desertification: the Sahara is marching south. The mainstream desertification narrative flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. A standard statement was that each year 6 million hectares of land were being 'irretrievably lost through various forms of desertification or destroyed to desert-like conditions' and 21 million hectares annually were being reduced to zero or even negative productivity (UNEP, 1984, cited in Swift, 1997: 81, and repeated in the Brundtland Report [WCED, 1987: 128] and elsewhere). Human activity was deemed responsible, but later research found it overwhelmingly related to rainfall.

Rejection of heresies

The third cluster of errors is the out of hand rejection of heresies which later come to be accepted.

These are best known in science and medicine with a roll of honour of scientists, medical researchers, and others who have been the first to make a discovery and see a new truth, or who have questioned a conventional dogma, mindset, or shibboleth, and have been disbelieved, ridiculed, and penalized. They have faced entrenched received wisdomoften wielding powerful sanctions against apostates. Historical cases like Giordano Bruno and Galileo are well known. Others are more recent, for instance:

• Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, set out the theory of continental drift in 1912. Despite geographical and geological evidence, his theory was ridiculed and not taken seriously for six decades until evidence of magma convection currents provided a causal force that could explain it.

• Barry Marshall, following up on a discovery by J.R. Warren in 1979 of a bacterium Helicobacter pylori in the stomach (which was believed to be too acidic for bacteria), had eventually to infect himself to persuade a sceptical establishment that peptic ulcers were caused by bacteria and could be treated with antibiotics. Before that they had been attributed to stress and sometimes part of the stomach was removed (Uphoff and Coombs, 2001).

• Kilmer McCully observed in the mid-1960s that arteriosclerosis was associated with high levels of the amino acid homocysteine, counter to the prevailing belief that it was caused by high blood levels of cholesterol. Unable to obtain research grants, he had to leave Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Eventually other researchers confirmed his results, and his research was widely praised for being correct decades before its time (Uphoff and Coombs, 2001).

• In 1949, three years before the development of the Salk polio vaccine in 1952, Frederick Klenner reported having cured 60 out of 60 polio patients, including some who were already showing symptoms of paralysis, with massive intravenous doses of vitamin C. Klenner presented his findings to an annual session of the American Medical Association but the medical establishment took no notice, although at the time polio was a worldwide scourge and there was no effective treatment (Levy, 2002: 19–30). The Salk vaccine later became the universal treatment.

• Howard Temin, whose finding that non-genetic changes in RNA could be inherited confronted orthodox neo-Darwinian genetic reductionism, was condemned for heresy before later being recognized with a Nobel prize (Lipton, 2008: 58).

• Umami, the fifth taste after sweet, sour, salt, and bitter, was finally accepted 90 years after its discovery by the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda. The acceptance came when in 2000 and 2002 receptors were finally found on the tongue that were specific to it! Lehrer (2008: 59) writes that 'science had persisted in its naïve and unscientific belief in four, and only four, tastes'.

And these are but a few in a long and growing list.

Similar rejection and ridicule have been evident in rural development:

• In the late 1980s, N.C. Saxena, a senior Indian bureaucrat, recognized that contrary to the universal professional view, prohibiting small farmers from harvesting trees on their land had the perverse effect that they would cut them to realize their value while they could, and then not plant or protect others, whereas if they were free to harvest and sell them at any time they would do the opposite – plant and protect trees. He found himself a lone voice among a dozen foresters and others in arguing for abolishing the restrictions. The Minister for the Environment was vehemently against abolishing restrictions. It was years before it was generally accepted that Saxena was right and that farmers who can cut their trees any time they wish normally preserve them as savings until they need to cash them.

• Rickets was reported in part of rural Bangladesh. Rickets was known to be associated with lack of vitamin D or of sunlight. There was plenty of sunlight in rural Bangladesh. The reports were met with 'a bewildering array of rebuttals' (Uphoff and Coombs, 2001). Yet it was there, with nearly a third of the children in one community affected by it. It had been overlooked for 15 years. The subsequent explanation was calcium deficiency, and its occurrence was recognized as an unseen epidemic (Uphoff and Coombs, 2001).