Nepal, according to David Malone, is caught between the two fastest growing economies in the world but isn’t growing itself – “You really have to get up early in the morning to achieve that.”
For Malone, though, Nepal’s subsidiary position has nothing to do with its neighbors, who he feels “would rather see it succeed.” As he didn’t have the answer himself, he called on the intellectual community to spend more time reflecting on the state of the economy, rather than political intrigue.
Malone has previously served as non-resident ambassador to Bhutan and Nepal, and as Canada’s High Commissioner to India, among other positions. In 2008, he took up his position as president of the IDRC, an organization that primarily funds research. The IDRC has supported 130 activities worth about USD34 million in Nepal since 1972, more recently to help farmers in conserving the genetic diversity of their traditional crops. Malone is currently editing a volume on Nepal’s governance crisis together with Suman Pradhan and Sebastian von Einsiedel. The work will feature several Nepali authors and is to be published by Cambridge University Press this year.
In Malone’s decades of experience, he finds that when it comes to a country’s development and economic growth, specificity perseveres. To think that “there is one size that fits all in development does not really work.” No single template exists to dig a country out of trouble, as seen in the extremely divergent models for economic growth adopted by India and China. While China invested, beginning in the late 1970s, in bottom-up agricultural reforms, marked by Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “crossing the river by touching the stone”, and a manufacturing industry catered to exports, India’s economic liberalization of the early 1990s was marked by an emphasis on the services and information technology sectors. Even though both have since seen tremendous economic growth, their growth is grounded on very different factors. He further ascertains that at times development persists despite corruption, internal violence and civil unrest. Therefore, “the idea of the snake oil peddlers who have that one idea about how development is to be achieved – Maniacs!”
However, Malone did have a few generic suggestions for how to successfully implement development projects. Notably, he prescribed a certain degree of humility, risk-taking, ensuring local commitment and ownership, and an acceptance that one’s instincts may be wrong. Indeed, these lessons were learned the hard way. During his early career in development, he had the opportunity of working in Sudan in the late 1970s, at a time when over 50 million dollars was being spent on projects there every year. Alas, today, there isn’t a trace of any of the projects he worked on.
“The particular flaw in our approach was that the Sudanese were particularly polite about what we offered them, but they were no more than polite, in the sense that … there was no degree of local commitment to any of the projects, and without local commitment all such projects fail.”
As for the overall field of development assistance, while admitting that it has made significant mistakes over the years, Malone did not agree to branding it “illusory.”
“We have seen enormous progress at the international level in cross-cutting ways. If you look at health statistics since the international development effort started, certain diseases have been wiped out, smallpox, to give an example. Others have been largely wiped out, namely polio. Life expectancy has risen nearly everywhere.”
Still, this progress is not irreversible and often quite fragile. Thus, Malone had a few recommendations for the existing development paradigm. First, watch out for the dissenters. The development field is very trend-driven and can easily be persuaded by conventional wisdom. This was a blatant mistake in the case of Iran in the 1960s and has continued to be development’s Achilles’ heel over the years.
Second, focus less on humanitarian relief. Today, over 30 to 40 percent of development assistance is set aside for humanitarian crises, a huge shift from thirty to forty years back, when only a few specialized agencies, notably UNHCR, WFP, UNICEF, and the Red Cross were involved in humanitarian assistance and received just a small portion of development aid.
“While human beings of course need to be supported and rescued when they are in extreme distress, usually very little remains of these investments over the medium and long term.”
The current situation, according to Malone, “is largely a result of the so-called CNN effect where the television cameras rush in to capture a telegenic disaster, because there are human survivors in great distress…and governments then feel ‘we need to do something because the public wants us to do something to relieve this distress, wherever it is.’ But then of course the cameras disappear and the lasting developmental value of humanitarian assistance may not be too great.”
Third, create demand for development research.
Lastly, Malone called for humility in the field, because “what we are certain of today, we may question tomorrow and be quite certain is wrong the next day.”
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