There’s only one thing people hate giving away more than money. Power. In fact, the power to give away money is something people with large amounts of it tend to greatly enjoy.
But power is what it is all about. It’s the whole point of development. That’s why you can’t speak to a development professional for more than 30 seconds before the word ’empowerment’ pops out. The difference between humanitarian response and development is that development is not just about change; it is about sustained change.
There is a growing consensus that we need to greatly increase the amount of money available to spend on our global challenges, and campaigns are building to achieve this, including recently around the Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact.
But the problem with many of the reform proposals on the table at the moment is the lack of power analysis. Yes, we need more money, but simply increasing the amount of money funnelled to institutions with a long history of misusing the power they have seems to take us backwards as much as forwards.
Are we building a system for the 21st century with the same power dynamics – elected leaders from countries of the Global South flying north to beg for debt relief in Paris or faster lending in Washington? Or are we thinking bigger? You can’t delete power and wealth – the world’s biggest and richest countries will always exercise their power. But you can build institutions and processes and norms and laws which somewhat mitigate power and balance it out a bit.
Early in my career a great mentor of mine, Charles Abugre, taught me that when a development project is completed the correct measure of success is not how many kids have gone to the youth club, or how many houses have been built, or arms injected, but how power relationships have changed. And that is true of international development finance as well.
I hope that this will be one of the key topics for debate at the forthcoming Shift the Power Summit in Bogota in December which Global Nation is proud to be co-hosting.
The #shiftthepower movement has caught the zeitgeist. Decades of challenging the charity narrative, the donor-beneficiary dichotomy, are paying off, as more and more people and organisations sign up to a decolonization, structural transformation and, most of all, an analysis of power.
The challenge before the development community is not just to use power wisely, kindly, generously – but actually to hand over power, to become less powerful so that others can assume power.
The power to decide where to spend money. The power to make people fill out a format that you have designed. The power to hire. The power to promote. The power to ignore. The power to choose which parts of a transformational agenda to adopt, and which to discard as too radical. The power to fund particular areas for research and not others. The power not to have to provide evidence, not to have to explain. The power of inherited money. The power of the charitable giver over the grateful receiver. The power to demand gratitude. The power to ignore history. The power not to rush. The power to spend decades ridiculing the idea of industrial strategy and capital controls and then suddenly to change your mind. The power to say what is possible and impossible. The power of the dollar. The power of the English language.
It’s not just how much money there is, it’s who decides where and how to spend it. That is why there is a growing movement behind the concept of Global Public Investment and its principles of mutuality summed up as ‘all contribute, all benefit, all decide’.
Mutliateralism is at a crossroads. In 20 years in development the narrative has never been more progressive and verdant with opportunity. The rise of the South in terms of economic strength makes the voice of the South, both governments, civil society and business, more powerful than ever in development discussions. That means the language of decolonization, anti-racism, and structural transformation hits harder than it did in previous eras (most notably the 1970s) when the uber-powerful West was able to swat it away and impose its will.
Of course, winning the narrative will only take us so far. Nature and geography constrain human possibilities; chance influences humanity’s progress as much as decision; the reality of international competition and the incentives that drive political decision-making are in some ways more fiercely powerful than ideas and words. So we need wise political strategy to accompany a persuasive vision. That’s another thing we can work on in Bogota. See you there.
Jonathan Glennie is the Co-Founder of Global Nation.
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