NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Best Practice Development Fads 101
By David Ellerman, Visiting Scholar, University of California at Riverside
KeywordsDevelopment fads, Development assistance, Institutional memory, Best practice
Summary
Development assistance, this article argues, seem to be constantly surfing with the latest fads. The institutional memory that large institutions like the World Bank and IMF have of what has been tried in the past is often lacking; the result is failed ?bold new initiatives? of yesteryear resurfacing as the hamster-wheel of fad-driven aid programs keeps turning.
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Over the last sixty years, development aid and assistance have been increasingly organized as a deliberate, institutionalized, and well-financed business. Yet it cannot be reckoned a success. Where development has been most successful (e.g., East Asia), international aid and assistance from official or non-profit organizations has had little to do with it, and where assistance organizations have had their largest footprint (e.g., in Africa), success has been the least.
In most areas of organized human endeavour, learning takes place over the years even if there was much painful stumbling in the beginning. For instance, in the fields of medicine and public health, there are real discoveries as well as mistakes; genuine learning does take place, and it is cumulative. Other fields such as ?management theory? seem to be constantly surfing with the latest fads; the ?classics? are only the latest best-sellers in airport bookstores. Development assistance often seems to be more like ?management theory? than an applied science.
One response to failing organizational effectiveness in business management or in development assistance is chasing ersatz ?solutions? or fads that promise to quickly address long-standing problems or at least their symptoms.
How might we identify fads? Look at how development assistance organizations justify their continuing existence and budgets. The long term is too long-term; justification must come quickly. Any gardener knows that ?successful? weeds are quick to establish themselves on the ground. In a similar manner, a development fad has to show quick results on the ground, results which can then be amplified through public relations activities couched in terms of the latest rhetoric to justify the work of the organization. Thus in development assistance, the fast-growing ?weeds? will tend to choke the ground and crowd out the longer term developmental ?crops.?
But doesn?t learning take place? Over the course of time, there is indeed some ?learning? but it is a kind of breathless pseudo-learning as one ?best practice? fad after another is taken up and dropped. As each fad proves not to live up its hyped promise, it is quietly abandoned in favour of the latest ?solution??another cycle in the hamster-wheel of fad-driven aid programmes.
The curious part of this ?continuous learning? is the lack of memory; the organization is condemned to repeat its ?glorious? past.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. [Santayana, George 1962 (orig. 1922). Reason in Common Sense. 2nd ed. New York: Collier Books, p. 184]
There is something like this present-mindedness where ?experience is not retained? in large technocratic organizations like the World Bank or IMF. Seeing the mistakes of the past is a double-edged sword - the two edges being learning and blame. Since avoiding blame is a paramount bureaucratic imperative, learning is also avoided as the mistakes of the past are quickly lost down the organizational ?memory hole.? Who has time or inclination to dwell on possible mistakes of the past? Children are dying now!
But that is not the only reason why ?experience is not retained? in a technocratic organization. There is a superficial view that science advances along a well-defined frontier so that knowledge of past theories and ideas is only of antiquarian interest. How could reading something that Albert Hirschman wrote more than a half century ago possibly have contemporary interest to the modern development researcher eager to stay on the frontiers of knowledge? ?Science? marches on! All that was useful or valid in the older theories has been surely swept up and incorporated in the latest theories.
This is a common view in ?development economics? and particularly in the large development bureaucracies such as the World Bank. Thus, intellectual life in the field is seen as keeping up with the latest econometric studies, e.g., randomized testing and impact evaluations, and digesting the latest best practice fads, e.g., social funds, free enterprise zones, microfinance, results-based aid, ?Big Push? schemes in post-socialist economies or in Africa (or wherever Jeff Sachs is giving advice), labour migration/remittances, or anything described as a ?Millennium? this or that. It is particularly interesting when cutting-edge thinkers in ?management theory? and in ?development economics? keep (re
)discovering the same things such as ?performance-based pay? and ?output-based aid.? Gee-whiz, why didn't someone think of that before?
It is quite daunting to try to follow the rush of ?bold new initiatives? all described in breathless new rhetoric?like trying to drink from a fire hose. And it is all very ?scientific? since all this new thinking surely represents the ever-advancing frontier in the science of development. In this manner, there is an all-too-modern version of Santayana's non-cumulative present-minded ?savages? who do not study or retain the past.
Amidst this exciting march of science into the future, there is no room for backward-looking thinking that might discover uncanny similarities between the ?bold new initiatives? (development fads) of today and the failed ?bold new initiatives? of yesteryear.
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