Reimagining International Development for the 21st Century

Indy Johar explores how international development is or at least should be changing.

Having worked with various UNDP offices and other development agencies around world over the last year. — it is becoming apparent that “International Development” is changing and needs to change, driven by some of the following emerging realities:

MOVING THE MIDDLE — Increasingly, the challenge for International Development lies with Middle Income Countries, many of which are stagnating and/or struggling to find viable pathways to a 21st century High Income future. Though the Bottom Income Economies continue to exist, the systemic mainstream challenge is shifting the sticky middle. This requires us to reimagine a development economy fit for trillions of dollars of investment as well as remaking/redesigning institutional infrastructures fit for this reality.

A MIDDLE WITH TWO STORIES — We also have to recognize that within the middle income block are two divergent stories — one group of states trapped in a cycle of decline — usually as a result of climate change, demographics and resource dependency — and another group with the capacity & necessity to imagine solutions of growth. Both these scenarios require fundamentally different support and scales of intervention from International Development.

A NEW SCALE OF INTERVENTION — Middle Income States in the midst of a vicious cycle of decline — need Development Practices which go beyond the basic innovation strategy of “prototyping and handing off to ministerial counterparts”. Increasingly the counter parties are not there or do not have the structural capacity to intervene at the scale required. This requires us to imagine a new scale of Development Aid Funding, once goes beyond seeding innovation to one which is perhaps of the order of the Marshall Plan and drive innovation at scale and distribution. This is a scale of thinking, intervention, and operations that many development agencies would struggle to imagine, resource or build the capabilities/capability to address.

INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR THE 21st CENTURY However, Middle Income states with the capacity to “strengthen” also need new typologies of support — it is no longer sufficient to imagine & prototype — micro projects, socially minded projects. We must imagine new models of institutional economies — which address the growing movement of global devolution. Let’s imagine a new 21st century treasury — realtime federated, using BlockChain — supporting a fiscal devolution not yet imagined; Let’s image new models of measuring real-time inflation analytics using data science, let’s reimagine — new models qualification & certification using tech like/such as BlockChain; lets imagine the role of complementary currencies, MOOCs and hybrid schooling etc. Fundamentally, let’s start to reimagine the institutional infrastructure we deem the norm — as it is becoming increasingly clear/apparent that the transition from middle income will not be delivered without re-imagining the institutional infrastructure. An institutional infrastructure fit for the 21st Century not just replicating the institutional infrastructure of the 19th century.

NEW GENERATION OF FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS. Increasingly, the challenge of Development requires us to reimagine a new financial economy of Development — one extending beyond “political” aid and grant. The scale of capital required demands that the Development world links to global capital markets — instruments like Resilience Bonds, Catastrophe Bonds, Hedge Funds focused on development. We need to build new research & development capacity to Design & Develop the new Financial Instruments for 21st century Development.

BEYOND THE GOAL TO ADDRESS THE SYSTEM — Increasingly, development agencies need to recognize that SDGS are system challenges — addressing poverty, education and health requires us to address water irrigation and sanitation — these goals cannot be addressed in isolation — these cannot be treated or addressed as individual goals — but require “Systems Change approach” in which multiple goals are address together in a “development stack” in recognition of their system interdependency.

BEYOND THE PUBLIC & PRIVATE — We must recognize the shortcomings of the Washington Consensus focused on the hard transition from Public Sector Economies to Massive privatization — the risk it generates of replacing visible monopolies of power with invisible monopolies of power. The transition needs to focus on democratizing the power of innovation and empowering citizens to become authors in/of their lives — by investing in growing open source/ commons economies of the micro yet network scaled intervention. Seeding the infrastructure for decentralized & democratized innovation necessary for a complex and emergent world — without dogmatically privileging the “private” which we have seen, has become, in many parts of the world, a framework for new oligarchies.

FROM STATE TO MOVEMENT — The state as the sole domain of intervention is an out-dated model — we are increasingly seeing this notion of the national state as the architecture of change being challenged by a combination of the rise of city ‘state’, the power of multinational corporatism, and the organisational modalities enabled by the likes of Bitnation & crypto institutions starting to dream about challenging the institutional dominance of the state from money production, public verification architectures, land registry to pubic notary functions. This shift is combining with a need to face up to the wicked challenge of our reality, where the nation state is neither contextually close enough to problem or challenge nor can isolate or fully encompass to address the systems challenges we are facing from environmental pollution, system level resource dependencies & terrorism etc. This reality increasingly asks us to recognize the nation as a system network of interests & dependencies — significantly transcending its geographic boundary, and organized as swarm of agencies — a movement; suggesting a near now future where the real counter parties of International development in the 21st Century are likely to be cities and systems — subnational, transnational and multinational.

Fundamentally, this future requires a new International Development capacity & vision, of a like not witnessed since World War 2. Fundamentally, the challenge is not capital, or capacity but a paucity of vision, and appetite for a scale of innovation. We need to start this journey recognizing firstly, that neither the individual national state nor the our present Development world have tools or the scale of tools to deal with this systems, interdependent reality — once we can humbly agree this — we can choose to invent with necessity the necessary tools to unleash 6 billion people + to take our civilization to the stars — together.

This post first appeared on the Dark Matter Laboratories blog.

Photo credit: DFID - UK Department for International Development via Foter.com / CC BY

For more on the future of international development see our e-book: 'The Donors’ Dilemma: Emergence, Convergence and the Future of Foreign Aid', Guest Edited by Andy Sumner and Tom Kirk.