Category Archives: Official Development Assistance

The global ecumenical movement and sustainable development

Oct. 3, 2017

ACT Alliance, World Council of Churches and their members working together

During most of the coming week, I will be in Geneva with about 75 other people from around the world to offer up our best thinking about new ways of understanding churches’ participation in development.

Our gathering, entitled the “Ecumenical Strategic Forum on Diakonia and Sustainable Development,” will strengthen the churches’ collective efforts toward accomplishing “the 2030 agenda for sustainable development.” More on that below.

The problem is that four decades of economic growth policies that favour corporate notions of development over other approaches—sustainable, transformative, human, social, or any other modifier—have left us with ever-greater gaps between the rich and poor both among and within countries. The World Council of Churches and ACT Alliance—the two key organizers of this week’s forum—call for a new approach that integrates more dimensions: rising nationalism, climate change, marginalization of non-governmental organizations in some countries, deepening inequality, war, forced migrations, and inclusion of children, youth and women.

They see in the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) a way forward, and they see in the churches’ own history and theology of diakonia a solid justification for further action.

Diakonia is one of those New Testament Greek words that in the church over time became either a liturgical function or a specific, service-oriented ministry. In this new millennium, its deeper meaning is being recovered. One background document for this Geneva meeting speaks of diakonia as the “church’s ministry of sharing, healing and reconciliation.” 

That definition resonates with me. It seems to open the possibility of understanding some aspects of our work in a clearer way: reconciliation is not just penance or reparation for past wrongs, but an agenda for transformation of broken relationships. Sharing is not just about imparting technical expertise or sending money, but about honest dialogue about differences of race, class, gender and power. 

Those Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

As principles or even as guides for action, I support the Sustainable Development Goals. Who but the most reactionary would not? And I agree that the goals are an opportunity for churches and others to hold governments accountable for national strategies of sustainable development. 

But we have lived through successive and failed “decades of development.” We see governments that refuse to live up to their commitments to the United Nations and to all sorts of multilateral agreements. Extreme poverty, social conflict, and injustice cannot be eliminated, or climate change fixed, without significant structural changes to the global economy.

What I will be looking for in the coming days are practical steps toward building alliances that enable real transformation that benefits the people who usually get left out because of economic calculations.

Official development and a liberation agenda

(Sept. 15, 2011)

Political debate in Canada about the future of this country’s development assistance programs is what pushed me to start writing about development.

Canada’s aid program has its roots in the 1950s. Cold War competition and fruitful interaction with a generation of new leaders in the Commonwealth led Canada into new relationships with many newly independent “developing nations.”

In 1960, the External Aid Office was created. In 1968, near the end of a period when Canadian governments found new roles in social policy, health care, human rights and international development, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was created to administer the bulk of Canada’s official development assistance (ODA) programs.

CIDA’s aim is“to manage Canada’s support and resources effectively and accountably to achieve meaningful, sustainable results and engage in policy development in Canada and internationally, enabling Canada’s effort to realize its development objectives. CIDA works in concert with its development partners, fragile states and countries in crisis, countries of focus, and the Canadian population and institutions.”

“God is Good,” says the broken-down water truck in Delmas, Port-au-Prince (2011)

Initially, CIDA administered the bulk of Canada’s ODA program in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia. “In 1995, CIDA took on the responsibility of administering Canada’s official assistance (OA) programs in Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (countries in transition) by supporting democratic development and economic liberalization.”

A liberation agenda

Some in the north sought to participate in official development programs while maintaining both a lively critique of the programs and advancing a liberation agenda. As the Canadian Interchurch Fund for International Development (ICFID*—an ancestor of KAIROS) was formed in 1973, its member churches provided a definition of development that served the churches for the next 25 years or so:

“Development is a process of continuous change by which any country, any specific population, or sector of population in its natural, cultural, or social milieu and at a definite stage in history, within a framework of international relations, seeks liberation, both material and spiritual, by:

  • transforming its structures of production;
  • establishing new social relationships;
  • acquiring for itself adequate political and administrative institutions;
  • recreating or strengthening its own culture for the purpose of achieving a better quality of life.”

* ICFID: Robert Fugere, “The Interchurch Fund for International Development,” in Christopher Lind and Joe Mihevc, eds. (1994), Coalitions for Justice, Ottawa: Novalis, p. 220.

What kind of development?

(Sept. 4, 2011)

Javier Sicilia (Proceso, 2011)

In 2011, a Mexican poet, journalist and social activist found himself leading a new social movement that found ready followers across Mexico. Javier Sicilia dared to protest the murder of his son Juan Francisco at the hands of a drug gang, and to link the death to the way the Mexican government carries out the so-called “War on Drugs.”

Although we lived in the same city, Cuernavaca, during the late 90s and to some extent moved in similar circles of people of faith concerned about human rights and social justice, I don’t recall that I ever met him. But I read his weekly columns in Proceso, Mexico’s leading national newsmagazine. Sicilia drew deeply from the best of Catholic social teaching and from the wisdom of the Zapatista Indigenous rebels in Chiapas to condemn globalized capitalism. For Sicilia, the problem today is not just capitalism or even the rule by wealthy elites in most countries. These are problems that have been obvious for centuries.

By the early 1980s, it was possible to discern a new and harsher form of capitalism, one that came to be called “neo-liberal economic globalization” (or more often simply either neo-liberalism or globalization).

Do we err in promoting development?

Sicilia also asserts that we who question neo-liberal capitalism and its free market model of development err in using the same terms as those who have provoked and maintain extreme poverty.

Among those who influenced Sicilia’s ways of thinking and acting was Ivan Illich, an Austrian priest and educator who was profoundly suspicious of church hierarchies and of formal education. Illich (who also lived at least part-time in Cuernavaca until his death in 2002) wrote that the contemporary concept of development was born from U.S. President Harry Truman’s 1949 inauguration speech. Truman announced a program of technical assistance to under-developed countries that was called “Point Four.”

Until then, according to Illich, “we only used the term [development] to refer to animal or plant species, the value of real estate or geometrical surfaces. And, in less than a generation, we were inundated with diverse theories about development.”

Adoption of these models, Illich argued, gradually destroyed local and subsistence economies, replacing them with export-oriented market economies and industrialization. Illich’s essay “Vernacular Values” is in a 1981 book called Shadow Work. The text can be found on many internet sites, including here. (Comments on development are in his “1st part.”)

When we talk about development, let’s be clear that we are talking about something other than approaches that not only damage local communities, but imperil the whole Earth.