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The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly

Published by Penguin Press, 2006

For most development practitioners, whose desire to work for positive change in the world is our professional and personal raison d'être, The White Man’s Burden is a confronting and thought-provoking read.  Making his intentions clear with the book’s sub-title, ‘Why the West's efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good’, Easterly’s book is a compelling examination of the reasons behind what he regards as the largely failed attempts of the global aid community to achieve much good with the US$2.3 trillion in aid spent over the last 50 years.

Early in the book, Easterly poses a particularly sobering question to illustrate his criticism. How is it that wealthy countries are able to deliver 9 million copies of Harry Potter to consumers in a single day, while aid systems run largely by the same countries cannot manage to get 12 ¢ medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths?

The White Man’s Burden is, in a nutshell, a search for the answers to this question. In a broad ranging study covering economic growth, political reform, IMF assistance, HIV/AIDS and even security interventions, Easterly systematically analyses and teases out the key factors behind the repeated failure of aid to achieve results and learn from mistakes.  Throughout the book, Easterly’s research and analysis are interwoven with his own direct experiences as a World Bank economist for over 16 years. In contrast to the sophistication and depth of his analysis, Easterly’s conclusions about the reasons for the lacklustre performance of aid are relatively simple and intuitive.  From this reviewer’s perspective, they revolve around two key factors. 

The first relates largely to the structure of the aid system, and the incentives (or, as Easterly argues, lack of) for various aid actors within the system to perform and be either rewarded or held accountable for their performance.  As an economist, Easterly draws on the idea of the ‘principal-agent problem’ in economics to illustrate his point.  He demonstrates that the relationships between the principal (the public in ‘the West’), the agent representing the principal (donors and other aid actors involved in the ‘supply’ of aid goods and services), and the customers (the poor in ‘the Rest’), are disconnected and misaligned in terms of power, space and information.  The net result is that incentives for the agents to perform well are very weak or non-existent.

The second factor relates to the dominance of the bureaucratic planning approach in the aid system.  The fact that the most powerful aid actors (donors) are, by nature and design, bureaucracies naturally leads them to favor bureaucratic planning approaches to aid that are rigid, reductionist, homogenous and centralised in terms of decision-making.  Easterly argues that applying such approaches to change in complex, dynamic human systems – communities, organisations, institutions and even entire countries – are destined for failure, no matter how well intentioned they may be.  This is compounded by the lack of structural incentives for improving performance (mentioned in the paragraph above), which leads to not just occasional, but repeated failure due to the inability of aid actors to learn from their mistakes.

While careful to avoid proposing a ‘silver bullet’ solution, he contrasts the mainstream bureaucratic nature of aid delivery to the entrepreneurial behaviour of goods/services providers in market environments.  Because providers of goods/services are held directly accountable for how well they satisfy the demand of their customers, they have much more self-interest and incentive to constantly search for and experiment with better ways to deliver their product/service to the customer, learn from experience, and continuously improve performance. 

Easterly’s critiques are not intended to question the need for aid, but are offered unflinchingly as hard lessons on how the gap between the rhetoric and actual results of aid can be bridged.  His concluding chapters provide some case studies of individuals and organisations that have taken unorthodox, entrepreneurial approaches to development, and succeeded in finding ways that make real differences to people’s lives.  One example of this is PROGRESA, an education program in Mexico initiated by a Mexican economist that provides cash grants to mothers on the condition they keep their children in school. While cash grants are often viewed as an aid taboo because they increase dependency, independent evaluations were in fact able to demonstrate the success of the program’s strategy. According to Easterly, such examples illustrate what can be achieved when conventional approaches to aid are forgone, and development actors are given the freedom and supportive conditions to experiment and find solutions that work.

Easterly draws on his economic training to infuse his research and analysis with hard-nosed analytical rigour and plenty of evidence.  These insights are blended with his own fascinating personal insights, strong penchant for common sense, and plain-english style, to effectively present a set of complex ideas in a very simple way.  The result is a highly readable, compelling and thought-provoking book.  For anyone with a critical interest in the effectiveness of aid and development, The White Man’s Burden is worth adding to your reading list.

Warin Nitipaisalkul

wnitipaisalkul@hassall.com.au

Star Rating:  4/5 ¶