Poor and benighted

摘要

The fat reports favoured by international development agencies are full of lofty goals like "making poverty history", not to mention grand claims about big victories. By contrast, people who work in development prefer tales about bizarre schemes and massive cock-ups. Two new books provide myriad examples of this, from malaria-reduction efforts that inadvertently lead to the rise of resistant strains to American agricultural techniques exported wholesale to places with other systems of land ownership. Given all this, it comes as no surprise that neither Ben Ramalingam, of Britain's Overseas Development Institute, nor William Easterly, an economist at New York University, is a fan of the idea of development as something the West and its experts export to the Rest.