Max Stephenson, Jr.
Professor, Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs
and
Director, Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance
Virginia Tech
The international community has redefined its interests in the individual citizens of nations during the last three decades. The doctrine of human security now justifies intervention in otherwise sovereign states on the basis of ensuring the rights and freedoms of those nations’ citizens in furtherance of international order. As the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) put the matter in its Human Development Report in 1994, the international community must now seek to ensure that nations’ populations are free from want and free from fear if it is to address the challenge of global insecurity successfully.
More generally, international development initiatives have always had to address the realities of states’ capacities and willingness to participate in such efforts even as they had also to consider how best substantively to assist the individuals, institutions, or populations targeted. Each of the articles offered in this volume relates to the issue’s overall theme of intervention by assessing the impacts of such actions on the exercise or development of individual agency or for the capacities of individuals to avoid or overcome poverty and/or to make equitable policy choices. Together, these papers illustrate that neither individuals nor institutions nor states, the mythology of national sovereignty notwithstanding, are autonomous social actors. Instead, all are enmeshed deeply in social imaginaries that constitute the often-invisible structures that shape human possibility.
In democracies at least, socio-cultural conditions shape political potentials, and these in turn either support or undermine free economic markets. And all of these together, or acting singly, iteratively may shape the outcomes of interventions designed to encourage democratic agency, shift public attitudes to support new technologies or innovations, or secure participation in alternate markets. These factors, too, will influence individual and social capacities to acquire knowledge. Indeed, overall, these articles illustrate that such learning is critical to positive outcomes for aid or development interventions.
Brendan Halloran’s analysis demonstrates how misleading and inappropriate it may be when aid agencies (or their overseers) insist on technical responses to challenges and concerns that demand socially adaptive change, in this instance, efforts to help individuals garner agency for democratic participation. Halloran concludes his review of several United States Agency for International Development (USAID) democratization projects by pointing up the reality that the U.S. foreign assistance agency will not succeed (in its efforts to encourage democratic efficacy in populations previously lacking it) if USAID and Congress continue to treat interventions as technical and neutral instruments that may be pursued and evaluated accordingly. Political agency is the product of a complex amalgam of social, cultural, political, and economic factors. The norms linked to these must be nurtured, learned, and accepted broadly across not only targeted groups, but also the populations of which they are a part, to ensure their social legitimacy and realize their promise. None of these are technical concerns. The upshot of Halloran’s analysis is that those development agencies, including USAID, currently employing supposedly scientific instruments and criteria to pursue their aims and to evaluate their impacts, must reconceive their efforts as initiatives targeted to assisting populations in processes of change and learning, and adopt project and program evaluation measures consistent with that aspiration.
Similarly, Stefanie Georgakis’ article concerning European Union (EU) and Italian efforts to cope with a massive and sudden in-migration from Tunisia to the island of Lampedusa by imposing norms and barriers designed to keep this new “other” apart from local and European Union residents illustrates a typically human fear-filled response to such demographic shifts. The EU and Italians alike erected metaphoric walls and borders of all sorts in an effort to corral and control the potential change the migrant influx represented and to prevent its spread and dreaded usurpation of existing ways of life. This case reminds observers that international and national actors may act in concert to prevent change and thereby to cement existing ways of knowing, rather than to open or ensure new possibilities for democratic action or different types of agency or engaged citizens. This scenario makes clear that intervention may not necessarily be liberating or empowering, but can have opposite consequences. What also appears true is that local, national, and international interventions in such situations will be mediated by the existing sociocultural structures and dominant epistemic-scale understandings of who is a legitimate resident and citizen, and under what conditions, if any, newcomers or perceived interlopers, may gain such standing.
Quentin Stoeffler’s simulation and analysis of an effort to provide very poor farmers with cash as a poverty amelioration and development strategy is an example of a purposeful intervention aimed at assisting individuals by which its authors indirectly hope to aid the societies of which they are a part. Stoeffler finds that the success of this approach depends finally on how existing markets respond or whether any suitable markets exist for products offered as a result of the aid effort. As with the Halloran and Georgakis analyses, Stoeffler concludes that interventions, even those involving “simple” cash transfers, occur in a web of existing interrelated sociocultural, political, and economic relationships. These may neither be assumed away nor ignored if the agents of change wish to secure even a small measure of success. Moreover, the cash transfers themselves may prompt unforeseen and negative consequences. In this finding, Georgakis’ article echoes Halloran’s analysis. Those providing the aid must avoid the trap of imagining that their interventions occur in a vacuum and because well intentioned, certain to bear positive fruit. In short, in Stoeffler’s case, those offering to help individuals with cash must be open to learning as they go and adapting their intervention accordingly, recognizing they control few of the factors that ultimately will dictate the success or failure of their aid enterprise.
Finally, Sabrina Provencher’s article addresses the question of how integrated interdisciplinary STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects-related learning may occur at the K-12 level. Her analysis addresses the well-known difficulties scholars have in bridging the epistemic divides that separate researchers. While she expresses hope that additional studies will yield analytical frames that will more effectively and predictably bridge these cognitive (and emotional) barriers, she is frank to point up the challenges in securing that result even though the possibilities opened by that outcome would be large. For now, she argues that technology-rich learning environments may hold the most hope of any presently available vehicle to provide students and faculty alike with the tools necessary to develop alternate frames to cross disciplinary differences.
As a whole then, these articles caution would-be interveners, whether offering strategies to secure improved education, more robust development, democratization, or equitable immigration, to be cognizant that change in human populations is never a neutral or technical concern. If it is to occur at all, such change must be marshaled, cajoled, and voluntarily adopted. Change always occurs in a sociocultural and political context and its successful agent will act deliberately and mindfully and with deep awareness of existing norms and values, even if these are in some measure repugnant. As Provencher’s article illustrates, the prospect of change often induces fear of the dissolution of existing ways of knowing for populations. New modes of understanding cannot be pressed as if merely technical changes, but must instead literally be taken to heart by those affected, if change is to occur. In short, social change inevitably requires individual and social learning and learning requires time and patience and no small measure of perseverance and it may well prove, as the essays in this issue amply demonstrate, an often Sisyphean process.