Tania Li wrote a book, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (published in 2007, Durham University Press), which I have meant to read for some time. Her fieldwork was in Sulawesi, very relevant for my current tasks, so I nestled down last week with my Kindle and dove in. It is an excellent book, documenting what has happened in several development/conservation projects in Central Sulawesi, and placing those findings in broader global and theoretical contexts. Many of the experiences she relates, I have seen replicated in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and other parts of the world.
Following a theoretical discussion, she traces the historical involvement of first the Netherlands and England in the colonial era in Indonesia, and then the continuation of similar governance approaches by the Indonesian government and its partners. ‘The will to improve’ refers, not to the desire to improve oneself or a government’s own actions (as I’d imagined); but rather to the desire to improve others, particularly—in her indepth examples—the rural peoples living in Central Sulawesi. But I write now, not to review the book per se, but to add to it from my own experience.
I recall, from graduate school days in the 1970s, first a general disdain among anthropologists for ‘do-gooders’ (I wondered at the time if I was one); then as I studied Marx and his followers, there were those who railed against any attempt to improve people’s situations as ‘holding back the revolution’, ameliorating conditions that could lead the masses to rebel; then there were my own concerns not to be ‘paternalistic’ in my interactions with others. The concerns Li voices, regarding the will to improve, seem to fall within this realm. In her analysis, she tries very hard to provide a balanced view of the perspectives of rural peoples, NGO workers, Indonesian government actors, and various workers with aid and research organizations. By and large, she succeeds. But, she has praise only for one NGO, Yayasan Tanah Merdeka (YTM) in Palu, Sulawesi, whose work she describes briefly as ‘exemplary’. Specifically, she notes
‘Their [YTM’s] primary mode of engagement is political: asking questions, provoking debate, and conducting analysis that helps to expose unfair rules, greed, and destruction. They focus on issues of substantive injustice, the litmus they use for deciding when and where to intervene.’ (lines 3520-3523, Kindle edition)
This description resonates with my own attempts. But I have spent my life in contexts where trying to ‘improve’ local folks was a common thread. I’ve worked in a variety of jobs (as a researcher at CIFOR, a consultant for the international banks, an NGO worker, an independent academic, a professor). Through this complex lens, I feel that Li’s analysis misses an important element: the self-awareness of many of these actors in their (our) attempts to make the kind of difference Li calls for, within the constraining world she describes. In one case, for instance, she talks about what she considers an ‘unintended consequence’ of political activism among the local population who have been ‘facilitated’ for conservation. I know in my own experience, we have often facilitated groups, expressly hoping that they would indeed act politically (in situations where we, as outsiders, were unable to do so). Indeed, she herself provides confirming evidence, describing one facilitator who later became a leader in the mini-rebellion that transpired in the area. Our whole ACM project (http://www.cifor.org/acm/), described briefly below, was intended to empower local folks, a goal we glossed over in written documents to maintain our freedom/capacity to act. Similarly, Women in Development specialists in the 1980s urged action, in writing, in terms of production and economic benefits of involving women. This was, we reasoned, a strategy that the donor community and other scientists would find appealing and that might get some attention to women’s lives.
Li’s reliance on written material to represent those concerned with conservation and development—also valuable in itself—still fails to capture the real motivations, informal strategies, and small successes that characterize some who operate within this world. There is a need for a sympathetic ethnography of this world as well, one that captures the successes, as well as the failures, as people who share her goals strive to address raw power and inequitable structures. Perhaps such experiences—both positive and negative—can provide insights that would help us replicate the positive.
Here I recount five examples of such attempts within my own life:
1. In 1979, Pete Vayda and I developed a proposal1 to examine the rationality of swidden agriculture in a context wherein both local Dayaks and their agriculture were nearly unanimously dismissed as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ (Dayaks were also categorized as orang terasing as described by Li). We concluded that indeed their system was rational, even sustainable within small population densities; we found the people to be proactive, analytical and (not surprisingly today), as intelligent as any other population. We wrote extensively about our findings. I was dismayed, as time went by, and these findings were not—for years—seemingly incorporated into the policy narratives that dominated Indonesian politics. Swidden agriculture as evil and Dayaks as unthinking traditionalists (very convenient scapegoats) continued to hold sway. Li’s reported policy narratives about the people of Central Sulawesi resonated well with my own experience of comparable narratives in Kalimantan. On the positive side, eventually though, our findings began to be taken up by NGOs and contributed to counter-narratives that have, I believe, influenced Indonesian policies and politics about local folks, local systems, resettlement and swidden agriculture. It has all just taken a lot longer than I imagined it would (and, of course, the original narrative remains powerful).
2. In 1983-86, I worked in Sumatra with a team of Farming Systems researchers, eventually leading the team.2 We were trying to improve agriculture and livelihoods, rather than people; but we thought working with the people would make the accomplishment of these goals both more directly useful and more successful. We combined growing ethnographic understanding of local systems and local people’s desires with collaborative experimentation with ‘cooperator farmers’, first the transmigrants from Java as directed by our Indonesian partners. Later, we were able to prove the ecological and agronomic sense of the local Minangkabau systems in that context. But meanwhile a crisis emerged: my sense that we should also be looking at the local farming system was confirmed: inter-ethnic jealousies popped up in the form of false rumours that one of our team members was trying to proselytize Christianity in this very Muslim context. Political actors at all levels (local to international) became involved. Though losing one of our most valued (and loved) team members, our desire to add the local Minangkabau cooperator farmers to our mix was approved. It became possible to listen (overtly) to local folks’ voices and incorporate their concerns as well in our work. But, as Li points out for Central Sulawesi, the best we really had immediately to offer in that context was the sharing of the local system’s advantages with transmigrants! This recognition, however, represented a) another chink in the world view that held these folks to be backward; and b) a new starting point for agronomic and agroforestry experimentation. Those farmers involved with us also gained in self-confidence in dealing with outsiders; they learned scientific and analytical skills that they can continue to use as they fight the many battles that continue to confront them—skills that can strengthen their voices. We also hoped our results might modify the national inclination to export Javanese and Western agricultural technologies willy nilly to areas of Indonesia where they were inappropriate. Although again, I was disappointed in the level of direct uptake, the positive experience of our partner scientists—recognizing the inherent rationality of different systems, the differing cultural inclinations of different ethnic groups, important gender differences, etc.—has continued to influence their own work as they’ve gained power within various bureaucracies.
3. In the late 1990s, influenced by the positive elements of these two previous experiences, I worked with researchers at the Center for International Forestry in Bogor to develop an approach we called adaptive collaborative management (ACM).3 It built on the positive features of Farming Systems, particularly a strong voice for local folks, but also incorporated more attention to ecological sustainability. In the first round of 11 countries, although we had varying results, many were encouraging enough: people (both men and women) doing their own analyses of their problems, determining plans, implementing and assessing them in an iterative way, expanding their networks, gaining in confidence, and more—probably not unlike Yayasan Tanah Merdeka’s approach. We felt our village partners were gaining in skills needed to empower themselves, to make their own voices heard. We tried to get funding to continue our work; sometimes we succeeded, but not often enough. Although we’d predicted that with this kind of approach we’d need 10-15 years to really assess its value, we could only get a maximum of 3-4 years at a time. Second-phase funding proved in most cases impossible. The kinds of improvements we saw, we had not been able to predict or to measure quantitatively (the gold standard for donors). Again, Li’s analysis fits well: we had not been able to turn our approach into enough of a ‘technology’ to impress donors or governments. But we had seen people (men, women; the marginalized; different ethnic groups/castes) take greater control of their lives; some local people organized and began confronting those mistreating them; some bureaucrats began to take notice of what local people were saying. We had some successes.
By the mid-2000s, we’d managed to get funding for new ‘action research’ in several countries (though few in the sites where we’d been working—where indeed the funding proved most useful!).4
4. In one case (to which I was recruited in the last year),5 funding was for only two years operating in 12 countries—an impossible task, given the nature of such cooperative work. The teams tried to conduct what they called ‘action research’, but with the complexities of government approvals, site selection, rapport development, cross-site communications, little time was left for the truly time consuming task of working with (and listening to) local folks, even local elites!
5. In the second of these cases,6 the plan was to fully implement ACM. Although we had three years for only five countries, and more funding, the team leader, the donor and many team members proved unwilling to trust local people; they could not bring themselves (and in many cases, were not trained) to pay sufficient attention to local desires/plans. Too many had the attitude that Li identifies: the will to improve, whether local folks themselves or their environments. Too many team members felt ‘they knew best’ for the approach—which depended fundamentally on people’s freedom to analyze, plan, implement, assess their own process— to work. As a less powerful, 2nd tier member of this latter team, I was unable to make my own vision, which was indeed to build directly on local wishes, reality. Indeed, it wasn’t until the project was almost over that I realized the depth of our different assumptions about what ACM meant and local people’s autonomy within the team.
If we accept Li’s conclusions in their entirety, the implication is that in fact we are virtually impotent to remake our world into a more equitable, just place in which to raise children and to live peaceably with others. I see the will to improve [ourselves] in a positive light. The world needs to be improved—as Li also dramatically shows! And I believe, as I imagine she does too, that local people’s views on how to do this are at least as valuable as our own ‘educated’ ones. Her excellent analysis struck me overall though as unduly pessimistic (it’s easy enough to feel that way). I prefer to believe that even elites,7 such as we are, can play a useful role (perhaps toward being defined out of existence in a utopian future we benefit from envisioning). This is particularly the case if we take seriously the need to listen as much as to teach; and to work with local folks either to marry their wishes compatibly with broader concerns in mutually acceptable ways or, perhaps more common, to help them right the injustices they (and we) perceive. My own experience tells me that positive outcomes can result.
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1 This project was funded in 1979 by the US Forest Service, as part of the UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere Program, and involved collaboration between the East West Center’s Environment and Policy Institute (in Hawaii), Indonesia’s Lembaga Biologi Nasional, and Mulawarman University in Samarinda, East Kalimantan (see my 2009 collection, The Longhouse of the Tarsier, Borneo Research Council, Phillips, ME).
2 This project was funded by USAID, a part of the Collaborative Research Support Program on Soil Management, that linked the University of Hawaii (where I worked), North Carolina State University (from which the multi-country program was administered), and the Center for Soils Research (now the Center for Soils and Agroclimatic Research) in Bogor, Indonesia (see Toward Sustainable Agriculture in the Humid Tropics: Building on the Tropsoils Experience in Indonesia, 1991, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina).
3 This name, ACM, was independently invented by many researchers roughly simultaneously. Our CIFOR program operated initially in 11 countries, and was funded variously by the European Union, USAID, the British DFID, University of Florida, Asian Development Bank, with later versions funded by Swiss Intercooperation, Ford Foundation, Canada’s IDRC, and German GTZ (see my The Complex Forest and The Equitable Forest, both published in 2005, Resources for the Future, Washington, DC) .
4 The two year, Collective Action and Property Rights project in Jambi, Sumatra was able to build to some degree on the previous ACM work: See Komarudin et al. 2008. Collective Action to Secure Property Rights for the Poor: A Case Study in Jambi Province, Indonesia, Collective Action and Property Rights Working Paper 90: 46.
5A collaborative project between CIFOR and the US-based Rights and Resources Initiative, funded by the Canadian IDRC and Ford Foundation. See Larson et al. 2010. Forest for People: Community Rights and Forest Tenure Reform. Earthscan and CIFOR, London—a set of analyses that make use of our extractive results, more than anything collaborative.
6 This was a project attempting to better manage landscapes, funded by Swiss Intercooperation. See Colfer and Pfund 2011, Collaborative Governance of Tropical Landscapes. Earthscan and CIFOR, London, for analyses that also report more extractive than collaborative research.
A comparative analysis of these projects and their shortcomings, from a less theoretical perspective than Li’s, is available in Colfer et al. 2011. Participatory Action Research for Catalyzing Adaptive Management: Analysis of a ‘Fits and Starts’ Process. Journal of Environmental Science and Engineering 5: 28-43. Another, more institutional analysis can be seen in Colfer 2013. The Ups and Downs of Institutional Learning: Reflections on the Emergence and Conduct of Adaptive Collaborative Management at the Center for International Forestry Research. In Adaptive Collaborative Approaches in Natural Resource Governance: Rethinking Participation, Learning and Innovation, eds. Ojha, Hall and Sulaiman, pp. 48-102. Earthscan/Routledge, London.
7 See Colfer 2013. Can Rural Women also Have it all? Voices of “Elite Women” Important for Truly Oppressed. Forest News (http://blog.cifor.org/15223/can-rural-women-also-have-it-all-voices-of-elite-women-important-for-truly-oppressed#.UtKl9vS1yM5).