Global development’s past, present, and future

Editor’s note: This is the last of six reflections by Ruth Levine, Director of the Global Development and Population Program, at the close of her eight-year term. The first post was “Closing the gap between social movements and policy change.” The second was “Strength in numbers: Taking a field-level view.” The third, fourth and fifth were “All happy grantees are alike: They focus on ideas, interactions, and important details,” “How can we drive change when we’re Menlo Parked?,” and “The Hewlett Foundation Way.” In this final essay, Ruth offers some thoughts about the nature of current and future global challenges—and how philanthropic and other types of institutions need to adapt. These are issues she will be working on starting in September at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

We all need new ways to be citizens of the world because the world is changing fast. As my eight-year term as the director of the Global Development and Population Program comes to an end next week, I am thinking about what is ahead for me personally, the team at Hewlett, and the many organizations whose good work around the world we have been privileged to support. It has me marveling about how much has changed in global development—and the idea of development itself—since the Hewlett Foundation was started in 1966, and how our current challenges are calling us to both reimagine and recommit.

My father’s generation

Fifty-three years ago in California’s Santa Clara Valley, William and Flora Hewlett and their son Walter planted the seeds of what has become one of the largest private foundations in the United States. Concerned about the wellbeing of women around the world and the health of the planet, the Hewlett Foundation started making grants to support international efforts to provide voluntary family planning services and to understand the impact of population growth on the environment. This was seen as one of the urgent issues of the day, and one for which American money and know-how could make an important and positive difference.

That same year, I was a young child living in a small college town at the foot of beautiful Mount Makiling in the Philippines. My father, a Cornell University professor, was doing fieldwork in rice paddies, alongside an international cadre of plant breeders, water engineers, and agronomists at the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture and the International Rice Research Institute; he was part of the Green Revolution. He and his colleagues, supported by U.S. federal agencies and private foundations, deployed technical expertise to increase yields of staple crops, like wheat, corn, and rice, so production would keep pace with rapidly growing populations in low-income countries. In the Philippines, a generation of Filipino agricultural scientists were trained to undertake world-class research with international experts who were developing “miracle rice.”  That rice increased the harvest by ten-fold, transformed the country’s economy, and was part of a world-wide expansion of food production.

Many of today’s dominant institutions in global development were born in the same era, against the backdrop of the Cold War. USAID and the Peace Corps were both created a few years earlier, in 1961; the International Development Association, the part of the World Bank designed to provide low-interest loans to poor countries, was established in 1960. The field of international development, attracting academics, engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and adventurers, exploded with new funding, optimism, and a sense of purpose: money, science, and know-how from the richest country on earth would ease the suffering of people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and in doing so would create alliances to serve both defense and commercial interests. We’ve got a lot of things figured out, the thinking went, so we can transfer our technologies to solve huge problems elsewhere; the solutions will benefit us all. We, who have “developed,” can bring along those who are “developing.” That spirit was reflected in the Hewlett Foundation’s grants to support work outside U.S. borders and in my father’s career-long international work.

My generation

During my own career in global development, which started in 1990, I’ve felt that model shake and bend. Technologies that solved some problems in dramatic fashion created other, more challenging ones. The Green Revolution prevented mass starvation but fostered input-intensive agriculture that brought financial hardship to many small farms. Intensified global trade, including the exploitation of inexpensive labor and natural resources, permitted hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty but also fostered greater gaps between rich and poor. Western models of democratic governance were adopted but foundered when overlaid on traditional social systems in contexts with weak institutional capacity. The fields with the strongest scientific basis—health and agriculture—extended lives and increased productivity, while fields constructed more by people than by nature, like education, struggled to replicate success. These are the types of challenges that emerged after the early optimism.

As idealism bumped up against reality, the institutions set up in the 1960s to transfer mainly U.S. and European knowledge and money to low- and middle-income countries labored to respond to contemporary challenges. Bilateral and multilateral aid agencies set up governance programs in which advisors from Western democracies coached counterparts in low- and middle-income countries, often through short “missions” or even shorter training workshops. The United Nations created an endless set of opportunities for governments to voice high-level commitments that variously privileged economic growth, infrastructure, human needs, or environmental sustainability—and then aid agencies deployed international non-governmental organizations to implement those commitments. Indicators were tracked; indices were built. Researchers from elite universities and the brain trusts within multilateral agencies tried to create generalizable knowledge about a wide array of questions: “What’s the right economic policy for ‘the Tanzania’s of the world’?”  “If we can create miracle rice with ten times the yield, can we create miracle classrooms with ten times the learning?” Some of these efforts succeeded—witness the remarkable reduction in global poverty and the increase in life expectancy. But many did not.  All of the organizations involved, and all of the people within those organizations, wrestled with the reality that the complexity of problems have outpaced the sophistication of solutions and, yes, “context matters.”

As a private philanthropy, the Hewlett Foundation has had more flexibility than most to adapt and try new approaches, exploring the special ways in which a foundation’s relatively small dollars could make a difference because we are not bound by the same interests that constrain official aid agencies. We don’t have U.S. contractors lobbying us to spend more at home, and we aren’t part of some larger foreign policy architecture.

Working on these sorts of challenges, in new and fit-for-purpose organizations, is what the next generation entering the field of global development want, need, and are able to do. My daughter is an undergraduate in college who cares passionately about global citizenship, and is heading off for a summer internship at an aid agency. Like me, and like my father before me, she wants to make a positive contribution to the lives and livelihoods of people who live in countries with less material wealth than we have in the United States; she also knows there are plenty of problems right here at home, and she sees the ways in which we are connected worldwide through commerce, migration, media, and the environment. She is not alone. There are millions of young people from all over the world who want to work toward a brighter, more connected future. Their energy and ideas are powerful. The question is whether the institutions of 50-plus years ago are able to channel that energy and ideas in ways that correspond to what’s needed for the next 50 years.

Responding to these new needs and opportunities is not a tweak in the wording of an international NGO’s mission statement, or a change in the org chart of the World Bank; this is a reimagining of the project of global development, and the creation of, and support for, entities that can take it on. It’s an incredibly exciting—if disruptive and risky—agenda that is particularly well suited to contributions from philanthropies.

As the Hewlett Foundation’s international work evolves in the years ahead, whether in the Global Development and Population Program, the Environment Program, the Education Program, or other areas, I am hopeful that this foundation can be among the leaders in exploring new ways to do this vital work, placing each action within a genuinely global context and embracing the habits of mutual respect. We have a good head start because we have been supporting organizations that are experimenting with new ways of working. But there’s a long (and exciting) way to go.