Should ‘development professionals’ partake in poverty tourism?

A UN-funded global meet. A ‘slum tour’ for 400 development professionals. A feeling of unabating unease. ‘Slum tourism’ hardly needs an introduction; it is practiced around the globe, from townships in South Africa to favelas in Rio; from Kibera in Nairobi to Dharvari in Mumbai. You pay a fee and are taken on a tour to see the kind of poverty you have previously only seen in charity appeal photos. Now though this poverty is right there in front of you in all its tragic, stinking, feverish glory. Birkenstocks totter across uneven ground and handbags are clutched tightly; worlds collide as tourists are ‘sensitised’ to the reality of life for the world’s majority.

No writing on slum tourism is complete without asking – is it crass voyeurism or enlightened travel? I do not want to get embroiled in the many debates that surround such questions here – they have been done to death and a quick Google will bring up a plethora of quality articles on the subject.

I want instead to focus on the dynamics of development professionals partaking in ‘slum tourism’. It is taken as read that exposure to ‘the field’, ‘the ground’, ‘the grassroots’ is crucial if we are to understand the current ‘development’ dynamics at play. I was always under the impression that ‘development professionals’ will, at some point in their career, spend a significant amount of time living and working directly with the communities where their roles play out. How wrong I was.

Compassion? Guilt? Adventure? Examining Personal Motivations for Doing ‘Development’

What really motivates people to pursue a career in international development? This is probably one of the major unasked questions in the sector, yet it seems to me that it is also a hugely important one. Our personal motivations fundamentally shape our responses to ‘development’ issues: pity concerning poverty may give rise to charity, anger concerning social injustice may give rise to action.

There are hundreds of thousands of people working in international development across the world. So what is driving us all to leave family and friends, forfeit other job opportunities, adopt a sometimes demanding and basic lifestyle, and enter such a highly competitive sector? Is it all about compassion? Or maybe it is about absolving a sense of guilt? Or perhaps it is about seeking adventure in seemingly exotic far-flung places?

Why are personal motivations for doing ‘development’ so under-examined? Were you asked about your personal motivations for doing ‘development’ during your job interview? Have you ever talked to your colleagues about what motivates them?  Perhaps not, but if so then what sort of responses did you or they give? Maybe something to do with wanting to alleviate poverty or reduce inequality? I think we can we go deeper by examining the emotions behind these reasons.

Empathy and development in the UK

Following on from the discussion about empathy in A Famine Buffet I’ve also been thinking about empathy in relation to development in the UK.  I campaign on development issues in the UK with a local group of interested and committed people. A lot of our campaigning involves setting up stalls on the local high street, talking to passers-by about the issues we work on and asking them to support our campaigns through signing petitions or letters to their local MPs. Learning the tricks of the trade – how to attract people’s attention, how to engage them and how to get a positive response all within about thirty seconds – is what has got me thinking about empathy.

A Famine Buffet

A bloated belly in Chad. An emaciated woman in Kolkatta. A skeletal frame in Sudan. Images of hunger are synonymous with poverty and in turn with ‘development’. I recently attended the launch of a global hunger report written by a large bilateral agency. The event was glitzy. The food was lavish. My conscience was in turmoil. The walls were covered in projected images of ‘hunger’ and against this backdrop we quaffed fancy wine, nibbled on canapés and satiated ourselves with an extravagant buffet. Food stuck to the roof of my dry mouth and the wine tasted acrid. I swallowed and made small talk as I imagined a new menu:

An ounce of maizemeal served with a side of integrity

Half a cassava dowsed in a sauce of veracity

A handful of rice accompanied by a clear conscience

Extraction Enclave & Humanitarian Hinterland: Fort Dauphin, Madagascar

Doing ‘development’ alongside an international mining corporation presents various opportunities and challenges to the NGO that I work for in south east Madagascar. We know that they’re an important and long-term ‘development’ player in the region, investing in infrastructure and operating at a level we never could. We share knowledge with their incredibly committed biodiversity research team. But we also struggle to strategise and plan programmes while their mining schedule seems so unpredictable and poorly communicated to stakeholders and communities. We face numerous social and economic problems associated with the mine – an increase in sex work and transmission of STIs, price inflation with worsening poverty and inequality, forest clearance and restricted access to livelihood assets, disputes over land tenure, etc.

The pros and cons of the mining project are complex and have been discussed in great detail elsewhere. What I’d like to explore in this post is the apparently striking separation between the corporation’s “extraction enclave” and the surrounding “humanitarian hinterland”. In his book Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order anthropologist James Ferguson suggests that capital investment in Africa represents a highly sophisticated form of globalisation. He says that it tends to be selectively territorialised and concentrated in privately secured zones, often with little or no benefit to the wider society, and new forms of order and disorder that result in the emergence of “extraction enclaves” and “humanitarian hinterlands”. Ferguson suggests that there are two quite distinct kinds of governance applied to l’Afrique utile (usable Africa) and l’Afrique inutile (unusable Africa) as identified by French colonialism. Usable Africa gets “extraction enclaves”: useful bits that are secured, policed and, in a minimal sense, governed through private means. These are increasingly linked up in transnational networks that connect dispersed and discrete spaces in a selective point-to-point fashion. Meanwhile the vast terrain of unusable Africa gets “humanitarian hinterlands”: most often amounting to a kind of government by NGOs, with a hodgepodge of voluntary organisations carrying out the day-to-day work of providing basic social services, especially in areas of crisis and conflict. To what extent is this the case in Fort Dauphin, Madagascar?

What’s not to like about ‘development’? Gustavo Esteva

Surely wanting to help people is a good thing? Not necessarily so according to Mexican thinker and activist Gustavo Esteva. He is an advocate of post-development; an academic movement which calls for the dismantling of ‘development’ from the World Bank to international NGOs.

What does Esteva write about?

Esteva’s essay Development  asks “what does development actually mean?” He traces the history of the word to illustrate that ‘development’ is not something that has always existed. Rather it is an idea, something that has been invented.

My job ‘in the field’: a reflection

I live in India. I work in ‘development’. I was lucky; I graduated with a degree in Anthropology and immediately got a job working ‘in the field’. So I packed my bags and headed half way across the world to start a life far removed from my days as a student. I had been to India twice before for months at a time; I knew the country, its idiosyncratic quirks and off beat rhythms; its vibrant colours and potent smells; its sleepy villages and pulsating slums.

And far removed from all the guidebook photos of festivals and saris and yoga and wonders of the world, there is my office on a hill. I travel there everyday and sit at a computer. I write project proposals and grants and evaluations. ‘Development’ lingo says I am ‘working in the field’ and yet I can’t remember the last time I walked through a slum or a village – the places on the margins of Indian society where ‘development’ takes place.

So why do I live in India if the work I do could be done anywhere in the world?