CHAPTER 1
PART I Word Play
Introduction: words and concepts
'When I use a word' Humpty Dumpty said, 'in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all.'
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, 1871 Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws, and began to think. First of all he said to himself: 'That buzzing noise means something. You don't get a buzzing noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something.'
A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 19261
The words used in development continuously change. Some do become hardy perennials – poverty, gender, sustainability, livelihood – long-term survivors, year on year. Others influence policy, thinking and practice and then are used less and less, perhaps in part because their job is done – basic needs, for instance, and feminism (somewhat surprisingly). Others like coordination and integration have their day, fade away and then revive. Yet others gestate for years and then their moment comes and they are almost everywhere – sustainable livelihoods, social capital, civil society, good governance.
Words can feed cynicism and at the same time be a source of fun. To mock fashions in the lexicon of development we use expressions like buzz words, development-speak, flavours of the month, and PC (politically correct); and we describe acronyms as alphabet soup. Current development-speak words can be used for Development Bingo (aka tombola or houseyhousey), a diverting game that can be played by students during lectures on development and more generally by members of the audience in political fora.
Words, bingo and reflexivity introduces the Development Bingo game in which the columns can list the latest and most used fashionable words, including nowadays acronyms such as MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) and RBM (results-based management) and words like harmonization, capacity development, deliverables, social protection, evidence-based, empowerment, accountability and fragile states. These are ticked as they are mentioned. Development bingo brings triple benefits: it mitigates the ordeal of the listener; it enhances critical awareness; and it startles speakers with suppressed laughter or cries of 'development' when a column is complete. This includes an invitation to list and reflect on your own favourite words.
The Cornwall and Eade book Deconstructing Development Discourse is at once entertaining, enlightening and erudite on the subject of words in development and says almost all that needs to be said. For our purposes here let me underline two points. First, the vagueness of the meanings attributed to the same words by different actors – empowerment and participation are notorious cases – can lead to misunderstanding but is not all bad: for it can also sometimes allow action to go ahead, with the word as a Trojan horse. Second, in contrast, defining what you are going to mean by words, in a talk, lecture, or writing, sharpens thinking and helps communication. These two points are in tension, and it is a matter of tactics and judgement, which should be master when and for whom.
For all the cynicism, critiques, whimsy and fun to which development-speak gives rise, words do matter. In my view they matter hugely. They express concepts. They raise issues. Their choice and meanings reveal and express mindsets. Reflexivity, meaning critical reflection on one's own mindset, and warning readers about this, is fundamental. Then the usages and meanings of words evolve. Identifying new ones that have come into use can show us how thinking and practice have changed and are changing. Development Bingo is in the spirit of serious fun, a source of learning as the listener or reader lists words and checks them off as they are used. Such words and their combinations frame and form our perceptions and thought, structure our mindsets, and influence our actions. As Fritjof Capra (1996: 47) put it:
As humans, we exist in language and we continually weave the linguistic web in which we are embedded. We coordinate our behaviour in language, and together in language we bring forth our world.
A word or phrase can make us see things and patterns and possibilities that we would otherwise not have seen. Small is beautiful introduced and legitimated intermediate technology: if Schumacher's publisher had not suggested such an arresting and memorable title, development would have been poorer, and Schumacher's work less known. Simple is sophisticated which follows below is transparently, some might say grossly, derivative. It sought to develop a theme and never took off or had any significant influence. Was it, is it, anything more than a creature of its time (1978)?
Then The power of words in development examines words and phrases as instruments of interpersonal and institutional power. They privilege those who are fluent in English and marginalize those who are not. Jargon has its technical uses but is also an instrument of power, and labelling with words like participatory can be a camouflage.
Many words and phrases that come to flourish seem to start their wider lives in Washington DC. The World Bank at one time aspired to be the Knowledge Bank (Broad, 2007). A central repository and source of knowledge would dangerously concentrate power and threaten diversity and pluralism, and the World Bank did not achieve that ambition. But it maintains its position as a prime source not just of dominant ideologies but also of Words of power.
Appropriation and misuse of participatory was once feared when it was applied to GIS. In the event, committed activists seized the initiative and Participatory GIS became a vibrant movement empowering many weak communities.
The name of an organization interacts with its identity, which in advertising-speak we came to call its image and now in corporate-speak we know as its brand. The name of an organization influences not just how it is seen but whom it recruits, what it does and even how much influence it has. Sightsavers and WaterAid are international NGOs concerned with much more than saving sight or providing water but their identities, images, brands and authority are focused and enhanced by the specificity of their names. A book with an arresting title sells better and has more impact. What's in a name? is of historical interest, referring to the christening of an international organization which later renamed itself, while Hubris and hypocrisy sees mediocrity following the proclaiming of a centre of excellence.
Words empower those who can use them with confidence, especially when the words are or appear new. Some of the power of academics over students, and indeed with their colleagues, lies in the mastery and use of technical terms and jargon. How to impress academic colleagues and Advice to students (in Academic games) are excursions into that world.
What words count? presents ways into analysing a text and the mindset and orientation behind it through counting the number of times words are used and also noting words not used. When applied to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness this provides material for an emblematic sentence of its most common words, and another of words that do not appear at all.
The same can be done when listening to a talk, counting the number of times certain key words are used. This has become a practice of some journalists when reporting on major speeches by politicians.
Finally, What words and aspirations now? invites you to make your own list of words and phrases you would like to become part of the lexicon of development, and then to compare them with some of those that have frequently scored high in participatory workshops.
Words, bingo and reflexivity
A place to start is with the words and concepts we habitually use, listing these, and asking how they frame, influence and reinforce our thinking and action. I have tried to do this for myself. Here is a matrix of what, with fond delusion, I like to believe are some of my favourite words. When I use them in writing I have to check that what I have already written is not already peppered with them.
What are yours? Below is a blank, with more rows, since you are probably not as constrained as I am by pentaphilia (the love of fives of a thing).
In Bingo (aka tombola or housey-housey) players have sheets with columns of numbers. As a caller shouts out random numbers, players tick as theirs come up, and shout out 'BINGO!' when they have a complete column. We can do the same with words in development. So here is an invitation for you to pencil in Table 1.3 with words that you consider have become current and much more used in the past 10 to 15 years. You may want to include acronyms, or make out a separate matrix for them.
When someone is talking or lecturing about development, you can then tick the words as they use them. And perhaps, in development studies, shout 'DEVELOPMENT!' when a column is complete. Particularly after lunch, as a wake up.
Here is my list of recent Development Bingo words. Please bear in mind that they will soon be dated, if they are not already.
'Reflexivity' – critical reflection on one's own mindset, predispositions, values, mental frames, and ways of interpreting experience and reality – is not one of the words in Table 1.4.
And yet, is it not fundamentally important? How can we do well in development if we are not self-aware? Nor are 'power', 'relationships' or 'personal' in much use, though more perhaps than in the past. When we reflect on these, and their omission, are they elephants in the room? And if they are, why do we not use them more?
Simple is sophisticated
Simple is Sophisticated was an unsuccessful attempt to coin a phrase that would catch on and make a difference. The article which follows was a creature of its time, the latter 1970s. In the reference to Modern Rice Mills depriving poor women of livelihoods there lurks the fond idea that technology that would put poor people out of work could be prohibited. This was the decade when a member of the Planning Commission in India advocated banning combine harvesters from Northwest India because they would displace hundreds of thousands of seasonal migrant labourers. We are now in 2011 in a new world. Mobile phones have transformed communications and the quality of life for hundreds of millions of poor rural people. But though their technology is complicated, mobile phones are simple to operate and have become part of many livelihood strategies. They embody the sophistication of both technical complexity and user-friendly simplicity. With them, simple is doubly sophisticated.
To achieve rural development in the third world, the time is overdue for a reversal of professional values; ideas of sophistication should be stood on their head; and true professional sophistication is often to be found in simplicity.
In common usage today (1978) 'sophisticated' means refined, cultivated, advanced and complex, the opposites of crude, boorish, primitive and elementary. Almost everywhere, professionals, including engineers, economists, doctors, architects and agronomists, prefer procedures and techniques which are described as sophisticated and which are variously complex, exact and costly. Professionals believe that it is by using such procedures and techniques that they can best prove their abilities and competence. For them, 'sophisticated' technology is more prestigious than intermediate or appropriate technology; 'sophisticated' methods of project appraisal more rewarding than less elaborate methods; 'sophisticated' surgery more challenging and satisfying than simple surgical operations.
But most of these procedures, techniques and values have been conceived and evolved in and for the rich, privileged and industrialized North, not the poor, underprivileged and predominantly rural South. The flow from North to South of textbooks, training, and professional recognition and rewards brainwashes and socializes Third World professionals into accepting these value systems, which, as Carol J. Pierce Colfer has argued in a recent Development Forum, draws them away from the poorer rural people. Prestige and recognition go to those who use complicated and costly tools and whose papers are published in hard international journals. Professionals who seek a national or international reputation all too often sense that this can be best be achieved by excelling according to the values of professional establishments of the North.
Much that passes for professional sophistication is inappropriate in the North itself; but it is doubly so in the South. The cult of these forms of sophistication reinforces dependence and impedes development in the South. Elaborate procedures and complex techniques, when transferred from North to South have high costs. They generate an appetite for expensive equipment, for foreign experts, for counterparts, for training in the North, for data collection and for the processing and analysis of data. Resources to meet these demands are diverted from alternative uses. Urban bias is accentuated, dependence sustained or deepened, and national professionals in the countries of the South gain skills, experience and contacts which encourage them to migrate to the North and to international agencies. The rural areas, where most of the poor people live, remain peripheral within peripheral countries, a mine from which data, skills and funds are extracted.
Reaching the poor
But if development means ending poverty and deprivation, and if most of the poor and deprived people live in the rural areas of the South, then true sophistication will be found in those procedures and techniques which most effectively reach and help them. Methods tailored to the needs and situation of people who are poor and scattered in rural agricultural communities where skills are scarce are likely to be radically different from those evolved for people who are relatively rich and concentrated in urban industrial centres in countries where skills are plentiful. What appears professionally sophisticated for the one will often be professionally crass for the other.
Some examples can illustrate the point. One can ask – which is more sophisticated:
• A soils map made over a long period by a highly trained scientist or a similar map made in a much shorter period in collaboration with local farmers?
• A fishing survey by an international expert, taking months, costing thousands of dollars, and culminating in proposals for expensive equipment to be used on a remote lake in an area with poor maintenance facilities; or a two-week survey by a local university student leading to immediately feasible proposals for upgrading and expanding existing fishing methods?
• The introduction of modern rice mills with a potential for destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of poor women; or the improvement of traditional rice hullers which would maintain their employment?
• A computer-based system requiring experts, counterparts and massive field data collection to monitor rural projects; or a weight-for-age chart to enable illiterate mothers to monitor the growth of their babies?
• The work of a doctor who performs open-heart surgery for a few of the privileged; or that of a doctor who trains health workers from villages to provide services for many of the deprived?
In each case, there is room for argument on the basis of detail. But the general point stands out clearly. The second, simpler procedure or technique, closer to the rural people and involving them more, is more cost effective. The lesson is the paradox: that in attacking rural poverty, it is sophisticated to be simple.
This principle, that simple is sophisticated, applies to much of rural development. It applies, first, in the design of rural development projects. Approaches which can be managed by rural people themselves are usually more successful than those which cannot. Approaches which enable them through their own efforts to improve their levels of living are usually more successful than those which require major inputs from outside. Housing, tools, machinery, cropping systems and services which they can maintain, operate and manage are likely to be more cost-effective than those which they cannot. Moreover, in rural development, simple is replicable.
