News from the Collective

The Shelter

On January 26, 2017, the IKEA refugee shelter was declared the worldwide Design of the Year in a unanimous decision.[1] When I interviewed one of the jurors about the process I was told that they’d chosen the “obvious winner”: the IKEA shelter was high profile, it had featured widely in the media, it was a positive story with a clear social purpose, and it offered a practical solution to the so-called “refugee crisis,” one of the most significant issues of the previous twelve months.[2] The London Design Museum has been awarding the “Design of the Year” for a decade now, celebrating examples that “promote or deliver change, enable access, extend design practice, or capture the spirit of the year” (Beazley 2017). The IKEA refugee shelter seemed to match all of these aims, claiming to be modular, sustainable, long lasting, recyclable, easily assembled, affordable, and scalable. It was installed on the Greek islands to shelter newly arrived refugees in 2015, and it came with the backing of the United Nations (UN) Refugee Agency, who purchased 15,000 units for distribution around the world.

The juror I spoke to explained that the shelter won because it “tackles one of the defining issues of the moment: providing shelter in an exceptional situation whether caused by violence and disaster…. [It] provides not only a design but secure manufacture as well as distribution.” A statement described the project as “relevant and even optimistic,” concluding, “it shows the power of design to respond to the conditions we are in and transform them” (Beazley 2017; personal interview, April 25, 2017, Design Museum, London).

It is easy to understand why this shelter has generated so much interest since it was first announced in 2013. It has received funding from IKEA, a company that has shaped so much of everyday life in the Global North and whose minimalist modernism has populated so many domestic environments. As Keith Murphy points out, there is a social democratic spirit underpinning so much of Swedish design, a combination of simplicity, affordability, and universality that both reflects and promotes a more egalitarian social order (Murphy 2015; see also Garvey 2017). When applied to refugee housing, this has all the makings of positive story. The media are given something their readers can relate to—the experience of unpacking and constructing IKEA flat-pack furniture—and can connect it to a problem that concerns us all: how to house the millions of refugees we see on the news. The IKEA refugee shelter, the story goes, can be assembled in four to six hours with a basic manual and no specialist tools. Everything comes in two compact boxes, much like those that contain your new bed and table from the IKEA store. More attractively, the design arrives with a number of innovative little tricks, including a photovoltaic panel that provides sufficient electricity to power a small light and mobile phone charger. It seems like a heartwarming example of philanthro-capitalism, good design, and humanitarian innovation (Scott-Smith 2016). What’s not to like?

For anyone who has actually seen the shelter up close, it looks rather mundane after this hyperbolic description. It has a rectangular floor plan, vertical walls, and a pitched roof. The shelter is fairly small, covering an area of 17.5 square meters, and it is designed to house a family of up to five people. When inside, you can look up and see the entire structure laid bare: a standalone steel frame with imposing horizontal beams, onto which foam panels are clipped. These panels are made from polyolefin, a light, flexible plastic, and they have the feeling and texture of swimming floats. They have been attached to the frame with hand-tightened bolts and brackets, and the shelter has four small ‘window’ openings, ventilation slots, and a lockable door. The main designer described its chunky, basic appearance as the kind of house “a 5-year-old would draw” (personal interview, May 18, 2017, Stockholm). It is, indeed, visually uninspiring, but this is because it is meant to be basic. Like much of IKEA’s product line, it is mass-produced, economical modernism. It is meant to offer a shelter that is immediate, quick, affordable, and easily transportable, staying as close as possible to the price and weight of the main alternative: the tent.

Tents have been the go-to shelter for humanitarian organizations for more than 50 years. The UN Refugee Agency distributes tens of thousands of them annually, and they are still valued for their lightweight, inexpensive simplicity. To be taken seriously as a humanitarian product, therefore, the IKEA shelter needs to be comparable to the tent in terms of price and weight while making some crucial improvements. There are four, in particular, that can be found in this design. First, the IKEA shelter provides increased security through a lockable door. Second, it provides greater privacy through firmer and more opaque walls. Third, it provides improved communication with a mobile phone-charging station. And fourth, it lasts considerably longer: up to four years rather than just one. These improvements encapsulate the basic requirements for dignified living according to the designers, combining security, privacy, durability, and connection to the outside world. These features, the narrative goes, are particularly important given the protracted nature of so many contemporary refugee situations and the likelihood of a lengthy exile.[3]

When I spoke to the designers about dignity, they came back again and again to the same material expressions, which were fascinating in their tangibility and their conception of refugee social worlds. Dignity meant being able to stand up in the IKEA shelter, which is impossible in a tent. Dignity meant having walls that were “knocky”: firmer, more secure, more resonant when tapped, which distinguished the materials from tarpaulin. Dignity meant privacy: whereas silhouettes can cause a problem in tents, the IKEA shelter does not reveal activity inside when the lights are on at night; its material is more opaque and disperses the shadows. Such improvements, however small, allow the design team to mobilize a more expansive, idealistic rhetoric. In its publicity materials, the shelter has become a “safer, more dignified home away from home for millions of displaced people across the world.” It has channeled “smart design, innovation and modern technology” to offer “a sense of peace, identity and dignity.” It is “universally welcoming”, a “home away from home” that balances “the needs of millions of people living in different cultures, climates and regions with a rational production—a single solution” (Better Shelter 2015; personal interview, May 19, 2017, Stockholm, Sweden). Far from being a better tent, this shelter has some revolutionary ambitions. But is it a better tent? Does it live up to its aims of producing a compact, cheap, lightweight product for meeting a basic human need?

The Reaction

The day after the announcement of the prize I sensed a collective sigh of despair among my colleagues working on refugee issues, which was tangible in personal conversations, snarky asides, and exasperated emails. The failures of the shelter were, for many of them, far too obvious. It was meager, limited, with no proper floor, no insulation, no natural light, and with a structure that let in drafts and dust. It had been oversold, under-ordered, and was described as sustainable when in fact it involved flying piles of metal and plastic around the world. It ignored established practice in the humanitarian shelter sector, which advocates the use of local materials and abundant local labor, and, above all, it was accompanied by an insistent triumphalism, with media reports pushing the narrative that an intractable problem had been solved. It had not. Managing refugee arrivals is a complex political issue that requires sustained political engagement, legal reform, and advocacy in host states to ensure investment in welfare and protection. Although these were not the aims of the IKEA refugee shelter, such lavish praise and attention, my informants felt, were a distraction. Many such “innovative designs” have become a fetish, creating a mistaken reassurance that circumstances can be controlled while obscuring a series of more serious, structural issues that remain unaddressed (Scott-Smith 2013).
 

The most tangible criticisms of the IKEA shelter, I soon realized, came from two opposing directions. On the one hand, there were those who argued the shelter did too little. It was a mean little space, they suggested, that looked like a garden shed or, due to its plastic panels, a chemical toilet. This line of critique usually came from architects, who filed the object contemptuously under “product design” and declared that it involved no architectural thinking at all. Architecture, they pointed out, should respond to the site and local environment, not mass-produce a universal design with no adaptability or control. Architecture should create sensitive and carefully planned responses to specific problems, not ignore basic elements such as insulation, proper flooring, and natural light. Architecture should also be pleasing to the eye. If you took the Vitruvian triad of architectural virtues, the IKEA shelter seemed to fail on every count. Firmitas, utilitas, and venustas was the aim, but the shelter was flimsy rather than firm, flawed rather than useful, ugly rather than beautiful.[4] It was particularly galling for this group of critics that the shelter won not just Design of the Year, but that it won the architectural category as well.

The other type of criticism came from humanitarians. They argued not that the shelter did too little, but that it did too much. It provided a fully integrated, flat-pack solution when this was rarely required or appropriate. It flew in a prefabricated house when there were better opportunities to work from the bottom up. It lionized designers when design was rarely a priority. Unlike architects, humanitarians were working in a context of limited time and limited resources. They worked with the mantra that “shelter is a process not a product,” a slogan that derives from the work of Ian Davis (1978), one of the founding thinkers of the humanitarian shelter sector, who argued that humanitarians needed to focus on the way people shelter themselves. Davis said that disaster-affected communities had their own techniques for finding and building shelter, suggesting that humanitarian shelter should mean discouraging designers and other outside “experts.” The priority should be to provide materials such as wood, nails, tarpaulin, and tape that help people build their own homes. These could be used and reused as people expanded their accommodation. The crucial task, in other words, was not to provide finished shelters, but to support people in their own process of sheltering.[5]

The Tension

In the middle of May 2017, I took a trip to Stockholm to meet the IKEA shelter’s design team and see how they navigated these two very different criticisms. I arrived at their headquarters on the 11th floor of the old Ericsson building in a southern suburb of the city, and spent some days learning about their brief, their aims, and their ways of thinking. The first thing that became clear was that this was not, in fact, an “IKEA shelter.” It was a designed by a group of independent Swedish industrial designers who had met at college and developed the basic idea in discussion with humanitarians in Geneva. They later received substantial financial support from the IKEA Foundation, which allowed them to refine, test, and iterate the idea, eventually leading to a commitment from the UN Refugee Agency to purchase a large number of units.

As I learned more about the project, it soon became clear that the story of the shelter seemed to be constantly swinging like a pendulum. It was caught between the expansive utopian idealism that so often underpins the announcement of new humanitarian designs and the restricted, mundane implications of their actual implementation.  Both types of criticism, in other words, were basically correct: the IKEA shelter is both ‘too much’ and ‘too little’. It is clearly a product rather than a process, so it ends up being overwrought, top-down, and “too much” for aid workers who are skeptical of universal solutions. At the same time, it has been designed to be cheap and lightweight, so it will always be “too little” for those with bigger ideas about what design can achieve (especially as it lacks many of the basic elements that are crucial to architecture, such as proper flooring, insulation, light, strength, and beauty). The formal name for the shelter seems to encapsulate this tension. It is properly called the “Better Shelter”, and I was reprimanded in Stockholm for using the name “IKEA shelter,” which remains in common parlance but has never been formally adopted.[6] This name emphasizes the restricted horizon of improvement. The product aspires to be better, but it is no more than shelter. It idealistically attempts to improve the world, but pursues this by providing basic shelter rather than engaging with a more expansive terrain of housing.

The problem of doing too much and too little was powerfully illustrated in December 2015, when the Swiss city of Zurich conducted a fire safety test on the IKEA shelter. The video of the test was screened on the news and subsequently circulated online: it featured a series of terrifying images in which a small fire, illuminating first the translucent sides of the shelter, suddenly engulfed the scene in an explosion of flames and molten plastic. The media picked up on the story, Zurich cancelled its intended use of the shelters for new migrant arrivals, and distribution of the shelter began to slow. This was perhaps the biggest challenge the design had faced since its inception, and the fire test led to more than a year of additional work as the team made changes to the shelter’s design – mostly adjustments to the panel material. During this process, however, the design team found no clear code to work. Fire retardancy standards and testing procedures could not be found in the usual humanitarian handbooks, and so the team felt hostage to unrealistic criteria. The Swiss tests had compared the shelter with a permanent residential building, which seemed unfair (as a tent, which was the closest equivalent, would fare no better), yet it seemed impossible to object when the Swiss fire tests were released. The shelter was meant to be “better,” and the whiff of double standards would drift over the scene very quickly if they argued this was a shelter for a different population. The idea that refugee accommodation should be held to lower standards would not be good publicity for a product so concerned with the promoting dignity.

The fire tests raised a number of questions. Is this a “slightly” Better Shelter? Or is it “sometimes” a better shelter, depending on location and context? And when, exactly, is it a better shelter – in which times and places? One thing is clear: most people would not choose to live in one of these structures because of its obvious limitations. It has no floor or insulation, barely any natural light, and a tiny living space, even if its three or four tangible improvements certainly make it better than a tent. But then again, it should be better, as it costs a good deal more than a tent: currently twice the price of a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) standard family model. Is this a problem? Don’t we expect a better shelter to be a more expensive shelter? Yet how much is too much? What if twice the price means aiding half as many people? Is this a “better” result?

As the IKEA shelter becomes more widely used in different locations, a clear lesson has begun to emerge: that the whole product is deeply dependent on context. It is only “better” in some times and places. It may be “better” when compared with a tent, but not when compared with a Swiss apartment building. It may be “better” in a Middle Eastern refugee camp, but not in a Western European reception facility. It may be “better” when funds are plentiful and refugee numbers limited, but not when refugees are plentiful and funds limited. It might be “better” when there is an urgent need for emergency shelters, but not when there is scope for people to build a home of their own.

The Lagom Shelter

Perhaps this, in the end, defines the wider world of little development devices and humanitarian goods: they are simultaneously too much and too little. They are vulnerable to the charge of being too limited as well as the charge of being too expansive. They fail to tackle fundamental global injustices, but they still make numerous ideological assumptions about human life and human dignity beneath their search for modest improvements. The little development device oscillates between its grand visions of human improvement and its modest engineering in a tiny frame. The humanitarian good balances a philanthro-capitalist utopia with the minimalist aim of saving lives. All of this is encapsulated in the slightly Better Shelter. When I discussed these thoughts with the team in Stockholm, they basically agreed, and reached for the Swedish word lagom to describe their aims. It is tricky to translate, but means something like “the right amount,” “neither too little nor too much.” The Better Shelter is lagom because it has to be viable as well as adding value. It has to negotiate with the critics who claim it is “too much” as well as those who say it does “too little.” The shelter could never please architectural critics because it was only designed as a cheap, short-term home, and it would never please bottom-up humanitarian practitioners because it was too top-down and complete. Lagom captures the search for balance while reflecting a wider ethos of democratic Swedish design.[7]

Yet aspiring to be lagom does not make the central tension disappear. Just like being “better,” being lagom depends on context. What counts as “just enough” depends on where you are, who you are, and what you are doing. Something lagom in Sweden may not be lagom elsewhere. This became apparent just before the Better Shelter was launched, when a handful of units were shipped to Lebanon for a practical test with refugees. On their arrival in the Bekaa Valley, a group of armed and angry Lebanese neighbors appeared. The shelters, in their view, were too permanent. It did not matter that they had no foundations. It did not matter that they could be removed in less than a day. It did not matter that the walls and roof would degrade in just a few years. The structures were too solid, and the authorities agreed.[8] The Better Shelter had become “too much” for the Lebanese political context, just as in Switzerland it had become “too little.” The same features that made it insufficient in one country made it extravagant in another.

So although the Better Shelter tries to be better everywhere, it can never hope to adapt to the infinite complexity of refugee crises and its scales became disrupted when butting up against hard political realities. Since 2013, the designers have been working assiduously in Stockholm to optimize every component: changing the clips and panel material, redesigning the bolts and vents, refining the door and frame. They think an improved product can overcome both the Swiss fire tests and the Lebanese resistance. But what is “better” will always change with context. The Lagom Shelter can only be truly Lagom on the 11th floor of the old Ericcson building in Stockholm. As soon as it moves, the balance changes. Lagom cannot be built into any universal form.

References

Beazley. 2017. “Flat-packed refugee shelter named best design of 2016”. Beazley Design of the Year Press Release, 26.01.2017. Available at link

Better Shelter. 2015. Better Shelter: A Home Away From Home. Better Shelter Promotional Leaflet. Available at link.

Davis, I. 1978. Shelter After Disaster. Oxford, UK: Oxford Polytechnic Press.

Garvey, P. 2017. Unpacking Ikea Cultures: Swedish Design for the Purchasing Masses. London, UK: Routledge.

Murphy, K. 2015. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Scott-Smith, T. 2013. “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects and the Management of Malnutrition in Emergencies.” Third World Quarterly 34(5): 913-28.

———. 2016. “Humanitarian Neophilia: The Innovation Turn and Its Implications.” Third World Quarterly 37(12): 2229–2251.

———. 2017. “The Humanitarian-Architect Divide.” Forced Migration Review 55:67-8.

Sewell, Abby, and Charlotte Alfred. 2017. “Evicted Refugees in Lebanon Have Nowhere Left to Run.” Refugees Deeply, September 28. Available at link.

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Notes

[1] The phrase “IKEA refugee shelter” is a misnomer. As explained below, this object has been produced by a group of Swedish industrial designers who received financial support and sponsorship from the IKEA Foundation. The formal name for the product is the Better Shelter, but the phrase “IKEA refugee shelter” is still widely used. I continue to use it partly for the sake of recognition, and partly to highlight the intimate connection with IKEA, which is central to the story of this product despite being made distant through several degrees of institutional separation.

[2] I use scare quotes around the idea of “crisis” here for three reasons: first, because the “refugee crisis” is based on a doubtful claim that the number of refugees in the world today is “unprecedented”. Second, because much larger refugee numbers routinely arrive in developing countries – this situation is only a “crisis” because it has affected the rich world. And third, the crisis has not been a result of refugee numbers, which is relatively manageable, but the political response. If anything, this is not a refugee crisis, but a hospitality crisis.

[3] The whole design of this shelter emerged in part from UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s (UNHCR’s) recognition that refugees are spending ever-longer periods in camps, and therefore tents are no longer suitable due to their short lifespan.

[4] For this reflection on the relationship with the Vitruvian virtues, I am grateful to Mark E. Breeze.

[5] The critics do not even agree. Humanitarians have their biases; architects have theirs. I have written about this tension in the June 2017 issue of Forced Migration Review (Scott-Smith 2017).

[6] Its previous name was the Refugee Housing Unit (RHU), which made for a popular humanitarian acronym but was never very catchy. The rebrand as ‘Better Shelter’ tried to quash the use of “IKEA Shelter” completely, which is too reminiscent of corporate sponsorship.

[7] IKEA have developed a Lagom project in recent years. See here.

[8] For more on the political circumstances of the “no camp” policy in Lebanon, see Sewell and Alfred (2017).

Or, How the Bible, Witchcraft, and Botany Were Brought Together By Bureaucracy In A Completely Everyday Fashion That Was Totally Normal At The Time, No, Really, Stay With Me On This One You Guys. Because I can explain. This is … Continue reading →

A contribution by Dr Kayleigh Hodgkinson-Murphy and Dr Angela Daly.

The QUT Pathways to Ethical Data project combines the interdisciplinary expertise of Dr Angela Daly, Dr Kate Devitt and Dr Monique Mann, assisted by Dr Kayleigh Hodgkinson-Murphy, to investigate and promote ethical data practices & initiatives, towards a fair and just digital economy. The team members are co-editing an INC Theory on Demand book on ‘Good Data’ and currently have a call out for proposed chapters for the book, which will be published in late 2018.

Last month, on 22nd November, approximately 50 industry practitioners and academics gathered at Queensland University of Technology’s Gardens Point campus in Brisbane, Australia to participate in the ‘Pathways to Ethical Data’ workshop – known as ‘Good Data’ for short. Collecting participants from across Australia and overseas, as well as from a variety of industry, government and discipline backgrounds, the workshop sought to examine and discuss the complex issues surrounding ‘good’ and ‘ethical’ data practices.

Early in the workshop, Dr Kate Devitt from QUT facilitated an activity that asked everyone to order themselves from most to least dystopian in their view of data practices today and in the future. This activity served not only as an introduction between participants but as an introduction to the depth and breadth of opinions held on the practices of data collection, retention, research, and use. Many participants stood around the centre of the line, reflecting the general group opinion that data is neither inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather that it’s the structures and practices surrounding the collection, retention or use of data that has an impact on whether the data can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

The themes that appeared during these early discussions were revisited in the longer talks given by various professionals in the field. Associate Professor Raymond Lovett (ANU), Dr Donna Cormack (University of Otago Wellington) and Dr Vanessa Lee (University of Sydney) spoke to the group on perspectives of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, identifying the specific complexities in both collecting and using data relating to Indigenous populations. Their discussions paralleled issues raised within the group discussions, namely that good data needs to engage with the community and further consideration needs to be given to data practices that reproduce colonial structures. Following this, a collection of lightening talks paired industry professionals with academics to speak in detail on particular topics such as community wifi initiatives, electronic health records, the ethics of open data and the recent ‘robodebt’ controversy in Australia where the government has badly implemented algorithmic decision-making to identify overpayments of welfare. These talks gave an opportunity to blend industry expertise with a broader academic framework and led to passionate and spirited discussion throughout the room.

The workshop proved to be an informative and valuable introduction to the project – identifying just how complex the issues surrounding data can be. However, while participants were honest about the very real issues and problems currently enmeshed in various industry and government data practices, there was also considerable discussion about the routes available to move towards more ethical data futures.

Following the daytime workshop, the QUT Good Data project team partnered with Thoughtworks’ Brisbane office for a public evening event. After a technical demonstration of bias and discrimination in machine learning, QUT’s Dr Monique Mann facilitated a discussion with special guest Asher Wolf, a well-known information journalist, digital activist and founder of the world-wide CryptoParty movement. Asher spoke about her own journey as an activist and fighter for good information and good data to great applause from a packed audience. A good end to a good day of good data!

Do you want to participate, consider sending in a proposal to the Call.

In the last few years there has been a proliferation of new “little development devices” and practices in places where we might least expect them: at the World Bank and in national development agencies usually associated with the kinds of large-scale infrastructure mega-projects that these institutions pioneered after World War II. Yet the current emphasis on “little” development devices cannot be understood as a straightforward reaction to earlier forms of development policy that used “big” development devices. Rather, if we want to understand the current fascination with little development devices, we need to look at a different moment in international development institutions’ history: the many prominent failures in development assistance that marked the 1990s, such as the AIDS epidemic, the Asian financial crisis, and the “lost decade” of development in sub-Saharan Africa.

If we cannot understand the emergence of these new devices without paying attention to the recent failures of development policy, does that mean that they signal the failure of international development as we’ve known it? Yes and no: yes because many of them have been developed as innovative responses to the failures of development assistance, and no because they are nonetheless still very much development devices aimed at many of the same objectives that have held sway since the mid-twentieth century, including economic growth and poverty reduction.

In fact, although policy failures are central to this story, the part they play is a surprisingly creative one. These failures were profound enough to provoke a crisis of development expertise, leading development practitioners to question their very metrics of success and failure. Over time, these practitioners sought to re-establish the grounds for their authority, reconceiving the object of development—poverty—by forging new metrics of aid success, by developing new techniques for its measurement, and by adopting new devices amenable to this kind of measurement.

Rather than the failure of development, what precipitated the proliferation of these new micro-devices was thus the transformation of development governance through its engagement and problematization of failure, as well as its growing preoccupation with the ever-present possibility of future failures.

Responding to Past Failures

Beginning in the 1990s, there was a lot of talk about the failure of development policies. Some external critics focused on the persistence of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, while others pointed to the AIDS crisis in Africa, or the sudden increase in poverty in Asia after the 1997–1998 financial crisis. All of these crises had occurred on the watch of the major development organizations in spite of (or, as many critics suggested, because of) their efforts.

Inspired by these crises, both external critics and many of those working in the policy development and evaluation units at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to point to various policy failures (Collier 1997; Killick 1997). Staff in the Policy Development and Review department at the IMF, for example, noted that the ever-increasing number of conditions that aid packages imposed on poor countries had no positive effect on compliance, and were significantly reducing borrower governments’ “ownership” of the reforms (Boughton 2003). Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Operation Evaluation Department’s (OED) assessments were pointing to dramatically declining success rates—from 80% to 85% in the 1980s to less than 65% in the 1990s (OED 1994), figures that were of great concern to World Bank president James Wolfensohn.

One of the underlying targets of these criticisms was the policy framework known as the “Washington Consensus,” a broadly neoliberal approach to development that put growth at its core and saw the market as the best way of achieving development goals (e.g., Stiglitz 1998:1). Yet, even as the World Bank dedicated its 1997 flagship World Development Report to the “rediscovery” of the state after two decades of denigrating or denying its role, the report was also very careful to distinguish the World Bank’s present strategy from earlier state-led approaches to development, arguing for the need to “take the burden off the state by involving citizens and communities in the delivery of core collective goods” (World Bank 1997:3).  Treating both state- and market-dominated approaches as failures, the World Bank has pursued a middle way between the two, forging new and dynamic assemblages of public and private actors, claims, and practices to simultaneously pursue public goals and private interests (Best 2014a).

Contested Failures

Of course, policy failures occur all the time. Sometimes they are perceived as failures, and sometimes they are ignored. Yet occasionally they become what I call “contested failures”: failures important enough to produce widespread debates about the meaning of success and failure and the metrics through which we evaluate them (Best 2014b). The concept of contested failure is connected to what Andrew Barry calls “knowledge controversies,” in which the metrics that are usually taken for granted become, for a time, politicized (Barry 2012).

These are interesting moments when we confront them in our everyday lives. Many of those of us who teach for a living, for example, have confronted a set of exams that fall so far below our expectations that they force us to re-evaluate our conceptions of success and failure (and, at least in my case, to change the assignment altogether). Such contested failures are fascinating moments in politics because the question of what counts as success is both highly technical—involving questions of evaluation and calculation—and normative—raising the question of what we value enough to define as success.

The “aid effectiveness” debate that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s was a classic example of this kind of contested failure, as its participants responded by problematizing and ultimately rethinking what makes aid succeed or fail. This widespread debate, which included practitioners, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics, and politicians, raised important questions about why aid did not seem to be working, and ultimately produced some rather different definitions of what counts as successful development (World Bank 1998).

New Definitions of Success

The new definitions of success that began to take hold from the late 1990s onward were somewhat paradoxical.

On the one hand, the conception of success that began to emerge was far bigger and messier than it had been in the past. In the place of narrowly economic definitions of effectiveness, agencies now sought to pursue a much broader and longer-term set of objectives, recognizing that economic development is inextricably linked to political, social, and cultural dynamics that are often particular to a given country or region. For example, development staff hoped to achieve a much greater level of “country ownership” over the policies that they believed needed to be pursued, seeking to encourage domestic engagement by various stakeholders. Their goal was to build political support for ambitious, longer-term institutional reforms, whether through (at least somewhat) participatory consultations or community-driven development.

On the other hand, the metrics for measuring success became increasingly narrow, particularly as the enthusiasm for results and outcomes-based evaluation began to grow in the 2000s. These new metrics sought to respond to (and reduce) the ambiguities produced by the expanded conception of development objectives by making them more readily quantifiable. If development policymakers and aid ministers were no longer able to point to a school or dam to show where the dollars had gone, at least (the theory went) they could point to a measureable result that affirmed a direct line of causality between policy, output, and longer-term outcome.

Not surprisingly, one of the effects of this drive to make aid outcomes measurable has been to create incentives for pursuing policies that are easier to measure. For example, the “cash on delivery” approach, developed in 2006 by the U.S.-based think tank Center for Global Development, promises to pay a set amount for each “unit” of an agreed result. One pilot project developed by the British Department for International Development (DFID) in Ethiopia pays the government £50 for each student who sits a particular exam, and £100 for each one who passes it. This kind of fixation on measurable results creates a proliferation of policies aimed at getting students in exam seats and bed-nets on beds while driving policymakers away from the kind of complex, messy conceptions of development success that the aid effectiveness debate had revealed to be so important.

New Micro-Devices: Poverty, Cash Transfers, and Microcredit

Many of the devices and practices that emerged in the years since the aid effectiveness debate reflect this hybrid character. Although the large-scale, macro-level ambitions of market-led development and poverty reduction remain at the heart of these policies, they are now increasingly pursued through more cautious, smaller-scale, micro-level techniques. This does not just mean that these interventions address the same targets at a smaller scale. Rather, the embrace of these new techniques of intervention corresponds to a new ontology of the object of development.

One area in which we can clearly see this combination of macro-ambitions and micro-techniques is in efforts to reduce poverty. Part of what development researchers and practitioners found so unsettling about the Asian financial crisis and AIDS crisis was how these events pushed huge numbers of people back into poverty, undoing decades of progress. Led by the Social Protection Unit at the World Bank shortly after its creation in 1996, a number of aid agencies began to move away from static conceptions of poverty that generally assumed once an individual or family moved out of poverty they would stay that way (World Bank 2001a). These policy failures forced aid practitioners to rethink poverty on an ontological level, seeing it as a dynamic process rather than a static state (Best 2013). Staff working on social protection at the World Bank sought to redefine poverty as social risk and vulnerability, and to devise a range of more flexible devices in response. This approach to poverty reduction ultimately became a core part of the influential 2000–2001 World Development Report Attacking Poverty, and has been adopted by a number of other organizations, including the DFID and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; World Bank 2001b).

The logic of the social risk approach is straightforward: in a volatile and unpredictable world where political, economic, climate, and health crises are always possible, poverty-reduction policy needs to help individuals and communities become better risk managers, capable of preparing for and responding to external shocks. Because some risks are covariant (affecting a large community or even the entire national population), traditional forms of insurance may not be effective because they were designed to respond to idiosyncratic risks (such as a single individual’s health difficulties, or a house fire). The state therefore becomes an important part of the solution, but only as one actor among many, resolving problems of market failure, supporting and combining with private sector initiatives, and enabling individuals to become more active in managing their own risks.

Some of the most popular devices for managing poor people’s vulnerability to poverty, including conditional cash transfers (CCTs) and microcredit initiatives, clearly reflect this hybrid public-private, micro-level focus. CCTs are state-provided funds targeted toward very poor populations, particularly women, generally on the condition that they keep their children in school and bring them in for regular health check-ups. The funds are supposed to help poor people respond to immediate shocks, whereas the conditions are aimed at increasing the resilience of future generations and improving their chances of becoming better risk managers.

Microcredit initiatives, which provide very small loans to people who would not qualify for conventional credit, started out as state and NGO-funded programs but have become increasingly market (and profit) driven in recent years. Their objective is to provide poor individuals with the kind of financial credit that they need to actively take “good” economic risks (such as investing in education or an entrepreneurial activity), in the belief that this will allow them to become more active and autonomous participants in the market economy.

As the World Bank’s first Social Protection Strategy’s title made clear, although this approach works at the micro level, it continues to have macro-level development ambitions, even as it reconceives them in more dynamic terms: seeking to transform social protection efforts from “safety-net to springboard” (World Bank 2001a). The Social Protection Unit’s current website builds on this idea:

In a world filled with risk and potential, social protection systems help individuals and families especially the poor and vulnerable cope with crises and shocks, find jobs, improve productivity, invest in the health and education of their children, and protect the aging population (World Bank 2017).

Evaluation

For the many experts and officials at international development agencies seeking to re-establish their authority in the wake of the failures of the 1990s, these new development devices are attractive in part because their promise of calculability. Many CCT programs have been explicitly designed to collect evidence about their effectiveness, and their growing popularity among development agencies is linked to the promise of demonstrating measurable results. After inconclusive evidence about whether it was the cash or the conditions in CCTs that had some positive effects on school enrollment, a growing number of CCT programs have been designed as randomized experiments that test the effectiveness of conditional and unconditional payments (Baird et al. 2010).

In the case of microcredit, calculability plays a very different but nonetheless crucial role: the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques for evaluating and pricing credit risk among the very poor has made it possible for large financial firms to become involved, not only expanding microcredit but also building a new financial industry around the packaging and resale of these loans to foreign investors (Langevin 2017). These firms have managed in some cases to securitize large portfolios of microloans (rather like the subprime mortgages at the heart of the last global financial crisis), translating the often very high interest rates charged to poor borrowers into global flows of investor value (Aitken 2013).

Governing Failure

Although these various new development devices hold the promise of measurable results, we should not overestimate their technical proficiency; they continue to face the problem of failure even as they seek to respond to it. In fact, many of these new development initiatives have failed to meet at least some of their main objectives. The evidence on conditional cash transfers, though plentiful, is mixed: they do seem to have positive short-term effects on educational enrollment in particular, but their longer-term effects are difficult to demonstrate, and it is not clear yet whether the conditions themselves make any difference. There have also been some highly publicized failures in microcredit, including a rash of suicides by individuals crushed by microfinance debts in Andhra Pradesh, India, that have reinforced a broader questioning of its capacity to alleviate poverty.

More fundamentally, the tension that I identify at the outset of this article—between a growing recognition of the messiness of development success and a persistent desire to tame and often deny that complexity by simplifying forms of measurement and evaluation—remains itself a nagging source of failure. Many of the development practitioners I have spoken to are well aware that it is nearly impossible to make tidy causal links between a given policy action and a complex series of longer-term outcomes, particularly where there are multiple other aid actors and external dynamics in play. Yet, because they are forced to play the game of measurable results, they have begun to design their policies so that they are as easy to measure as possible, distorting development objectives to make them appear calculable (Natsios 2010).

This emergent micro approach to development assistance remains a paradoxical one: cultivating public goals by mobilizing private interests, pursuing more complex objectives while trying to translate them into simpler metrics, and ultimately courting repeated failure to give the veneer of success.

References

Aitken, R. 2013. “The Financialization of Micro-Credit.” Development and Change 44(3):473–499.

Baird, S., C. McIntosh, and B. Ösler. 2010. “Cash or Condition? Evidence from a Randomized Cash Transfer Program.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5259.

Barry, A. 2012. “Political Situations: Knowledge Controversies in Transnational Governance.” Critical Policy Studies 6(3):324–336.

Best, J. 2013. “Redefining Poverty as Risk and Vulnerability: Shifting Strategies of Liberal Economic Governance.” Third World Quarterly 34(2):109–129.

———. 2014a. “The ‘Demand’ Side of Good Governance: The Return of the Public in World Bank Policy.” In The Return of the Public in Global Governance, edited by J. Best and A. Gheciu, pp. 97–119. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2014b. Governing Failure: Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boughton, J. M. 2003. “Who’s in Charge? Ownership and Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs.” IMF Working Paper WP/03/191.

Collier, P. 1997. “The Failure of Conditionality.” Perspectives on Aid and Development, edited by C. Gwyn and J. Nelson, pp. 51–77. Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council.

Killick, T. 1997. “Principals, Agents and the Failings of Conditionality.” Journal of International Development 9(4):483–494.

Langevin, M. 2017. “L’agencement entre la haute finance et l’univers du développement: des conséquences multiples pour la formation des marchés (micro)financiers.” Canadian Journal of Development .

Natsios, A. 2010. The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy and Development. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.

Operation Evaluation Department, World Bank (OED). 1994. Annual Review of Evaluation Results 1993. Washington, DC: Operation Evaluation Department, World Bank.

Stiglitz, J. 1998. Towards a New Paradigm for Development: Strategies, Policies, and Processes. Prebisch Lecture. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

World Bank. 1997. World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World. Washington, DC,: World Bank.

———. 1998. Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2001a. Social Protection Sector Strategy: From Safety Net to Springboard. Washington, DC: World Bank.

———. 2001b. World Development Report 2000/01: Attacking Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank.

———. 2017. “Social Protection: Overview.” Available at  link.

Image Credit: Consumer pays for her purchase with 1000 rupiah at a market in Lenek Village, East Lombok District, Indonesia. Asian Development Bank.