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Helping People Help Themselves:
Towards a Theory of Autonomy-Compatible Help
David Ellerman, World Bank* October 2001
"The best kind of help to others, whenever possible, is indirect, and consists in such modifications of the conditions of life, of the general level of subsistence, as enables them independently to help themselves." John Dewey Table of Contents Intellectual Background An Initial Look at Non-Distortionary Aid Non-Distortionary Interventions Intrinsic or Own Motivation Towards a Broader Helping Theory: Five Themes Theme 1: Starting From Where the Doers Are Theme 2: Seeing Through the Doers' Eyes Theme 3: Helper Cannot Impose Change on Doers Theme 4: Help as Benevolence is Ineffective Theme 5: Doers in the Driver's Seat Helping Theory Applied to Development Assistance Development Intervention as an "Agency" Relationship Theme 1 Applied: Starting from Present Institutions Theme 2 Applied: Seeing the World Through the Eyes of the Client Theme 3 Applied: Transformation Cannot be Externally Imposed Theme 4 Applied: Addams-Dewey-Lasch's Critique of Benevolence Theme 5 Applied: Applying An Activist Philosophy of Social Learning Knowledge-Based Development Assistance: Methodology The Standard Theory-in-Use Ownership Problems Self-Efficacy Problems Cognitive Dependency Problems Moral Hazard Problems Types of Development Knowledge Universal versus Local Knowledge Codified versus Tacit Knowledge Implications for “Knowledge Bank” as Storehouse or as Brokerage Knowledge-Based Development Organizations Introduction: A "Church" versus a Learning Organization Roadblock to Learning #1: Branded Knowledge as Dogma Roadblock to Learning #2: Funded Assumptions as Dogma Roadblock to Learning #3: "Social Science" as Dogma Roadblock to Learning #4: The Rage to Conclude The Open Learning Model Competition and Devil's Advocacy in the Open Learning Model Non-dogmatism and Socratic Ignorance in Organizations Towards an Open Learning Agency and Autonomy-Compatible Assistance Revisiting Hirschmanian Themes of Social Learning and Change Reframing the Debate about Conditionalities Hirschman's Theory of Unbalanced Growth Conclusion: The Two Paths Bibliography Appendix: Eight Authors in Search of Helping Theory
- (^) The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the author and should not be
attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to the members of its Board of Directors or the countries they represent.
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Abstract
If development is seen basically as autonomous self-development, then there is a subtle paradox or conundrum in the whole notion of development assistance: how can an outside party ("helper") assist those who are undertaking autonomous activities (the "doers") without overriding or undercutting their autonomy? This is the classic problem of "helping people to help themselves." This helping conundrum is the challenge facing a theory of autonomy-compatible development assistance, i.e., helping theory. Starting from a simple model of non-distortionary aid, we explore several themes of a broader helping theory and show how these themes arise in the work of various "gurus" in rather different fields such as John Dewey in pedagogy and social philosophy, Douglas McGregor in management theory, Carl Rogers in psychotherapy, Søren Kierkegaard in spiritual counseling, Saul Alinsky in community organizing, Paulo Freire in community education, and Albert Hirschman together with E.F. Schumacher in economic development. The fact that such diverse thinkers in different fields arrive at very similar conclusions increases our confidence in the common principles. The points of commonality are summarized as follows using the common framework of "helpers" trying to provide autonomy-compatible assistance to a certain set of "doers":
- help must start from the present situation of the doers—not from a "blank slate",
- helpers must see the situation through the eyes of the doers—not just through their own eyes,
- help cannot be imposed upon the doers—as that directly violates their autonomy,
- nor can doers receive help as a benevolent gift—as that creates dependency, and
- doers must be "in the driver's seat"—which is the basic idea of autonomous self-direction.
One major application of helping theory is to the problems of knowledge-based development assistance. The standard approach is that the helper or, in this case, knowledge-based development agency, has the "answers" and disseminates them ex cathedra to the doers. This corresponds to the standard teacher-centered pedagogy. The alternative approach of helping theory is the learner-centered approach of the active learning pedagogy. The teacher plays more the role of a midwife, catalyst, and facilitator to build learning capacity in the learner-doers so they can learn from any source such as their own experience, the teacher, or other sources of knowledge. Development assistance is further complicated by the local or tacit nature of much relevant knowledge. In addition to capacity-building, a knowledge-based development agency, e.g., a "knowledge bank," might function better not simply as a source of knowledge but as a broker connecting those who face concrete problems with those in similar situations who have learned how to address the problems.
The standard (implicit) model of an agency disseminating the answers is essentially a "church" model. Changing to the approach of helping theory entails changing the helping-agency itself from a church model to an organization that fosters learning internally as well as externally—like in a university where professors engage in learning and foster learning in students but where the organization itself does not adopt "Official Views" on the complex questions of the day. This means fostering competition in the marketplace of ideas within the organization and taking a more Socratic stance vis-à-vis clients who will then have to take responsibility for and have ownership of their own decisions.
Intellectual Background
The World Bank, the leading multilateral development agency, begins its Mission Statement with a dedication to helping people help themselves, and Oxfam, a leading non-governmental organization working on development, states that its "main aim is to help people to help themselves." 1 There is broad agreement—at least as a statement of high purpose—that helping people help themselves is perhaps the best ("best" in perhaps both a normative and practical sense) methodology for development assistance in the developing countries. That is our topic.
The main goal is the "doer" (e.g., person, group, or country) being "in the driver's seat" and actively helping itself. This is a central idea expressed in the World Bank's Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF).^2 If development is seen basically as autonomous self-development, then there is a subtle paradox or conundrum in the whole notion of development assistance: how can an outside party ("helper") assist those who are undertaking autonomous activities (the "doers") without overriding or undercutting their autonomy?^3 How can a development agency actually help people help themselves—as opposed to giving various forms of unhelpful help? The topic is related to the presumption in favor of inclusion, popular participation, involvement, and ownership as well as the suspicion that externally applied "carrots and sticks" do not "buy" sustainable policy changes. Our approach uses the (Kantian) notion of autonomy [see Ellerman 1988] and has much overlap with Albert Hirschman's approach to development (see last section) and with Amartya Sen's emphasis on capabilities and agency.^4
We cast a wide and vigorously multidisciplinary net to construct the intellectual background. Helping theory is approached by looking at the commonalties in quite different examples of relationships where one party, the "helper," is trying to help certain others, here called the "doers," to better help themselves. The target example of the helper-doer relationship is the relationship between a development agency and a client country but the theme is also explored in pedagogy, management theory, psychotherapy, community organization, and community education. The helper-doer relationships and prominent authors or "gurus" are (see Appendix for representative quotes):
- Albert Hirschman on the relationship of a development advisor and a government,
- E.F. Schumacher on the relationship between a development agency and a developing country,
- Saul Alinsky on the relation of a community organizer to the community,
- Paulo Freire on the relationship between an educator and a peasant (or urban poor) community,
- Søren Kierkegaard on the relation between a spiritual counselor and a student,
- John Dewey on the teacher-learner relationship,
- Carl Roger s on the therapist-client relationship, and
- Douglas McGregor on the (Theory Y) relationship between a manager and workers.
The argument is not that all these relationships are the same, but that there are commonalties when the party in the "helper" role acts so as to help the parties in the "doer" role to help themselves. The fact that such diverse thinkers in different fields arrive at interestingly similar conclusions increases our confidence in the common
(^1) Oxfam 1985, 14. (^2) See Wolfensohn 1997, 1998, 1999a and 1999b and in Stiglitz 1998. (^3) See Ellwood [1988] generally on the "helping conundrums." (^4) Sen's notion of freedom in Development as Freedom 1999 is closely related to our notion of autonomy.
principles.^5 The text is liberally sprinkled with quotations and footnotes so that the interested reader can follow the Ariadne's thread of the themes back into the original texts.
An Initial Look at Non-Distortionary Aid
Non-Distortionary Interventions
Our first task is to fix the sense of an intervention by the helper that most respects or is most compatible with the choices of the doer in certain simple models of the doer's decisions. The doer's decision-making is assumed to be given as a relationship between resources and decisions: given the resources available to the doer, the optimal decision is determined. An intervention by the helper is non-distortionary (ND) (a necessary condition for autonomy-compatibility) if it does not affect the relationship between resources and decisions although it may affect the resources. In other words, a ND intervention is one that does not change what the doer would do—given sufficient resources. In that sense, the intervention does not distort the original motivation of the doer.
This notion looks only to the mode of intervention by the helper, not to the preferences or choices. There is no assumption that the choices of the doer are in any sense autonomous, e.g., a monetary gift to a drug addict or an unrestricted grant to a country "addicted" to aid would be ND. Choices that are autonomous in the sense of being based on intrinsic or own-motivation will be considered later.
Moreover, "non-distortionary" is an autonomy-related characteristic of interventions by some human will (e.g., the helper), not natural events.
'The nature of things does not madden us, only ill will does', said Rousseau. The criterion of oppression is the part that I believe to be played by other human beings, directly or indirectly, with or without the intention of doing so, in frustrating my wishes. [Berlin 1969, 123]
Natural events on Crusoe's island might affect his choices but would not be classified as "interventions" at all.
If we think of the doer as a consumer allocating fixed income between goods, then a "lump-sum" income tax or subsidy would be an example of a ND intervention in contrast to an excise tax or subsidy attached to particular uses or goods. The relationship between income and consumer choices is the "income-consumption curve", so a ND intervention (e.g., a lump-sum change in income) is one that does not shift the income consumption curve. 6
(^5) For instance, here is the helping conundrum that arises in education. This "learning paradox" was clearly posed by the
early twentieth century Socratic-Kantian Leonard Nelson: "Here we actually come up against the basic problem of education, which in its general form points to the question: How is education at all possible? If the end of education is rational self-determination, i.e., a condition in which the individual does not allow his behavior to be determined by outside influences but judges and acts according to his own insight, the question arises: How can we affect a person by outside influences so that he will not permit himself to be affected by outside influences? We must resolve this paradox or abandon the task of education." [Nelson 1949, 18-9] (^6) In more general mathematical terms, suppose the decision problem is to maximize an objective function subject to some
constraints. An intervention would then be " non-distortionary" if it relaxed or tightened some constraints but did not affect the first-order marginal conditions for optimization.
[Hirschman 1971, 204] Indeed there might be a negative reactance effect on the part of the doer who bears the "insulting" conditionality to do what the doer wanted to do anyway. The controversy, however, centers on the clear case of distorting motivation (conditional aid in the 2 nd^ case).
We have defined a ND intervention given the framing of a decision but much controversy arises from different interpretations or frames for a decision. An optimistic observer might picture the doer as being genuinely motivated to undertake a certain autonomy-enhancing action or reform, but that action requires a certain amount of money. Hence the helper might provide the money without strings attached as ND help and then hopefully the action would be undertaken.
A pessimistic observer might offer a different way to frame the situation that would give a different result. The doer is motivated to undertake the autonomy-enhancing action partly because otherwise the doer would suffer certain consequences of not reforming. When the helper offers the no-strings-attached aid, then the aid could be used to soften or avoid the adverse consequences so the doer is no longer as strongly motivated to undertake the action or reform.
In Case 2, the helper might be inclined to offer the aid conditional on taking the action, but then the aid is distortionary. The reform, which is typically hard to monitor, might not be performed very effectively since the doer is undertaking it only because of the "supplied external motivation"—not because of the doer's "own" motivation. Indeed, from a dynamic perspective, there is an incentive for failure so that the doer will still qualify for the aid the next time around.^7 Charles Murray traces this failure to: "The Law of Unintended Rewards. Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer. ... The program that seeks to change behavior must offer an inducement that unavoidably either adds to the attraction of, or reduces the penalties of engaging in, the behavior in question." [Murray 1984, 212-5] In an actual situation, where the benefits are not directly observable, the helper may not know if Case 1 or 2 applied.
Taking an analogy between aid for reform and a wage for labor, it is useful to review the economic analysis of a wage increase in terms of a substitution effect and an income effect. The wage increase heightens the reward for labor so the substitution effect is an increase in labor offered. But if the labor is motivated to get income for other purposes, then the wage increase allows the same income to be received with less labor so the income effect is to decrease the labor offered. The two effects go in opposite directions so their relative strengths will determine if the labor offered increases (upward sloping supply curve) or decreases (backward bending supply curve).
Another useful model is the problem of moral hazard in insurance. The action or reform in this case is the set of precautions that one might take to avoid accidents. If those precautions are motivated by the adverse consequences of accidents that might otherwise happen and if those adverse consequences can be covered by insurance payments, then complete insurance would remove the motivation to take precautions. Thus insurance might increase the probability of accidents (since it removes the motivation for the "reform" of taking precautions) and that is called "moral hazard." On the moral hazard interpretation of Case 2, the unrestricted aid covers the downside of not taking the action so non-action becomes the preferred option.
(^7) Testimony to this incentive is given by the worry about "punishing" successful reformers by not renewing aid.
Let us return to the helping conundrum. If the doers have sufficient own-motivation to help themselves then non-distortionary aid to supply the means would indeed help the doers to help themselves. But if the doers are motivated to help themselves primarily in order to avoid certain adverse consequences and if unrestricted aid could itself alleviate those consequences, then the aid would subsidize the doers not helping themselves. Thus the aid agencies and international finance institutions " should help finance the costs of change—and should not cover the costs of not changing. " [Stern 2001]
Once the helping conundrum is understood, there are essentially two possible paths that helpers can take. One path might be called the direct or social engineering approach to "supply the motivation" to undertake the reforms by imposing the distorting conditionality in order to receive the aid. This is the most common approach in the "development assistance business." By supplying the motivation, the helper essentially takes over "the driver's seat" in a principal-agent relationship to distort the doers' motivation toward compliance and to monitor their compliance.^8
The other path is our topic of helping theory, autonomy-compatible (e.g., non-distorting) modes of helping people help themselves. This path is more indirect; motivation is to be found and fostered rather than supplied by the helpers. Indeed, intrinsic, internal, or own motivation on the part of the doers could not, by definition, be "supplied" by the helpers. Bought virtue is faux virtue. If the doers are intrinsically motivated to undertake the action or project, then the external aid will be enabling rather than "motivating."
Intrinsic or Own Motivation
There is now a large body of literature in psychology, sociology, and organizational behavior on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as the closely related notions of self-determination, autonomy, and internal locus of causality.^9 Although considerations of intrinsic motivation have figured prominently in the Romantic critique^10 of classical economics, the topic has until recently only received sporadic treatment in economics literature.^11 Bruno Frey's recent Not Just for the Money [1997] is the first book-length treatment of the topic of intrinsic motivation in the economics literature.
In the literature on aid for economic development, a substantial body of research now questions the effectiveness of conditionalities.^12 What is the distinction between genuinely wanting to change or only wanting to make certain changes because of various "carrots and sticks"? Conditionalities and aid provide only external or extrinsic motivation; genuine change requires a more intrinsic motivation.
An intrinsically motivated activity is an activity carried out by individuals for its own sake. The activity is an end in itself, not an instrumental means to some other end (such as satisfying biological needs or "tissue
(^8) It will be noted that we are unrealistically modelling the "doers" as a homogeneous group whereas much of the work in
development assistance is in reinforcing the reform-oriented doers against the non-reforming doers within a government. This neglect of coalitional politics is deliberate. Outside a narrow category of stroke-of-the-pen reforms, more institutional reforms require a broader consensus and a deeper "buy-in" than can be provided with aid bribes. 9
10 See Deci and Ryan 1985, Elster 1983, Lane 1991, Candy 1991, Kohn 1993, and Deming 1994. 11 See, for example, Ruskin 1985 (1862), and for a recent broad approach, see Lutz 1999. See Titmuss 1970, Arrow 1972, Scitovsky 1976, Hirsch 1976, Sen 1982, Schelling 1984, Akerlof 1984, Hirschman 1992, Kreps 1997, and Prendergast 1999. 12 See the discussion and references in World Bank 1998 and Killick et al. 1998.
turn affects performance), and (3) extrinsic motivation may crowd out and eventually atrophy intrinsic motivation.^15
Towards a Broader Helping Theory: Five Themes
The quintessential problem of autonomy-compatible intervention is how to "help people to help themselves." So far, we have used a simple one-dimensional model of help, namely giving a certain amount of aid in a "non- distortionary" manner (that is, "lump-sum" or unrestricted aid). Now we consider the general case of intervention with includes technical cooperation, dialogue, and capacity-building in addition to simple resource transfers. We leave behind simple precise models to develop five themes that describe autonomy-compatible help in a more general and realistic setting.
Theme 1: Starting From Where the Doers Are
A utopian social engineering approach tries to impose a clean model solution where, if necessary, the old solution is wiped away to make room for the new. To use a building metaphor, the old building is torn down to create a cleared space, a tabula rasa , upon which the new model building can be constructed. There is no need to take the characteristics of the old building into account—other than what is required to tear it down. The alternative non-utopian incremental approach would be to repair one part of the building at a time—which over time can still completely rebuild the building. To use a repairing the ship metaphor, the engineering approach would put the ship into dry dock so that standard techniques can be used to repair the ship independent of the conditions at sea. The incremental alternative is, according to Otto Neurath's metaphor, to "repair the ship at sea" taking into account the available techniques and the conditions at sea [See Elster et al. 1998]. Rebuilding the old, rather than destroying it to engineer a new model from the cleaned slate, is one way of introducing the theme of "starting from where the doers are." For the helpers to help the doers help themselves, the helpers have to design their assistance taking into account the current starting point of the doers, not an imaginary clean slate.
Theme 2: Seeing Through the Doers' Eyes
Since the goal is for the doers to help themselves, any assistance provided by the helpers needs to see the situation through the doers' eyes. The doers' actions will be guided by their knowledge, conceptual framework, values, and worldview, not those of the helpers. The strategy of help used by the helpers needs to be based on an empathetic understanding of the doers' viewpoint in order to be effective.
Theme 3: Helper Cannot Impose Change on Doers
This is the counter-thesis to the direct or social engineering approach. Transformative change comes from the internally motivated self-activities of the doers. Carrots and sticks (e.g., aid conditionalities) used by the "helpers" will distort the own-motivation of the doers, externalize their locus of causality, and may produce conforming surface behavior and cunning resistance rather than transformation.
(^15) Frey's "crowding-out effect" is what Lane 1991 calls the "hidden cost effect" following the idea of the "hidden cost of
rewards" as in Lepper and Greene 1978.
Theme 4: Help as Benevolence is Ineffective
Autonomy-compatible assistance is neither an imposition (theme 3) nor a gift (theme 4). Benevolent charity helps people, but it does not help people help themselves. It promotes dependency, not autonomy. The helpers are self-satisfied that their charity is helping others, but the doers are in the humiliating and degrading position of not helping themselves with the resulting resentment and thwarted self-reliance.
Theme 5: Doers in the Driver's Seat
This central theme is simply a restatement of the goal of the assistance, to have the doers helping themselves. "Being in the driver's seat" is the metaphor for autonomous self-activity. The car metaphor comports well with the other four themes. The car must: (1) start its journey from where doer-driver is, (2) the vision of the road ahead is from the vantage point of the driver, (3) it would be folly for guides (or "backseat drivers") to grab the steering wheel and try to drive, and (4) being driven by someone else weakens self-reliance and self-esteem.
Helping Theory Applied to Development Assistance
Development Intervention as an "Agency" Relationship
We now focus on elaborating the five themes in the context of community and economic development. The assumed setting is now that of an external development organization (the "helper") trying to help economic development in a less-developed country (the "doers"). We are concerned with development projects that involve changing human institutions, not with physical construction projects. We begin with what might be the standard implicit or explicit model of the relationship between the development organization and the client country, namely the principal-agent or agency relationship [e.g., see Killick et al. 1998]. How can the development organization as principal, design a package of incentives—carrots and sticks—to induce the desired actions on the part of the client country as agent?
The economic theory of agency^16 is one of the most sophisticated forms of the carrots-and-sticks engineering approach to human affairs so it will be worthwhile to examine it in a development context. For example, Killick [1998] applies agency language where an international financial institution (IFI) is the "principal" and the developing country is the "agent."
The first mistake in this approach is the model itself. In an agency relationship, "one person [the agent] acts for or represents another by [the] latter's authority" [Black 1968, entry under "Agency"]. Yet, the client country has no such agency relationship to the development organization; the client country does not have a legal or institutional role to act for or represent the development agency. In general, the creditor-debtor relationship is not, in the legal sense, a principal-agent relationship but is a more general contractual relationship. If we analogize with, say, the doctor-patient or lawyer-client relationship, then it is the other way around. If the development organization is seen more as a "doctor for countries" in a doctor-patient relationship, then it
(^16) The phrases "principal-agent relation" and "agency relation" have been imported into economics [see Ross 1973, Stiglitz
1974, Campbell 1995] from legal theory but are then used to denote contractual relationships that are not agency relations in the original legal sense. Agency relations tend to arise from large asymmetries in knowledge and monitoring ability so the principal cannot contractually specify the detailed actions of the agent (e.g., doctor or lawyer). Instead the agent takes on a legal or institutional fiduciary role involving the trust to "act for or in the interest of" the principal. Since information is always imperfect and each party to a contract would like to influence the behavior of the other concerning unspecified actions, economists have applied the "agency" phraseology to the general economic theory of contractual incentives.
An unwillingness to start from where you are ranks as a fallacy of historic proportions;.... It is because the lesson of the past seems to be so clear on this score, because the nature of man so definitely confirms it, that there has been this perhaps tiresome repetition throughout this record: the people must be in on the planning; their existing institutions must be made part of it; self-education of the citizenry is more important than specific projects or physical changes. [Lilienthal 1944, 198]
There a number of reasons why development interventions are often not designed to begin with existing institutions. Revolutionaries and reformers oriented towards utopian social engineering [see Popper 1962] aim to wipe the slate clean in order to install a set of "ideal" institutions. Any attempt to evolve out of the current "flawed," "retrograde," or even "evil" institutions is viewed as only staining or polluting the change process. For instance in the transitional economies such as Russia, the "leap over the chasm" imposed by institutional shock therapy fell far short of the other side since people "need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way." [Alinsky 1971, xxi] It will take the country much longer to climb out of the chasm than it would have taken if a bridge over the chasm had been built incrementally in the first place.
In spite of a rather "moralistic" outlook, Woodrow Wilson nevertheless made a case for an incremental approach in his first inaugural address.
We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it might be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek council and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursion whither they cannot tell.^20
Similar considerations argue for an evolutionary and incremental strategy in poor countries rather than trying to "jump" to new institutions.
The primary causes of extreme poverty are immaterial, they lie in certain deficiencies in education, organization, and discipline.... Here lies the reason why development cannot be an act of creation, why it cannot be ordered, bought, comprehensively planned: why it requires a process of evolution. Education does not "jump"; it is a gradual process of great subtlety. Organization does not "jump"; it must gradually evolve to fit changing circumstances. And much the same goes for discipline. All three must evolve step by step, and the foremost task of development policy must be to speed this evolution. [Schumacher 1973, 168-9]
Given a choice between the momentum of bottom-up involvement in "flawed" reforms and top-down imposition of what reformers see as "model" institutions, the "start from where the doers are" principle would argue in favor of using knowledge and experience to work to improve "flawed reforms" using the bottom-up approach to transformation—rather than throwing it overboard in favor of utopian social engineering based on the false hope of imposed "first best models."^21
(^20) Quoted in Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963, 71-2 in the context of their treatment of "disjointed incrementalism." Also
quoted in Hirschman 1973, 249. 21 For recent literature on institutional reforms in a world of "second bests," see Komesar 1994 and Rubin 1996.
Theme 2 Applied: Seeing the World Through the Eyes of the Client
If a utopian social engineer could perform an "institutional lobotomy" to erase the present institutions, then development advice would not need to be tailored to present circumstances. Generic advice would suffice; one message would fit all blank slates. But failing that, it is necessary to acquire a deeper knowledge of the present institutions. This is done by, in effect, learning to see the world through the eyes of the policy-makers and people in the country.
An autonomy-compatible interaction between teacher and learner requires that the teacher have an empathetic understanding with the student. If the teacher can understand the learning experience of the student, then the teacher can use his or her superior knowledge to help the student. This help does not take the form of telling the student the answer or solution, but of offering advice or guidance, perhaps away from a dead-end path, to assist the student in the active appropriation of knowledge. The teacher, according to Dewey's learner- centered pedagogy, must be able to see the world through the eyes of the students and within the limits of their experience, and at the same time apply the adult's viewpoint to offer guide posts. Similarly, in Carl Rogers' notion of client-centered therapy, the counselor needs to enter the "internal frame of reference of the client" in order that assistance can be given that respects and relies upon the actual capacity of the person.^22
In the context of adult transformation, how does the educator/investigator find out about the client-student's world? That is the role of Freire's notion of dialogue. In the non-dialogical notion of education, the teacher determines the appropriate messages to be delivered or "deposited" in the students, as money is deposited in a bank. Instead of ready-made best-practice recipes, Freire, like Dewey, saw the educational mission as based on posing problems, essentially the problems that were based on the students' world.
In contrast with the antidialogical and non-communicative "deposits" of the banking method of education, the program content of the problem-posing method—dialogical par excellence—is constituted and organized by the students' view of the world, where their own generative themes are found. [Freire 1970, 101]
Yet often to development "professionals, it seems absurd to consider the necessity of respecting the 'view of the world' held by the people." [Freire 1970, 153-4]
[D]evelopment experience has shown that when external experts alone acquire, analyze, and process information and then present this information in reports, social change usually does not take place; whereas the kind of "social learning" that stakeholders generate and internalize during the participatory planning and/or implementation of a development activity does enable social change. [World Bank 1996, 5]
(^22) Maurice Friedman [1960] emphasizes the importance of seeing through the eyes of the other in Buber's notion of dialogue.
"The essential element of genuine dialogue ... is 'seeing the other' or 'experiencing the other side.' [87] This 'inclusiveness' is of the essence of the dialogical relation, for the teacher sees the position of the other in his concrete actuality yet does not lose sight of his own. [177] Particularly important in this relationship is what Buber has variously called 'seeing the other,' 'experiencing the other side,' 'inclusion,' and 'making the other present.' This 'seeing the other' is not ... a matter of 'identification' or 'empathy,' but of a concrete imagining of the other side which does not at the same time lose sight of one's own." [188-9]
Moreover, the method of awakening and enlisting the activities of all concerned in pursuit of the end seems slow; it seems to postpone accomplishment indefinitely. But in truth a common end which is not made such by common, free voluntary cooperation in process of achievement is common in name only. It has no support and guarantee in the activities which it is supposed to benefit, because it is not the fruit of those activities. Hence, it does not stay put. It has to be continually buttressed by appeal to external, not voluntary, considerations; bribes of pleasure, threats of harm, use of force. It has to be undone and done over. [Dewey and Tufts, 1908, 304]
Development agencies often have a short time horizon so they tend to interpret the purchased outward performance as evidence for sustainable change and long-term transformation. Thus the bait and switch theory is constantly pseudo-verified and reapplied again and again by a development agency—much as a manager may "buy" outward obedience in the "spot market" for compliant behaviors and then interpret that as successful organizational development or capacity-building.
Moreover, we have noted that the attempt to buy or force transformation with "carrots and sticks" can lead to the threat-to-autonomy effect—a negative reactance, resentment, and pushback. Dewey noted that extrinsic incentives administered in a controlling manner would arouse the "instincts of cunning and slyness." [1916, 26] McGregor saw that such incentives would lead to "passive acceptance" at best and more likely to "indifference or resistance." [1960, 68]
Eventually the reliance on external "carrots and sticks" or "bait" can induce the atrophy effect when the original intrinsic motivation dries up and the party becomes an aid-dependent "marionette" responding only to external strings—a condition perhaps approximated in some aid-dependent countries. In this case, the "bait-and- switch" strategy ends up being all bait and no switch.
Nor is it only a problem in incentives. Similar problems arise concerning the cognitive (as opposed to incentive) elements in the client country's or doer's decision-making. The imposition of "beliefs" in the form of "best practice" recipes can temporarily override local judgment but will probably not lead to any sustainable change in conviction. This carries us to the activist pedagogy and the reasons why the Socratic guide or Deweyan teacher does not simply give the "answers" (even assuming the "answers" are available).
Learning is not finding out what other people already know, but is solving our own problems for our own purposes, by questioning, thinking and testing until the solution is a new part of our lives. [Handy 1989, 63]
Through direct observation and structured experiments, the learner is guided to actively rediscover and reappropriate knowledge with ownership–which at the same time will be adapted to local circumstances. This pedagogy puts the learner in the active role, i.e., "in the driver's seat."
Theme 4 Applied: Addams-Dewey-Lasch's Critique of Benevolence
We have focused mostly on how the help might not be autonomy-compatible by being an imposition that is controlling. However, there is also a "soft" form of control through "gifts," paternalism, and benevolence that is
perhaps even more insidious.^23 How can we differentiate those forms of help that are compatible with the autonomy of the beneficiary from those forms that are paternalistic and controlling? John Dewey developed a critique of oppressive benevolence, and Christopher Lasch juxtaposed the "ethic of respect" to the "ethic of compassion" [Lasch 1995].
Dewey's thinking about the controlling aspects of paternalistic employers was prompted by the Pullman Strike of 1894 and by the critique of Pullman's paternalism in the Chicago reformer Jane Addams' essay "A Modern Lear" [1965], an essay that Dewey called "one of the greatest things I ever read both as to its form and its ethical philosophy." [quoted by Lasch in Addams 1965, 176]
As its title suggests, Addams's essay was based on an extended analogy between the relationship between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia and that of Pullman and his workers. Like Lear, Addams suggested, Pullman exercised a self-serving benevolence in which he defined the needs of those who were the objects of this benevolence in terms of his own desires and interests. Pullman built a model company town, providing his workers with what he took to be all the necessities of life. Like Lear, however, he ignored one of the most important human needs, the need for autonomy. [Westbrook 1991, 89]
Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago was one of the leading examples of settlement houses in the turn-of-the- century settlement movement [see Davis 1967]. The settlement workers by living with and working with the poor tried to use an ethic of respect in contrast to the ethic of benevolence exemplified by the charity organizations of the day. Respect, starting with the self-respect of the poor, is related to their working to improve their own affairs, not being a target for "betterment."
Self-respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crises and who are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services. To give people help, while denying them a significant part in the action, contributes nothing to the development of the individual. In the deepest sense it is not giving but taking—taking their dignity. Denial of the opportunity for participation is the denial of human dignity and democracy. It will not work. [Alinsky 1971, 123]
Dewey developed at some length his critique of "oppressive benevolence." According to Westbrook, Dewey held that
self-realization was a do-it-yourself project; it was not an end that one individual could give to or force on another. The truly moral man was, to be sure, interested in the welfare of others—such an interest was essential to his own self-realization—but a true interest in others lay in a desire to expand their autonomous activity, not in the desire to render them the dependent objects of charitable benevolence. [Westbrook 1991, 46-7]
(^23) In addition to being wary of "Greeks bearing gifts," Thoreau noted "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my
house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for fear that I should have some of his good done to me." [See Carmen 1996, 47]
western Europe trying to bring about a thorough economic and financial rehabilitation. The idea that it is always possible to call on American aid, that here is the ever-present cure for external payments deficits, is a factor destructive of willpower. It is difficult to hope that, while this recourse continues to exist, the nations of western Europe will apply, for a sufficient length of time, the courageous economic and financial policy that will enable them to meet their needs from their own resources without the contribution of external aid. [Quoted in: Marjolin 1989, 241]
Fortunately the demands made by the Korean War resulted in the winding down of American aid. If the industrial countries of western Europe faced moral hazard problems in the short-lived Marshall Plan, one can understand the extent of the moral hazard problem in developing countries that face well-established professional aid-providers in the developed countries who need to constantly reinvent ways to "move the money" to justify their own jobs with the accompanying prestige, salary, and benefits.
Theme 5 Applied: Applying An Activist Philosophy of Social Learning
This central theme of "country in the driver's seat" results from applying the activist philosophy of education to social learning. Instead of being externally imposed, transformation can only come from within as a result of activities carried out by an individual—or a larger organization, government, or country. Thus any intervention on the part of the development agency should be autonomy-compatible. While compliant behavior can be elicited from the outside, a country must "be in the driver's seat" in order to undergo a sustainable transformation. Similarly, "ownership" of an outcome comes from the outcome being the fruits of the activities of the individual, organization, or country, not from being a gift or an imposition.^26 Development assistance should focus on changing the institutional matrix of policy-making (i.e., the local "intrinsic motivation") which is a more subtle and longer term affair, indeed a "by-product of other actions." Social learning resulting from an active learning strategy will cut deeper into the institutional matrix than will passively acquired doctrines.
If the client country should take the initiative and be in the driver's seat then how should a development agency initiate a project? One strategy is expressed in Schumacher's favorite slogan "Find out what the people are doing and help them to do it better" or in the slogan "Only jump on board moving trains." Look for the positive changes already starting to take place in the underlying institutions (a "moving train") and then apply development incentives ("jump on board") to strengthen those pre-existing tendencies. The development aid should not be controlling in the sense that the train should be moving anyway (i.e., by virtue of the country's "own motivation"). That is, the "moving train" should not be extrinsically motivated as a means to get the aid. If no trains are moving, then motion induced by "bribes" is unlikely to transform the underlying institutions.
(^26) Success for a leader or, in general, a helper may be paradoxical in the sense that the helper creates the situation where the
doers take success as their own accomplishment [see Edmunson 1999 for a practical overview of such paradoxes]. Charles Handy notes these results after the doers internalize the activity as their own. "Internalization ... means that the individual recipient of influence adopts the idea, the change in attitude or the new behaviour, as his own. Fine. He will act on it without pressure. The change will be self-maintaining to a high degree. ... The successful psychotherapist is the one whose patients all believe they cured themselves—they internalized the therapy and it thereby became truly an integral part of them. Consultants suffer much the same dilemma of the psychotherapist—the problem of internalization. If they wish the client to use the right solution with full and lasting commitment then they must let him believe it is his solution." [1993, 145] This echoes the notion of the Taoist ruler who governs in such a way that when the task is accomplished, the people will say "We have done it ourselves." [Lao-Tzu, Te-Tao Ching , Ch. 17]
There is a real danger that a development intervention, instead of acting as a catalyst or midwife to empower change in an autonomy-compatible manner, will only short-circuit people’s learning activities and reinforce their feelings of impotence. The external incentives may temporarily overpower the springs of action that are native to the institutional matrix of the country, but that will probably not induce any lasting institutional reforms. As these reforms were externally imposed rather than actively appropriated by the country, there would be little "ownership" of the reforms. Compliance might be only perfunctory; the "quick" transplant might soon wither and die—to then be "reinstalled" in an "improved" form by the next generation of agency task managers.
Knowledge-Based Development Assistance: Methodology
The Standard Theory-in-Use
The problem is that of a development agency trying to help some group, the "doers of development,"^27 in need of development assistance (e.g., policy-makers and government officials in a developing country). The agency is attempting to provide knowledge-based assistance (in contrast to only financial or material aid). One prominent case in point is the vision of the World Bank operating as a knowledge bank.
The main problem in knowledge-based development assistance is the standard, default, or naive theory-in-use (regardless of the "espoused theory") that the agency has "development knowledge" in the form of answers that need to be taught, transmitted, and transferred to the target population of trainees. That methodology is taken as so obvious that the focus is simply on how to "deliver" the knowledge, how to "scale up" the knowledge transmission in the client country, and how to measure and evaluate the impact of these efforts.
This "standard view" of knowledge-based development assistance is based on the pedagogy which sees the learners as essentially passive containers into which "knowledge" is poured. It is the theory that Paulo Freire called the "banking" theory since teaching was seen as depositing knowledge into a bank account [1970]. The standard theory is also captured by the old Chinese metaphor of help as "giving out fish."
Ownership Problems
In accordance with the principle of people owning the fruits of their labor, the doers will have ownership when they are in the driver's seat (indeed, the description as "doers" would not be accurate if they had a passive role). In the standard view of knowledge-based assistance, the helpers are teachers or trainers taking the active role to transmit "knowledge for development" to the passive but grateful clients. "Development" is seen almost as a technical process like building an airport or dam with the agency having "technical social engineering knowledge" to be transmitted to the clients.
Since this "knowledge for development" is offered below cost or for free as a "global public good," it is quite tempting for the developing countries to accept this sort of knowledge-based development assistance. There are even positive incentives such as extensive travel, pleasant accommodations, generous per diems , salary supplements, and other vacation-like benefits offered to those who cooperate to undergo the training. From the supply side of training, management pushes task managers to "show results"—particularly results that can be observed and evaluated back at headquarters (such as the head count in training programs). The task managers need to show that they have "given out a certain number of fish" or, even better, that they have
(^27) See Wolfensohn 1999.
