Development Ethics and USAID

“Tuesday Group”, May 17, 2005

David A. Crocker & Chloe Schwenke

Management Systems International

600 Water Street, NW, Washington, DC 20024

PRESENTATION SUMMARY

Part One ~ Development Ethics: Origins, Agreements,

Controversies, Agenda

Part Two ~ Development Ethics and USAID

• Democracy and Governance Assessment

Part One

Development Ethics:

Origins, Agreements,

Controversies, Agenda

WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT ETHICS?

“Development ethicists morally reflect upon and

assess the ends and means of local, national,

regional, and global development.”

• Colorado State University, 1978

- A course in development ethics?

SOURCES OF DEVELOPMENT ETHICS

• Development Practice

• Development Theory and Criticism- 40’s-50’s: Gandhi, Prebisch, Fanon

- 60’s-70’s: Goulet and Berger

- “Lifeboat Ethic” Debate: Singer vs. Hardin

- 80’s → Analytic philosophers

- 80’s → Streeten and Sen

- Associations, Consultants, and Initiatives: IDEA, IDB, HDCA, “Friday Morning Group,” NORAD

- Anthologies and textbooks

AREAS OF CONSENSUS ~ QUESTIONS

• What moral or value issues emerge in practice and how might

they be resolved?

- Examples from USAID experience?

• What is (good) development?

• “Development” or “______”?

• Development as rationalization of other goals?

- National economic or political interests?

AREAS OF CONSENSUS ~ MORE QUESTIONS

• What are best ends and values?

• How should benefits and harms be conceived?

• How should benefits, harms, and burdens be

distributed?

• Virtues/vices of development agents?

AREAS OF CONSENSUS ~ STILL MORE QUESTIONS

• Duty to promote development?

– Who has them?

– What are they?

– On what are they based?

• Role of professional codes?

• Practical impediments to development?

• Theoretical obstacles to development ethics?

• Who should decide these questions and how?

AREAS OF CONSENSUS ~ ANSWERS

• Deprivations and prosperity co-exist, and the former are unnecessary, remediable, and often due to the latter

• Development has ethical dimensions and can benefit from ethics

– Put moral questions and answers on center stage

– Explicit reflection and deliberation on “Doing the right thing”

• Development as interdisciplinary theory and integrated theory-practice

• Development as social change that reduces deprivation and misery and increases human well-being and freedom

AREAS OF CONSESNUS ~ MORE ANSWERS

• Development (good ends) is more than economic growth (a means)

• Development ethics on different levels of generality and specificity

• Global in triple sense

• Contextual sensitivity

• Rejection of extremes

– Discrimination

– “Unaimed opulence”

– Authoritarian egalitarianism

CONTROVERSIES

Scope of development ethics

• North and South?

• Beyond ODA?

Status of norms: universal or relative to culture?

“Thickness” of norms

• The good life or minimal decency?

• Self-determination plus tolerance or specific content?

• Threshold plus choice?

MORE CONTROVERSIES

Content of norms

• Which moral notions? Ethics as lenses for looking:

- Income/GNP?

- Preference satisfaction

- Agency/capability/functioning

- Rights

- Virtues

• Which distributive principles, and what distributions are most just?

• Human and nonhuman communities?

STILL MORE CONTROVERSIES

Responsibilities for change?

• Local, national, or global

Who decides?

• Experts vs. popular agency

• Outsiders vs. insiders

Blame for failures?

• Local, national, or global order

• Navigating against a headwind

AGENDA

• 1) Put ethics in the center of development

• 2) Promote ethical capabilities in leaders, change

agents, citizens

• 3) Overcome gap between theory and practice,

ethics and action

Part Two

Development Ethics and

USAID

HOW TO USE DEVELOPMENT ETHICS IN DG

Toolkit or Checklist?

A way of thinking, seeing, understanding?

• Conceptualizing “development”

• Differentiating between DG means and ends

• Identifying rights-holders and duty-bearers

• Voice ~ empowering stakeholders

WHAT TOOLS?

Applied EthicsNormative analysis, ethically-sensitive program design, andassessment informed by moral theory, moral intuition, and moral discernment.

Moral theories commonly applied in development ethics include, but are not limited to:

• Utilitarianism

• The capability approach

• Human rights approaches

• Kantian approaches

• Virtue ethics

• Feminist ethics

BUT WHY BE ETHICAL?

Drivers of international development and foreign

assistance

• National self-interest

– National security

– National prosperity and well-being

– National prestige

• Altruism

• Compassion and care

• Reciprocity, mutuality

CONSIDERING DEMOCRACY

A system of open competition between candidates, interests, power

factions, ideas?

• What happens between elections?

• “Good” governance? Accountability? Transparency?

• The common good?

• What happens to the “losers”?

A means to structure the application of power to achieve a working

consensus?

• Consensus through deliberation instead of competition?

• in competitive processes to identify the common good, who

always loses ?

DEMOCRACY’S GOALS

Avoiding the “fragile state” ~ democracy as a means to preserve stability and the status quo?

• Stability at what price, and at whose costs?

• Short term stability = protecting the status quo

• Equitable development, alleviation of poverty, social and economic mobility = creating long term stability

A mechanism (checks and balances) to constrain and direct – in a positive way – human greed and ambition?

• Is there room for different motives: integrity, civic virtue, moral principals, concern for the welfare of others?

• Where does inclusive “deliberative democracy” fit in to the mechanism?

IS THERE A ROLE FOR IDEALS IN DG

(outside the USA)?

LENSES OF DG ANALYSIS AND DESIGN

Political science lens

• “Who stands on the other side of democratic reform…”

• The donor’s interests are important, indeed may be dispositive…”

Economics lens

• “Competition is imbedded in the very structure of democratic governance.”

Sociological lens

• “Is there a social compact that allows ordered disagreement about policies to take place?”

Moral lens

• “Any analysis of the rule of law must begin with a review of the country’s human rights record…”

APPLYING THE MORAL LENS

The problem of corruption

• Identifying and constraining bad behavior

– Gift, petty corruption, tradition?

– Sanctions

– Institutional safeguards

– Accountability and transparency

– Codes of ethics, codes of conduct

• Encouraging good behavior

– Rejecting the notion that corruption is inevitable

– Fostering integrity

– Strengthening moral leadership

– Teaching moral education (“civics”)

– Codes of ethics, codes of conduct as dynamic tools

DGA FRAMEWORK ~ STAGE ONE

Characteristics of the political system

• Consider full rights of public participation

– Often constrained or frustrated by poverty, public apathy,

elite’s tendency to limit participation

• Right to participation linked to civic duty to participate

• Participation can be a destabilizing threat to elite interests

• Participation – an exercise of freedom: citizen voice and agency

– Consider if barriers to participation exist

• But what is the nature of those barriers?

• Who is responsible for the barriers? For removing them?

DGA FRAMEWORK ~ STAGE ONE

Good Governance

• “Democracy is a form of governance, not a philosophy club.”

• “Deliver the goods.”– Who defines the “good”?

– Are the goods really good?

– How much good is enough (for those who really need it)?

– How fairly is the good distributed?

• “A few authoritarian regimes have also delivered good governance…”

DGA FRAMEWORK ~ STAGES TWO AND THREE

Key Actors: Individuals and Institutions

• Players in the game of politics

• Any political environment (game) operates under particular rules– How just is the balance of power established by the rules?

– How fair are the rules that inform social choice?

– What opportunities are offered to the losers of the game?

– Do ideals shape the rules?

– Does integrity matter in how the rules are conceived, reformed, applied?

– Do the rules reflect the values of the stakeholders?

DGA FRAMEWORK ~ STAGE FOUR

Implementation ~ distilling the optimal strategy• “The primary problems are clear. The allies, opponents, and

resources have been identified, as has the playing field and its rules.”

– Who has defined the problems? (Whose problems take priority? Why? Do short term or long term results take precedence?)

– Is the field “sloped”?

– Who makes the compromises, and on what basis (need, power, donor status, other “strategic interests”)?

• “The hope is that this framework can help those who are committed to enlarging freedom and democracy find a coherent way to do so.”

CONCLUSIONS

USAID’s model of democracy and good governance is ethically incomplete

• The “right of rights”: citizen deliberation and agency

• A need to make broad-based public participation effective and sustainable

• Governance as stewardship, advocacy, and problem solving, not just delivering the goods

• Allowing space for desire for integrity, care for others, and the power of ideals as motivating factors driving citizens to do good

RECOMMENDATIONS

1) Incorporate a moral lens in the DGA Framework

2) Two-stage workshop at USAID on development

ethics

3) “Friday Morning Group” equivalent

4) Credit course or extended training for USAID staff on

development ethics