The essays in this collection are quite interesting overall, although the same handful of salient points are made throughout most of the individual selections. Essentially, the authors believe that 1) progress in the developing world is more easily achieved through free enterprise than through outright donor aid and 2) the technocrats in the international development industry need to modify their rigid, one-size-fits-all technical advice to acknowledge, and even exploit, the cultural values of the host countries. These are not new ideas and they have a good deal of support among many of the bright lights working in the development field today.
Drilling down a bit to more specific strategies, many of the authors in this collection recommend “forward integration” to business owners in the developing world, by which they mean that to maximize value local businesses must work to get as close to their end customers as possible, rather than be trapped into selling their products as commodities to wholesalers and other intermediaries. There are several particularly good examples of this conundrum, notably from Afghanistan, where businesses that are selling goods from dried fruits to marble are missing out on the big profit margins being realized by wholesalers in India, Iran and elsewhere in the region. What’s really interesting about this is that Afghanistan’s competitors come not from the highly developed nations, but from other emerging markets. This idea of forward integration crops up in other essays too, including a very interesting review of the Jamaican music scene by the executive director of Harvard’s Center for International Development.
Most of the contributors to this volume are associated with Michael Fairbanks, a well-respected consultant on business strategy and co-founder of a consulting company called The OTF Group, where quite a few of the authors have worked. Other contributors include the president of Rwanda, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank and the president of the African Development Bank. Together, the book’s contributors represent an impressive range of knowledge, experience, culture and nationalities.
However, In the River They Swim is published, oddly enough, by the Templeton Foundation Press, whose stated mission is to “help intellectual leaders and others learn about science research on aspects of realities, invisible and intangible. Spiritual realities include unlimited love, accelerating creativity, worship, and the benefits of purpose in persons and in the cosmos.” The publisher is part of the Templeton Foundation, headed by an evangelical Christian known for promoting conservative religious causes. The foundation has repeatedly denied that it has a right-wing point of view and claims that its president, John Templeton Jr., does not mix his religious views into foundation affairs. Well, even if we categorize Mr. Templeton’s recent financial support for California’s Proposition 8 as “personal,” the fact that the conservative and controversial Christian pastor Rick Warren pens the book’s foreword should give readers pause.
Just where are Fairbanks and his colleagues coming from? Here is a good collection of essays written by people who appear to be well-informed and grounded in facts, yet it is published by a press that thinks “spiritual realities” can be studied by scientific methods. And it is introduced by a Christian pastor whose first sentence is “Poverty is a spiritual issue” and who quotes liberally from Proverbs while hawking his recent book, The Purpose Driven Life.
I have nothing against religion and spirituality, per se. My complaint is that I find it difficult to take the authors’ recommendations at face value when there is some evidence that they might share an underlying political agenda. International development is a complex arena fraught with special interests and various maneuvers to bend science to serve a political agenda. Given that, I am uncomfortable with both this book’s publisher and the choice of pastor Warren to write its foreword.
-- Bonnie McEwan