Finding Our Place: Moving Towards Facilitation, Not Domination
“Shared vision doesn’t mean a ten-point shared utopia — it means you can generally state that you are moving in the same direction.”
I have worked in community journalism for the past (almost) three years, and something that continues to be reinforced year after year is the need to remove the phrase “voice for the voiceless” from our societal vocabulary. (This includes other iterations like “giving communities/individuals voices.” There is no such thing as someone without a voice. There are voices we prioritize and there are voices that are purposefully — sometimes even forcefully — muted, ignored, drowned out.
This is seen in communities, organizations, entire sectors and professions, and even larger theoretical silos like development.
Some tangible examples:
- Criminalization of protest, specifically surrounding environmental threats — Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, Bayou Bridge Pipeline, Line 3
- Eradication of local newsrooms
- Militarization of communities and over-policing
I’m currently reading adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. More specifically, I’m reading about how to facilitate radical discussions that are inclusive, spacious, and forward-thinking. Within this section, there are notes for folks in positions of power (white folks, men, economically-privileged, etc.) and how they must move within these spaces: Ensuring that the right folks are in the meeting, asking why you’re speaking before offering suggestions, ensuring that folks are listened to, and developing meeting times and practices that ensure there is enough time (moving away from internalized scarcity economics/productivity expectations).
From Individual to International
Initially, I was taking notes on this section as it was presented: at an individual or organizational level, but as I returned to the pages this morning I noted that these suggestions can and must be applied at institutional, societal, global levels.
“When trying to determine which articulation to prioritize, go with that of the most impacted people in the room — it is usually the most relevant, and often the clearest and most accessible.” amb, emergent strategy
Specifically, these concepts must be applied to the global development industry. “Development,” as a whole, has become a festering wound that no one is willing to change. There are surely organizations that denounce how development agencies, and even organizations like the United Nations, go about funding and prioritizing projects, but what will it take to dismantle the industry? It has been proven again and again that focus on economic development and modernization harms communities, and yet exorbitant amounts of money continue to funnel to these projects, swiftly and often without close consideration.
Open Democracy is one of my favorite resources for information on neocolonialism, development, modernization, and harmful practices. They note:
“According to the World Bank, a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the past 25 years, and the global poverty rate, at around 10%, is the lowest it has been in recorded history. That figure is less heartening, however, when it turns out that the threshold for extreme poverty is set at $1.90 a day, and even then in sub-Saharan Africa more than 40% of the population is below that line. The figure for South Asia is 12%. Much of the progress made in lifting people out of extreme poverty has been confined to China.
Meanwhile, inequality is on the rise both within countries and globally. Oxfam’s latest jaw-dropper is that 26 people own more wealth than the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity.”
That last sentence hit me in the gut. “What are we even doing then?!” It is truly mind-boggling that we believe we are doing anything when gross inequality exists. Unless we address the inherently rigged system that keeps people poor, unwell/unhealthy, and unable to attain basic human rights, we will not see “development” as it should be.
Systems change and emergent strategy truly come to life when we begin to step away from deliverables and “productivity” that focuses on the number of tasks accomplished, and instead move into powerful, impactful, and meaningful work.
This work is slow and has low deliverables, so it’s no wonder that it has not become the guiding light of our capitalist system. It’s also unsurprising that the development sector (which thrives off of showcasing their “achievements” for programs that are markedly unsustainable) utilizes deliverables to justify invading communities.
It is impossible for third world countries to ‘catch up’, because the wealth of the first world is achieved at the expense of the underdevelopment of the third world. One’s gain is the other’s loss. (Open Democracy).
When thinking about decolonizing development, my first inclination is to scream “GIVE WAY TO THE PEOPLE!” Organizations come in like bulldozers, razing culture, values, internal systems of communities to the ground, and attempt to rebuild a Westernized, modernized “better” community, based on what they think will work best. I’m not going to get into why this doesn’t work because we already know this doesn’t work, and the world has dozens of years and hundreds of examples to look at.
“Don’t tangify…Humanify! Shifting our way of being is our tangible outcome. Systems change comes from big groups making big shifts in being.”
adrienne maree brown provides some ideas for how facilitators can ensure that everyone’s voice is heard during meetings. Below, I’ve compiled three ideas from her book and projected them towards the development industry for consideration.
First and foremost, we must remove the idea of tangible outcomes and instead focus on providing the biggest impact. This may mean that the roadway doesn’t get implemented, but a women’s birthing center does; or, there may actually be no need for an agriculture project because there are few farmers in the community or their farming methods are actually more advanced than the ones planned to be implemented. We must remove the list of things that “must be accomplished” that is developed before speaking to the community. Remove funding from institutions that have a plan for a place they’ve never been. Remove neoliberalism's demand for oppression and exploitation.
“They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. […] I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted — harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population — about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.”
- Aime Césaire (1950): ‘Discourse on Colonialism’
Secondly, we must silence ourselves. Western voices are loud and they’re overwhelming. They hide oppression in good intentions and fail to consider that they may not know best. Development, if we even decide to continue engaging with it, must be led by communities. This means letting go of what we think modernization should look like, what a “functioning” society looks like, and releasing our obsession with economic development and capitalism. It means giving cash to communities and letting them develop plans that make sense for them. It means removing the idea that formal education and employment give a right to engage in paternalistic control over the future of communities that are not our own. It means asking ourselves why we are speaking.
Finally, we must be spacious in our ideas, engaging with theories and practices that are different from our own. The Western world is largely secular, and it very often misunderstands spirituality and its role in people’s lives. Sometimes these ideas manifest as mystiques or superstitions. Making space in our agendas and plans for beliefs that constrict or expand opportunities to engage in truly impactful development ensures that we (both our ideas and our plans) are elastic enough to absorb and integrate these beliefs. Again, focusing on impact instead of deliverables helps move us from paternalistic and harmful development plans towards more holistic and helpful ideas for communities to reach their full potential. On their own terms.
“We begin by listening.”
Achieving these goals and integrating powerful facilitation into our development industry may mean that we remove development from the international stage. (Take your final bow). In dreaming and envisioning the future of the world, where we truly tackle inequality and let communities be their best selves, it appears that development may not have a role to play. Instead, development may look like reparations to communities to rebuild in a way that truly benefits them; it may look like training up individuals in the communities to lead their own projects — engineers, doctors, artists, political movement builders; it may even look like more concerted efforts to remove foreign extractive industries from lands that are not their own, and instead invest in home-country infrastructure that is utilized by community members.
As a society, I don’t think that we are close to achieving this freeing and radical vision for the future. But until then, we can question our development industry and ask:
Development industry: why are you speaking?
