There’s only one thing people hate giving away more than money. Power.

By Jonathan Glennie & Hassan Damluji 

July 2023

There’s only one thing people hate giving away more than money. Power. In fact, the power to give away money is something people with large amounts of it tend to greatly enjoy.  

But power is what it is all about. It’s the whole point of development. That's why you can't speak to a development professional for more than 30 seconds before the word "empowerment" pops out. The difference between humanitarian response and development is that development is not just about change; it is about sustained change.  

A great mentor, Charles Abugre, used to say that when a development project is completed the correct measure of success is not how many kids have gone to the youth club, or how many houses have been built, or arms injected, but how power relationships have changed.

As important, or even more important, than the material benefits of a development project are the less tangible changes in capacity and confidence that make a community more resilient in the face of difficult circumstances, and more able to demand and defend its rights. Better health, better education, better incomes are only the means to the real end of development work: community strength and resilience, ready to face new challenges that come its way, long after the "development project" has moved on. 

We hope that this will be one of the key topics for debate at the forthcoming Shift the Power Summit in Bogota in December which Global Nation is proud to be co-hosting. Click here to see how to get involved.

https://www.shiftthepowersummit.org/

The #ShiftThePower movement has caught the zeitgeist. Decades of challenging the charity narrative, the donor-beneficiary dichotomy, are paying off, as more and more people and organisations sign up to decolonization, structural transformation and, most of all, an analysis of power. 

INGOs, foundations and international development agencies are supposed to exist to support partners around the world to deliver services and change, but too often it feels like the opposite, that partners and regional offices exist to provide information and support to the central office back in a Northern capital.  

The challenge before the development community is not just to use power wisely, kindly, generously – but actually to hand over power, to become less powerful so that others can assume power.  

The power to decide where to spend money. The power to make people fill out a format that you have designed. The power to hire. The power to promote. The power to sideline. The power to choose which parts of a transformational agenda to adopt, and which to discard as too radical. The power to fund particular areas for research and not others. The power not to have to provide evidence, not to have to explain. The power of inherited money. The power of words. The power of the charitable giver over the grateful receiver. The power to demand gratitude. The power to ignore history. The power not to rush. The power to spend decades ridiculing the idea of industrial strategy and capital controls and then suddenly to change your mind. The power to say what is possible and impossible. The power of the dollar. The power of the English language.  

We look back on our careers in international development and reflect on so many examples of power being guarded jealously and exercised bluntly. The time a senior INGO executive described a group of activists from Central America as “crazies” because their analysis was more radical than his, using his power to disempower others. The time the director of an organization stopped sharing information on budgets and planning – preventing accountability; knowledge is power. The time a coruscating speech about ecocide made in Spanish by an indigenous Ecuadorian woman was diluted by the English-speaking translator so as not to offend sensitivities. The many times leaders who speak eloquently in Arabic were made to feel foolish by being forced to address an audience in a foreign language. 

When someone says an idea is too radical, not possible, won’t fly, what they mean is, we have the power to say no to it. 

And then there are the times, many times, when power has been shared, released. When decisions have been devolved to communities. When leaders have been protected and enabled to speak, without first checking what they have to say. When some people have stepped back, to let others step forward. When grants have been made to enable organizations to do their job, not fulfil someone else’s priorities.  

And power analysis needs to be applied not just to development projects and organisations, but to the entire development finance architecture. Because if individuals love giving money but hate sharing power, the same is true for governments and international institutions. 

There is a growing consensus that we need to greatly increase the amount of money available to spend on our global challenges, and campaigns are building to achieve this, including recently around the Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact.  

But the problem with many of the reform proposals on the table at the moment is the lack of power analysis. Yes we need more money, but simply increasing the amount of money funnelled to institutions with a long history of misusing the power they have seems to take us backwards as much as forwards.  

Are we building a system for the 21^st century with the same power dynamics – elected leaders from countries of the Global South flying north to beg for debt relief in Paris or faster lending in Washington? Or are we thinking bigger? You can’t delete power and wealth – the world’s biggest and richest countries will always exercise their power. But you can build institutions and processes and norms and laws which somewhat mitigate power and balance it out a bit.  

It's not just how much money there is, it’s who decides how to spend it. It’s who’s in the room when decisions get made. That is why there is a growing movement behind the concept of Global Public Investment and its principles of mutuality summed up as “all contribute, all benefit, all decide”.  

Mutliateralism is at a crossroads. In our 20 years in development the narrative has never been more progressive and verdant with opportunity. The rise of the South in terms of economic strength makes the voice of the South, both governments, civil society and business, more powerful than ever in development discussions. That means the language of decolonization, anti-racism, and structural transformation hits harder than it did in previous eras (most notably the 1970s) when the uber-powerful West was able to swat it away and impose its will.  

Vision isn’t everything. In human affairs, the material matters, whether it is the consequence of human activity or beyond our control. Nature and geography constrain human possibilities; chance influences humanity’s progress as much as decision; the reality of international competition and the incentives that drive political decision making are in some ways more fiercely powerful than ideas and words. So we need wise political strategy to accompany a persuasive vision. 

But when humans seek to go beyond, to change their circumstances, improve their world, respond to crises and opportunities, vision is the first hill to climb. Shifting power is possible. In Bogota, in December, we will be opening new vistas, building new possibilities and breaking down imposed constraints. See you there. 

A shorter version of this article was published in Alliance magazine. https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/when-it-comes-to-the-global-financial-architecture-its-time-to-shift-the-power/