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Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World)

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Among many recent books on development assistance, this is a highly peculiar one. It does not discuss cross-country regressions (which are supposedly a sign of academic rigor) but it has many deep ideas illustrated by engaging and compelling examples.

`Helping people help themselves' has become a development motto bordering on a platitude. But how can you help people become self-sufficient? Major contribution of the book is formulation and unraveling of this fundamental conundrum of development assistance: paradox of supplying help for self-help, teaching another person to think things out for himself and the like.

The major novelty of the book is in chapters 3 and 4 where this conundrum is analyzed as parent-child, teacher-student, patient-doctor, manager-worker, all as examples of a general helper - doer relationship. If you thought that Soren Kiergaard's `passionate leap of faith', M. Gandhi' Satyagraha or Carl Rogers' non-directive therapy is a different world from development assistance, think again. Juxtaposition of major thinkers from various fields is compelling and does shed light on mundane conundrums of development assistance.

But the author is not only a renaissance thinker but he is also a `doing thinker' (an incorrect characterization from the point of view of the book, but I'll use it nonetheless to emphasize thinking informed by everyday reality): he spent ten years inside the World Bank. So he speaks with authority of one's own experience of how the Bank often provides `unhelpful help'. And not necessarily when it lends money but when it becomes `knowledge bank' as well. In the standard methodology of knowledge-based development assistance, it just knows relevant best practices and teaches and preaches them all over the world as a `global development church'.

Concluding part of the book asks the question `can the World Bank change?' and develops a proposal for change, a proposal which is so radical and demanding that the only answer is `no, the Bank can not change'. And this is the least satisfactory part of the book. Not because the author is wrong (he just as well can be right) but because the proposal for the Bank' change does not follow the thrust of the book itself. Following this thrust, the Bank would be viewed as yet another troubled country with its many (and unavoidable) structural limitations. The relevant question is whether one can encourage an autonomous change, a reform `inside-out' of this organization. This would have required a very close attention to heterogeneity of both the World Bank itself and its clients.

The Bank dealing, say, with Chile and the Bank dealing with neighboring Paraguay are literally two different organizations, although procedures, constraints and limitations are all the same (and it is a single country director which is responsible for both countries ), yet a demanding client (Chile) forces it to innovate and experiment, the way Paraguay is not. This is how internal heterogeneity of the organization (almost entirely absent, for instance at IMF) is being sustained. And as many countries say know `money we don't need and ideas we you don't have;, this internal diversity and heterogeneity is only bound to grow. So the question, at once humble and ambitious, is how the better performing (in the send of the book) segments of this extremely diverse and heterogeneous beast be expanded and given an opportunity to grow.

But that perhaps is a subject for the next book, to be written by `doing thinker' and `thinking doer' (a brutally pragmatic reformer yet with some capacity for self-reflection).

Ellerman eloquently gets the root understanding of the issue underlining the failure in development approach. Having understood that most of development agencies and institutions in particular World Bank either override or undercut the beneficiaries intrinsic motives respectively by the social engineering and the benevolent charity, Ellerman reveals to us how we need to start right where the people are and make sure that they are truly motivated.