Technocrats prioritise material progress; humanists focus on political rights. What we need is balance
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Rice paddy fields outside Hanoi, 2011. The new faultline in development will be between technocrats and humanists. Photograph: Kham/Reuters
For many years, the loudest debate in development was aid: does it work? The preoccupation with aid obscured much of what was happening in developing countries, and left the development community with less to say about other big north-south questions, such as intervention. Still, it was important and accessible, with a crowd-drawing prizefight between Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly.
The debate will not be resolved; it will fade. International aid will always be important, but in the emerging global order it will never be central to development. Most poor people now live in powerful countries. Most extremely poor people live amid war, where development aid only succeeds when serving a broader strategy. Foreign investment, remittances and climate finance also make aid less central.
What is the next big debate in development? The new faultline will be more subtle, but it will cut deeper: it will be between the technocrats and the humanists. These words are not new jargon: they have longer careers in intellectual history than does development.
Technocrats advocate technical, often technological solutions. They believe in a science of human affairs, and so have faith in expertise. What we lack most are more resources to implement their plans. Their eight commandments are the millennium development goals: the goals are clear and measurable, and focus on what people need most in their daily lives.
Humanists are shot through with scepticism, always seeing more complexity and specificity in human affairs. Their faith is therefore in debate, not expertise. Humanists will prefer the Millennium Declaration to the MDGs since it offers a richer, more holistic vision of the world and a wide plan of action. Since the daily deprivations of the poor are usually symptoms of misgovernment and structural problems, a focus on them is politically naive.
The faultline has little regard for right and left, and runs through almost any issue. The philanthropist Bill Gates is a zealous technocrat. So is Sachs with his Millennium Villages. Amartya Sen will be claimed by everyone, but any son of the Bengal renaissance is essentially a humanist. Witness, for example, his insistence on public reasoning, such as in preventing famine, which provoked the food specialists. Another humanist – and another student of the humanities – is Francis Fukuyama, among the most insistent that the development community broaden its horizons.
If you think Ethiopia and Rwanda are going in the right direction, you are a technocrat. Your priority is material progress. If you worry Ethiopia and Rwanda are going in the wrong direction, you are a humanist. You think political rights, and free speech above all, are the guarantors of progress.
As a technocrat you are untroubled by the process towards a post-2015 development agenda. What matters is that governments and others approve new goals. As a humanist, you feel this chance for a searching, self-critical debate slipping away. Cultivating a global conversation would have been more transformative than new goals.
The clearest touchstone is the direction of development economics, which is overwhelmingly towards randomised control trials of small changes in behaviour, such as the time of year farmers buy fertiliser. Technocrats, such as Gates, champion this trend and the leading argument for it, Poor Economics. Humanists will side with Sanjay Reddy's recent review of Poor Economics as myopic and mechanical, and lament the focus on "the elixir of individual success, and not on understanding or reshaping the economic environment within which individuals are asked to succeed".
If you're a technocrat you'd rather be reading about mobile phones and big data in Nigeria. If you're a humanist, you'd rather this was about Chinua Achebe or reviving the UN.
Ours is an age of technocrats. It has brought stupendous advances. And it has brought us to the edge of several abysses.
Rare is the politician or rock star who does not prefer readymade solutions to more open-ended prescriptions. And it's easier to staff an organisation with well-defined expertise than critical habits of the mind.
But there is now an urgent need to balance our technocratic approach with a new humanism. Otherwise we'll face our greatest challenges without our greatest intellectual resources, and the development community will be unable to reimagine itself for a dramatically changed world.
