American-run infrastructure projects in Iraq, while costing billions of dollars, haven't won much goodwill or contributed substantially to nationbuilding efforts. Outright fraud is one reason. But Cameron Sinclair suggests the problem is more fundamental: "Top down" reconstruction and humanitarian relief efforts simply don't work.
"The joke in Iraq is that the U.S. hires a Jordanian contractor, who hires an Iraqi subcontractor, who hires a crew of Nepalese workers," says Sinclair, executive director and co-founder of Architects for Humanity. "Then, when the Nepalese workers are kidnapped, no one cares and that's the end of the project."
Security concerns aren't what has kept Sinclair's group out of Iraq, he says. The key to successful reconstruction, whether it's done to clean up after an invasion, a tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, is that the work be directed and carried out as much as possible by those it is meant to help. "In Iraq and Afghanistan, we just felt that the bureacracy was so heavy, it wouldn't allow us to work in a way that we knew would be effective," he said.
Architects for Humanity has sponsored rebuilding projects in Sri Lanka and the U.S. Gulf Coast, and edited "Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises," which was published last month. The book describes dozen of successful, mostly small scale building efforts.
Sinclair's arguments in favor of involving effected communities in aid projects reinforce those made by William Easterly, a New York University economics professor, in his recently published "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," a broader look at economic assistance programs and organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF.
Sinclair sees some cause for hope. "There are a small, but growing number of aid organizations that are engaging the community and getting good results....This isn't rocket science. It works."
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Comments (1)
Some more connecting the dots "further inland": Microcredit seems to be key.
A gift strengthens a relationship that is almost feudal in its inequality, whereas a loan will create a sense of duty, connectivity and responsibility, it will foster cooperation and involvement. It will also energize and empower the risk takers that have the private initiative required to grow a society.
If I were to invest in microcredits for a certain area instead of to give to a project I would become involved in success and even if my investment were to fail I might just do it all over again for the sense of satisfaction and involvement it provides.
If the US $10b the US and Europe have given to the Palestinian Authority over the last decade would instead have gone to setting up a system of small and carefully audited ethical banks issuing microcredits to infrastructure and business projects, Hamas would probably not even have had the opportunity to create the social and political momentum that made it into the force it is today. And in many, many other cases, 'aid' given by the west often simply causes the life of the corrupt patient to be extended instead of fostering the growth of a self propelled middle class that will create conditions for the rule of law, freedom of speech and eventually democracy. The PA is exemplary in how aid has failed completely as a social and political tool. As for Iraq, it will be a long while before the country will be stable enough for private property to be respected sufficiently. Without that respect only small sized business is possible.
Then, It would help if the US and mainly Japan and Europe would abandon tariffs on agricultural imports but I suppose that in the curent global political climate having an independent food supply may be well advised.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5079324
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5310549
jvd70 (from N.W. Europe)
June 29, 2006 6:25 PM | Report Offensive Comment
Posted on June 29, 2006 18:25