Putting the money where it counts

We spend €340 million on aid but does it merely spread 'Westernising' values to communities in the Third World? Arturo Escobar, the anti-globalisation 'high-priest', talks to Paul Cullen

One of the paradoxes of the engagement of Western countries such as Ireland with the Third World is that those most involved in the aid business are often most critical of the way we provide this assistance.

While the rest of us dwell only fleetingly on the matter - usually when aid agencies tell us there's an emergency and they need money - development workers who have given years of their life to service overseas tend to fret constantly about the effectiveness of their work. With some justice, arguably, given that the West has pumped billions of pounds in development aid into the poor countries since the second World War and yet the problems seem greater than ever.

This seeming failure to produce visible results is crucially relevant today to Ireland, which for the first time is spending large sums of exchequer money on development aid.

Despite the Government's recent decision to snip €30 million from the aid budget, spending this year will top €340 million. It might only be half the price of a national stadium, but it's not an amount to be sneezed at. With this increased spending comes a greater responsibility to show that the money is being spent effectively.

The seeming inability of the West's aid to effect lasting improvements in the Third World has prompted much soul-searching and new thinking in the business. Far too late did our European neighbours realise that their kroner and deutschmarks were being pumped into white-elephant projects - dams with no water, roads that went nowhere.

"So much aid was linked to the interests of Western business, and therefore relatively little of it actually reached the Third World. Then so much more went to governments and was misappropriated in projects and never reached the people," says Prof Arturo Escobar, a Colombian-born anthropologist and writer on development who visited Ireland recently.

For Escobar, the lesson of the past 30 years is that aid must be directed to local groups. The elites, most of them corrupt, should be bypassed in favour of grass-roots social and political groups trying to transform their societies.

Many countries, including Ireland, have taken on board this kind of thinking, but Escobar goes further. Development is as much about "modernising" and "Westernising" poor peoples as enriching them, he believes. Indigenous cultures, lured into what he calls "the world of neo-liberal gain," swap native clothes for T-shirts and fruit juice for Coca-Cola.

"Development has mostly come out of wealthy Western countries, bearing the cultural outlook favoured by these countries. The process is not conscious but in many cases it has entailed the destruction of local cultures." Escobar, a soft-spoken engineer turned social scientist, is something of a high priest to the burgeoning anti-globalisation movement. Based at the University of North Carolina, he spends much of his time visiting social movements in Latin America and spreading his gospel to audiences in the West.

Ironically, he personally has benefited from the West's development policies, having been plucked from college in Colombia to take up a fellowship in the US. It says something about the economic decline of South America that Escobar believes that young Colombians today would have far less chance of benefiting from the educational advantages he enjoyed.

Whether it's the rain forest peoples of Ecuador or the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, his message is that poor people need to strengthen their social and political organisation first; before taking decisions on what activities to engage in and what aid to accept.

"Otherwise, neo-liberal globalising forces will gain ground. By the time people can participate properly in the political process, it is already too late and people are too heavily involved in the mind-set of consumption and modernising."

Escobar believes that, if the West is serious about wanting to improve the lot of the Third World, it must support projects that are designed in partnership with local people, not ones brought in by outsiders. He champions long-term projects that encourage political and cultural autonomy and which are built on the strengths of the local economy and culture.

He is dismissive about Western concerns about Third World corruption. "In my view, this is a misplaced fear. There is corruption worldwide and there isn't necessarily more in the Third World. There is more corruption at government level than among social movements, but in my experience NGOs in Latin America are professional and accountable.

"Sometimes funds lost in 'corruption' are appropriated and used by local people even if not in the initially intended way. But if you want to see true corruption just look at transnational corporations like Enron."

There is nothing inevitable or desirable about the emergence of a global culture, he believes. "It is happening in many ways. Even though many leaders and academics say the world is becoming more homogenous and that people want the same markets, it is not true. There are many challenges to this thinking around the world; most people do not think alike and our differences won't disappear."

What is inevitable about the process of globalisation is violence. "Violence is becoming inevitable on the side of the globalisation project, as the struggle for power continues. Look at Colombia, where violence is increasingly used to contain popular movements, to displace people and to make people accommodate to the dictates of international markets.

"But that doesn't mean that movements opposing globalisation have to be violent. Precisely the opposite - they have to see that violence doesn't lead anywhere. Unfortunately, the guerrilla movements in Colombia can't see that, they've lost sight of the value of life, and the essential fact that violence leads nowhere."