<incom> Broad & Cavanagh, The Hijacking of the Development Debate

[Peter Burgess]

Dear Colleagues

Thank you, Soenke, for bringing this article to our attention.

The "stability" of the world is not improved by the "pundits" who
advocate with huge influence for the wrong things. In a recent article
in the Economist it was observed (from my memory) that people who
don't know history will repeat the errors of the past, but that people
who misinterpret history will also make a mess of the present. It seem
that Sachs and Friedman ... and their zillions of followers are in the
second group.

But the "institutions" of the relief and development sector (RDS) have
also hijacked the development debate. When the World Bank or the UN
says something about development, most of the media accepts it as
valid analysis. As you know I have spent a long time (years) trying to
get facts about relief and development performance from an
accountant's perspective. How much did it cost? What was accomplished?
What is the durable value of the accomplishment? All simple accounting
concepts. But the RDS institutions have no concept of what I am
talking about, let alone any data. The lack of management information
is obscene.

I am in the middle of an effort to get this information pulled
together for the global malaria crisis. What works? How much does it
cost? What are the results (the aim is hopefully to reduce the
prevalence of malaria!)? What works best at least cost? Are there ways
to reduce the cost and increase the results? All basic management
information ... but though there are thousands of reports, NONE have
clear cost and result information in them. (hopefully this is not
true, but up to now after looking at several hundred peer reviewed
academic documents I have not yet found meaningful cost / result
information).

I think this is a disgraceful situation ... and I think the next step
should be to start holding the leaders of the various institutions
accountable for their failure to manage the resources under their
responsibility ... ALL OF THEM.

But it is worse ... the official accountability organizations like the
US GAO routinely report on an absolutely catastrophic failure to do
the accounting and contracting in a responsible way ... but always
somehow do the study and write the report after billions have gone
missing. When I was an active corporate accountant/CFO, the job was to
stop the money going missing in the first place. What on earth is
going on.

Peter Burgess
____________
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network
Tr-Ac-Net in New York
212 772 6918
peterbnyc at gmail.com



On 8/3/06, Soenke Zehle <s.zehle at kein.org> wrote:
> An excellent read, lots of useful stats, Soenke
>
> Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, "The Hijacking of the Development Debate:
> How Friedman and Sachs Got It wrong," World Policy Journal, Summer 2006
> <http://www.ifg.org/pdf/Broad%20Cavanagh.pdf>
>
> "Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs — articulate, learned globetrotting
> pundits — would seem an unlikely duo to hijack the development debate.
> Yet, through their best-selling books — Friedman's The World Is Flat and
> Sachs's The End of Poverty — their prominent exposure in the U.S. media,
> and endorsements by celebrities like Bono, the superstar lead singer of
> the rock group U2, they have done precisely that. Just a half decade
> after protests by citizen groups in Latin America and elsewhere
> discredited two decades of market-oriented neoliberal dogma, Friedman
> and Sachs have narrowed the debate with simplistic slogans of "more aid"
> and "more trade." They have done so by putting forward myths about the
> poor, economic development, and the global economy."
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