Episode 9: Political Economy of Development

Noaman Ali is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. His research and teaching concerns the political economy of development. His current research examines rural class struggle, land reforms and sub national state formation in Pakistan, through a case study of the Frontier peasant movement in the former North West Frontier Province, led by the Mazdoor Kisan party in the 1970s. His work is interdisciplinary, bringing a historical and ethnographic sensibility to the study of political science. More broadly, he is interested in social movements, rural politics, state and non state power, agrarian and industrial policy, development states and political economy in general. He joins us from Toronto, Canada.

He speaks to us about:

• interrogating power relationships and class differentiations

• decoupling development from economic growth

• redefining development as giving political power to the powerless

• structural transformations and the role of international financial institutions

• debt and capitalist logic

• incrementalism

• the unconscious class bias of development practitioners

• the NGO/development agency industrial complex

• the negative impact of green revolution technologies

• the importance of social movements - and much more!

Transcript

Intro: That kind of pragmatic thinking is really a way to avoid challenging power. It's really a way of saying we've compromised ourselves with power. Because challenging power is too costly, it's too expensive. Maybe part of that is that so many of us who are involved in thinking about or practicing development come from middle class or even upper class backgrounds. Maybe we have this kind of unconscious bias, where we're invested in power, because we have it. And we may not have as much power as business people or as much power as landlords or international politicians. But our power derives from that system. So maybe that's part of the bias that we have. But at the end of the day, what we're saying is, we are more concerned about preserving that system, through the logic of pragmatism and incrementalism, than radically upending that system. When politics is determined by the interests of the poor, when it is determined by the interests of the have nots, that is when their lives will get better. That is what history tells us. But as development practitioners or as people who think about development, generally we're thinking about how can we change this policy and move this lever from here to here? Rather than asking a more fundamental question: what would it look like if development meant power to the powerless?

Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development Podcast. My name is Safa and I'm your host. Thank you for tuning in to a series of episodes where we speak with academics, writers, artists and activists to contextualize international development and humanitarian aid within broader historical and global power dynamics and socio economic systems that have been shaped and reshaped over time. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different guests. Our guest today is Noaman Ali. Noaman is currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. His research and teaching concerns the political economy of development. His current research examines rural class struggle, land reforms and subnational state formation in Pakistan, through a case study of the Frontier peasant movement in the former North West Frontier Province, led by the Mazdoor Kisan party in the 1970s. His work is interdisciplinary, bringing a historical and ethnographic sensibility to the study of political science. More broadly, he is interested in social movements, rural politics, state and non state power, agrarian and industrial policy, development states and political economy in general. Noaman's research has been published in the Journal of Agrarian Change and Rethinking Marxism, and he has also written for Tanqeed. Noaman, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Noaman: Thank you for having me, Safa.

Safa: It's great to have you on the podcast, thank you. To begin the conversation, maybe you could just share a bit about your own positionality or background, and maybe some of the experiences that politicized you and that motivated you to study the political economy of development?

Noaman: To answer that question, I have to go into family biography, right. So my parents were actually both born in India. And technically my father wasn't even born in India, he was born in a princely state called Hyderabad Deccan, which was then incorporated into India, in the state that was Andhra Pradesh, and even that has now turned into something else. And so my parents are from India, but my father at some point migrated to Pakistan, which is where I was born. But my father, like many other Indians, and Pakistani's, actually worked in Saudi Arabia. So although I was born in Pakistan, my early childhood was spent in Saudi Arabia. And then again, my father wanted to go to Canada, he had that desire. And so we came to Canada, and most of my growing up and studying was done in Canada. So there's this process of kind of migration, a constant migration, a process of never really being rooted in any place. And the more I thought about it, the more I reflected on that, the more I realized that although individual choices are part of that - which were my parents' decisions about migration or moving around - alot of that is also a consequence of the global system in which we live. Why is it that we have to leave India or Pakistan to find upward mobility? To find better jobs, to find better professions? Why is it that in order to get your kids, you know, an excellent quality education, you think: I've got to send my kids to Canada or that I've got to move my family to Canada. So why is it that these economic opportunities seem to be located in in the global north, rather than the global south, or in these kinds of intermediary spaces like Saudi Arabia or Dubai. So that's part of the process that's got me thinking. The other part of that is, you know, as an immigrant in Canada, it's sometimes difficult to fit in. And at some point I just realized that nobody fits in. And that's part of what makes the city of Toronto great, it's that everybody fits in and nobody fits in. But it's not the kind of flat, multicultural space that it's presented as. There are deep divisions of class, deep divisions of gender and ethnicity that define the city of Toronto and that define the immigrant experience, really, in North America in general. And so we see that there's racism, we see that there's class division, most recently, that became apparent through the effect of COVID-19. So if you look at the data, it's in the working class neighborhoods and in immigrant neighborhoods that COVID-19 affected people more deeply. So obviously, we didn't have COVID-19 when I was growing up, but it occurred to me that there were these kinds of disparities, which I didn't realize myself - you know, I was going to university, interacting with other students that I realized there are actually people who are not as well off as I am. And there are people who are much, much better off than I am. And I still don't understand why that might be the case, given the fact that people who are smarter than me, more capable than me, better working, harder workers than I am, make less money or income than I do. And I don't want to say the opposite. I'm not going to say that I'm smarter than anybody else, or anything like that, but you know, there's people who are doing better than I am. And sometimes I suspect - it is suspicious to me why that's the case. So just motivated by this kind of sense of inequality that was countered with this idea that we actually need some kind of social justice or social equality. And that's how I got interested in questions of politics, which then tied into questions of global development as well.

Safa: Mm hmm. So you studied political science. In your work, in your research, there seems to be kind of a starting point of looking at questions of politics and power, as you mentioned earlier, in terms of your own analysis about the city you live in, the experiences of your parents. Could you speak a bit to that starting point, and how your research had kind of taken off from that point and then it's within that context that then later you analyze maybe programs or policies and how they're shaped by this broader context of politics and power.

Noaman: Right. So as I said, a lot of times, when we speak about inequality, it's almost like it's a fact of nature, like the poor shall always be with us - as opposed to asking questions of what kinds of historical or political processes produce inequality and reproduce it. Let me give you an example from my own work. And so we're not even getting to policies and programs of development yet, it's just the kind of work that I do, or that I was looking at in my research. And that's looking at rural relations in the countryside in Pakistan, in a certain part of Pakistan, now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. And if you were to go there in the 1970s, and if you were to meet with farmers, you would find that they were quite poor. You know, they may not have good clothes to wear, they may not have good food to eat, and they would not have great access to education. And you could speak to them and think about things with them for days - like, hey, let's talk about what kind of program we might have to increase incomes here. Let's get these farmers some goats so that they can increase their incomes. Let's see about how can we maybe build a school - let's talk about some technological infusion that can increase their productivity. And none of those things would be wrong, but they wouldn't ask a very important question: why are those farmers so poor to begin with? And if you ask that question, and it would be hard not to ask the question if you were to live with them and to understand what was going on - you'd realize that more than half or just about half of what they're producing, they're giving away to the landlords. And these landlords are these very powerful men and families that own thousands and thousands of acres of land, they own entire villages. They don't do much work themselves, they don't really do any work themselves. They may provide some investments. But most of the costs are borne by the peasants, by the farmers. So the farmer puts in the labor throughout the year and at the end of the year has to give up half of the crop to the landlord. That's a relationship of power. That's a relationship of inequality, about control of resources, control of mechanisms. And so I could talk about, you know, let's get these farmers some more goats or let's get these farmers some more educational opportunities, but that would be without asking those fundamental questions about why do those landlords have so much land to begin with? Why do these farmers not have land? Why do they have to even give up half of their produce to those landlords? So those kinds of questions of politics and power, I think are very important in understanding how people's livelihoods are determined and what kinds of incomes they have, and what can equality look like?

Safa: Absolutely, you know, those questions about what produces inequality, they're not usually thought about or answered in very deep ways by international development agencies, by international development actors. And in your research you talk about the Khans and their power, and their relationship with Nazirs, and how there's this kind of a relationship of enforcing power through Nazirs. And when I was reading that, it just made me think of it as kind of a metaphor for kind of the role of donor countries, perhaps being the Khans, and then you have their foreign aid departments and their international development agencies, foreign policy arms of their governments, and them being kind of like the Nazirs. Could you talk a bit about that type of relationship between the two and maybe how you see this playing out - not only in the context of your research, but on a broader scale, globally?

Noaman: Okay, that's a really interesting analogy that you've made. Just to spell it out a bit. So the large landlords that I was talking about in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are generally called Khans. So that's a title, that means I am a powerful person, I have all this land. And I have political and social power. So I'm a Khan. But if I have all that land, and if I have all that assets and capital at my resources, I'm not the one who's directly managing my stuff - I have a Nazir. A Nazir comes from the kind of Arabic and also Persian and Urdu words, which means to see. A Nazir is somebody who is an overseer, or a manager or an intermediary. And that person is the one who might be managing a particular village or a particular estate. So to think about that, in global international terms, it's really interesting. Like if you come from a perspective that international development agencies - say USAID or DIFID in the United Kingdom, or what used to be SIDA in Canada, if you start from the perspective that they hold power, they hold resources - and it's not just them, right, they also get a lot of their funding from international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. So these big institutions are also bank rolled, and mostly controlled by global north countries like the United States, Canada, so on and so forth. They really set the agenda, they really set the ideology of what they're going to do. So I have all this capital, what am I going to do and how am I going to do it? I'm going to find local partners who are going to manage the capital that we're investing and the aid projects that we're undertaking. And that's where you start getting into local governments, local development agencies, local NGOs, especially. So a lot of local NGOs in places like Pakistan, are really so dependent on foreign aid, they're so dependent on foreign aid that they in many ways become cut-off from the concerns of local people. And they're doing project after project, they need to get a contract from this agency or that agency. So they're going contract to contract, and in that they get cut-off from the kind of organic relations that they may originally have had, when they started out their business or their enterprise. You know, to try and unpack this, we really need to ask ourselves, what do we even mean by development to begin with? And the ways in which different people will approach the question of development. Are they all the same? Are they different? So generally, I think when a global agency like the IMF or World Bank is talking about development, they're looking at an indicator like gross domestic production per capita, so GDP per capita, and they'll say something like, look, the GDP per capita in the United States is - I don't know, these figures off the top of my head, so I'll just pick arbitrary figures, let's say in the United States, it's $50,000 GDP per capita. That is what we understand to be a high income country. Then you have something like, let's say, Indonesia, and there it's only $7,000 GDP per capita. And then you have low income countries, and then you have least developed countries and it's measured in terms of GDP per capita. And so your entire concept of development is growth. It's simply economic growth. Can we get economic growth here, yes or no? But economic growth can be driven by many, many, many different processes that may not be developmental, so that you may have a process of growth without development. Of course, you'll disagree with me - if you think growth equals development, if you think the only thing that matters is GDP per capita. And the flip side of that, the flip side of this we need growth we need growth kind of mantra is, then what do development practitioners or development agencies do on the ground? Many times they're operating from one of two perspectives. The first perspective is a charity model, that there's a lot of people who need aid, so let's get them that aid. Let's get them, you know, some food, for example. So food relief or disaster relief - which is very important, I'm not trying to diminish that work. But then when you start doing that a little bit, you start to get unsatisfied, you start to get dissatisfied, you might have heard of this saying that if you give somebody a fish, they'll eat for a day. But if you teach them to fish, then they will never want for food again, because they'll be able to stand up on their own two feet. And so a lot of development agencies, NGOs, have a discourse of empowerment. But what that empowerment looks like or what that kind of intervention looks like is how do we encourage or empower people at the local level to engage in activities that will increase, ultimately, growth? Here, we're talking about increasing people's incomes. So you know, some of the stuff I mentioned, like, how can we get people to use new technologies? How can we get people to get small capital? Micro finance, for example. And the logic behind that is, everybody is an entrepreneur, everybody is a business person, and all they need is a little bit of an injection of cash, and then they are going to be doing their own business. And that will get them out of poverty. Those kinds of initiatives have been shown to have some mixed results. But the concept of development is almost a mirror image of the big kind of development, the macro development that these big international institutions are talking about. And then this kind of micro development, where we're going to do micro intervention, small interventions - they might be women's empowerment, it might be an educational thing. But the goal ultimately ends up conforming to the goal of those bigger things. Another way of looking at development could be far more critical, far more considered. And there you also have different perspectives. So one perspective is that development is actually a discussion of what some scholars call structural transformation. That means that you go from an agriculture based society to an industry based society. And if we see, if we look at the history of what we now consider to be, you know, so called developed countries - the United States, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, they went through this kind of process where they went from agricultural societies to mainly industrial societies. But now we see a second layer of that. So it's not just industry, in terms of any industry, not just any industry will do. But you go from low value added industries, to high value added industries. And that's really that technological upgrading is where industrial development happens. But in order to do that, in order to be able to achieve that, you need as a country to have greater control over your own policies of investment, your policies of capital flow, of labor regulations. But that stands in contradiction to what agencies like the IMF and World Bank want, they want free trade, they want you to impose no restrictions on capital, they want you to minimize protections that you might have for your own industry. And they want you to specialize in the thing that you're good at. And if you're a poor country, what you're good at is either agricultural commodities, or it's the lower end of industrialized stuff. So Pakistan again, for example, our main export is cotton textiles. So we take, you know, we'll take cotton, some of it is grown in Pakistan, and some of it is imported from other countries - we'll process it into these textiles, and then we'll export it to other markets. But the majority of Pakistanis cannot afford to wear that cotton. Their incomes haven't even gone to that level that they can afford the thing that they're producing for foreign markets. Not only that, but the machines that we use to produce the textiles are imported. Many of the chemicals that we use to produce those textiles are imported. So at the end of the day, we're still dependent on imports. We're still dependent on other countries and we cannot develop. We're not developing. We may be growing, our economic growth rates may be growing. There may be multiple NGOs doing random things on the ground, or very focused things on the ground, which are like helping some women get out of poverty or helping some women get an education, but overall your society is not developing and ultimately those micro-finance endeavors aren't going to really amount to much because people need jobs and those jobs don't exist. So those those kinds of relations of power where a country is not even allowed to pursue its own policies, or if it seeks to do that, then it is heavily sanctioned and punished on an international scale need to be understood. And it can be really hard to do that when you're on the ground trying to engage local communities.

Safa: Mm hmm. You know, you speak about structural transformation and the role of IMF and other financial institutions in this global context where there are different power dynamics. And, you know, when you mentioned that economic growth can happen without development happening overall, in a generally/broadly speaking sense, that really resonated with me. And I think a lot of the times on the podcast there's this tension between short term goals and long term vision or, you know, using certain indicators versus overall impact and definition of what organizations are trying to achieve or what communities need and want. In your own thinking, in your own research, how would you say you would define development maybe in a better way? Or what would you say fundamentally should be changed or is important to think about in redefining how development or approaches to it can happen?

Noaman: I think that's a really excellent question, especially the way you framed it as a dilemma that I think often faces people who are thinking about development, or who are engaging in some kind of development practice - the dilemma between short term goals and long term goals. And I think the danger of that kind of thinking, is kind of smacking us right in the face, literally, at this moment. The IPCC, this assembly, this body of international scientists are telling us now that we have less than 10 years, less than 10 years to undertake drastic, drastic measures in order to avoid catastrophic climate change. Catastrophic climate crisis. And the thing about that is, it's not even a thing that's 10 years down the line. The images that we saw recently come out of California and the west coast of the United States where literally it looks like the sky is on fire. And previously we saw that in Australia, and I can speak to Pakistan where glaciers are melting, where the sea levels are rising. So in the north of Pakistan, we have mountains and glaciers are melting, entire glaciers will burst and new lakes will form overnight, and people are displaced. And then at the south of our country we border the ocean. But the sea levels are rising. And so a lot of land is now going underwater. And in the middle, we have these climactic changes, which are making it harder for farmers to figure out when to plant, when to harvest, and a lot of our crops are actually going to waste. So climate change is not something down the line. Climate change is now. And it requires drastic, drastic, drastic action. But if we approach the question of development, which now of course has to include considerations of ecology and climate change, in this kind of incremental, pragmatic, oh what about short term issues, that kind of thinking, unfortunately, I think has led to a situation where those long term issues that we saw as being, you know, way down the line, we now realize that we don't even have 10 years - not even to avoid the problem, but just to minimize it to a relatively more manageable level. And so at this point, who is unrealistic? The person who's calling for drastic change now? Or the person who's saying, no, no, no, hold on, hold on a second, we need incremental change. You know, reality has hit us in the face so hard that it is those people who are calling for gradual change who are unrealistic. And it is those people who are calling for drastic change who are the most pragmatic. And to step back from that, we have to then ask, why is it that that drastic action is not being taken? Why is it that that kind of necessary, fundamental change is not being taken? And that's again where power comes in. And that's where interests come in. There are very rich and very powerful people who, you know, to some degree do have an interest in tackling climate change, but others, especially the fossil fuel industry, and those associated with it, would rather, you know, the incremental kind of approach so that the billions and billions and billions of dollars that they've already invested in the fossil fuel industry doesn't go to waste. They want their returns before they're willing to undertake other kinds of actions. And if we boiled this logic, you know, to the kind of stuff that faces a development practitioner on the ground - on the ground, you might be saying - let's go back to the villages that I was talking about. That look, yeah, you know, you're right. The landlords have all this power. And by the way, the secret to their power is that they collaborated with British colonizers. And so the British colonizers used the force of guns to give them thousands of acres of land. Law and coercion was on their side, they didn't do anything to earn that land. They didn't, they weren't, you know, appointed by God to have that land, they got that land because they collaborated with the British. So these landlords, we might say, in the village, certainly are the root of the problem. But they're too powerful, they're too big, you know, so we have to compromise, we have to think rationally or pragmatically. So let us work on these short term solutions where you know, I might increase the income of this farmer by giving them a side hustle or a side business, right? Like, okay, you're farming for the landlord, but why don't you try starting this micro enterprise on the side. Maybe the women in your family can start doing this, in addition to all the other work that they're already doing. And just for the record, women do more work than men, back then and even now. But that kind of pragmatic thinking, which I understand, is really a way to avoid challenging power. It's really a way of saying we've compromised ourselves with power. Because challenging power is too costly, it's too expensive. Maybe part of that is that so many of us who were involved in thinking about or practicing development come from, you know, middle class, or even upper class backgrounds. Maybe we have this kind of unconscious bias where we're invested in power, because we have it. And we may not have as much power as business people or as much power as landlords or international politicians. But our power derives from that system. So maybe that's part of the the bias that we have. But at the end of the day, what we're saying is, we are more concerned about preserving that system, through the logic of pragmatism and incrementalism, then radically up ending that system, by thinking to ourselves - and imagine if this is what we meant by development - development means the transfer of power from those who have it to those who do not. From the haves to the have nots. And why would that be your concept of development? Or what does that mean? Because when politics is determined by the interests of the poor, when it is determined by the interests of the have nots, that is when their lives will get better. That is what history tells us. For example, a recent study came out in the United States looking at inequality. And what it showed was that a huge - like a massive, massive effect on income inequality in the United States could be explained by unionization. When workers were well organized in unions, when union density was very high, inequality was very low. And the authors of that paper argue that union density explains lower inequality better than any other factor, or many other factors. And what is unionization? It is power being transferred into the hands of workers who come together collectively to say to employers, to business people, that we're not just going to take whatever you're giving to us, we're going to exercise our power independently. Similarly, what I'm looking at in my research is how the farmers, the tenant farmers who are renting land from the landlords came together, formed their own organizations and literally fought with the landlords to take a greater share of their produce, and ultimately to just take over the land themselves. And that, to me is development, right? Because that increased people's livelihoods, that made them better off than they were before. It gave them greater opportunities, all the stuff that we talked about. But as development practitioners or as people who think about development, generally, we're thinking about how can we change this policy and move this lever from here to here? Rather than asking a more fundamental question: what would it look like if development meant power to the powerless?

Safa : Absolutely, I think you raised so many important points that I want to follow up on. But just to begin with one, you know that framing, the way that you articulated development work, or this type of mainstream apolitical, ahistorical approach to development is a distraction to actually challenging power globally, in a more fundamental way. And, you know, I see that through a lot of the conversations we have on the podcast where sometimes practitioners, they have to, you know, uphold this type of rhetoric of neutrality, of not saying something that the hosting government might find offensive, of not being political, of not taking, you know, kind of activist stances in their personal life. These policies, this kind of environment exists in which practitioners are not able to kind of be both activists and practitioners at the same time, and therefore, you know, that kind of translates into them maybe working for 10,20 years in development without actually being able to express, at least publicly, any kind of political sentiment or organize for any kind of political cause. That kind of environment exists. And you also mentioned how a lot of the practitioners that work in the sector, even if they are local practitioners, they are often from quite privileged backgrounds within whatever context they're coming from. And that's something that I read, when I was reading an article of your research, where you had mentioned how - at least in the context of Pakistan in the 1970s, in the area you were working in - many of the state bureaucrats that were recruited came from Khan families. And this is kind of, you know, kind of maybe a reflection or metaphor or can be linked to the same kind of trend we see in the sector where even if a practitioner is from the country that they're working in, that doesn't necessarily mean they have an understanding or connection to the life circumstances or the history or the needs of whatever community they're trying to work with. Could you speak to that kind of dynamic, that structure wherein those who are so called practitioners or staff or who are implementing these policies, themselves come from privileged backgrounds?

Noaman: Yeah, that's actually really interesting. So in my paper, which is talking with the 1970s, you know, I point out how many bureaucrats and officials come from the landlord or Khan families. But when I was actually doing my research on the ground, and this was about 2013, I walked into the office of a major NGO in Pakistan, like one of the largest NGOs, I don't want to name it, but it has provincial branches, or kind of semi autonomous provincial organizations. And so I went into the offices, I was trying to get help from them, talking to them. And the person who was running the NGO locally was from a Khan family, right? (Laughs) So that said, he was from a Khan family whose land had been taken over by peasants. And so his economic condition may not have been as good as those Khan families who still had their own land. Nevertheless, the fact that he was a Khan, and from that family, allowed him to get the kind of education that then allowed him to become a development practitioner, in that sense. And he wasn't the only one, one of his colleagues was actually somebody who still owned the village. And everybody in the village considered him to be like 'the' person to turn too. So these people have power, or at least one of them had power and maybe doesn't have the same amount of power anymore. Although his cousins are also Khans. So you know, he took me to meet his cousins who were politicians, and who were still engaged in struggles with tenants and stuff like that, or they had come to some kind of resolution with the tenant farmers. But what I'm trying to point out here is that the people who were populating the NGO were themselves people who were not thinking about the power relations that produced poverty, because those power relations until recently had benefited them. And now that the power relations had changed, now that the tenants had the upper hand, they were quite upset. So what kind of development practice would you be doing with that kind of a way of thinking? You would most likely be, you know, again, micro-finance, gender empowerment, small things, which have their own merits. I don't want to dismiss everything that development agencies do out of hand. But the question that I would have for many practitioners of development, as you said, Safa, that they may do 10 years, 20 years of work in a context where they understand what the power relations are, they understand what's at stake. But for whatever reason, reasons of neutrality reasons of being able to be in a country, being hosted in a country, they don't speak out, or they don't think about organizing workers or peasants or farmers in those kinds of ways. And ultimately, what does that accomplish? Ultimately, what has it accomplished? And what I mean here is sure, we may have reduced poverty, although that is debatable - the extent to which poverty has been reduced. Because I don't think that much of that can be attributed to development agencies, I think most of poverty reduction, to the extent that it exists over the last 30, 40 years, can be attributed to the rise of China. And very little of that has to do with development agencies, most of that has to do with the economic and political policies that China's pursued. In much of sub-saharan Africa, we've seen poverty has gotten worse. And you could probably map that on to NGO density, development agency density. In Latin America, to the extent that we've seen an increase in people's incomes and a decrease in inequality, that again was a consequence of political movements. You know, we may agree or disagree with those political movements, so called pink tide, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, so on and so forth. You know, and they themselves are not without criticism or without limitations. Nevertheless, again, what exactly do we accomplish by being quiet? Sure, we may improve some lives on a micro level, for limited amount of time, but the kind of drastic change - say poverty reduction in China, or reduction of income inequality in Latin America is the consequence of politics and power. It's not a consequence of development practice. To put that very bluntly, right? I know that I'm oversimplifying here. But I think that is the thing. So what do we achieve in these occupations other than creating - it's almost make work, in a sense, we're making work, we're making jobs for people, for middle class people, for jetsetting, international families, you know, people whose parents may have been diplomats, and now they're also part of the NGO complex. So it's almost like you're producing jobs for these people. And some of that might translate into interventions on the crown. And again, you know, I'm being blunt, I think that there are many NGOs that are doing important work, and many people who are committed and doing it for important reasons. I just think that the structure, the way that the whole network is structured, restricts people's activities to such an extent that I don't - and that's also the reason why I personally did not go into into development agencies or development practice. I chose academia, because at least I could think about these things critically, and academia would not necessarily restrict me from engaging in organizing work, or that kind of stuff, if those opportunities presented themselves to me.

Safa: Mm hmm. That's so interesting that you mentioned that choice you made personally in terms of your own career path. But you know, everything that you touched on reminds me of this other way of framing it that we sometimes use when I speak with people on the podcast is this tension between reform and structural change? Or as you said it , you know, what is the impact of ongoing development work versus the potential of political organizing and challenging the current power dynamics that exist? When thinking about maybe capitalist values and the way that they're kind of embedded in the development sector - could you speak to that baby a bit in terms of how the donor aid structure, the financial systems that are used, the goals, the indicators, how in different ways, this type of capitalistic ideology continues to be upheld by development workers and organizations? I know you spoke to that earlier, we spoke about the definition of aid and the GDP, but are there other ways in which you see that happening?

Noaman: So it's a tricky question, because different agencies, different NGOs, different organizations - there's almost like this web or there's a bunch of different indicators that different people are going to use. And some of those will be internal to their organizations. Some of those may be determined - in fact, oftentimes, they're determined by say, up until 2015, I think it was the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs that were set by the United Nations. And then after that, it was the Sustainable Development Goals. And there are things like we want to reduce poverty by this much, we want this much gender equality, we want this much of this. And then those then have to get translated by each country, or by each NGO, by each organization, by each aid organization into concrete, measurable indicators. But by the time you get down to the ground of concrete, measurable indicators, rather than looking at the qualitative shift, you may be engaging in, you end up looking at microscopic quantitative shifts, right. So gender empowerment, for example, instead of asking bigger questions about how are women in a country like Pakistan, or a country like India, where there's so much violence against women, where there's - and to be clear, this is not unique to India and Pakistan, it's not a cultural trait to Indians and Pakistani's alone. Nevertheless, the structures of gender inequality in India and Pakistan are so deeply rooted and often very violent. What is changing that? You know, there's different things, but I think a lot of it has to do with women's politics, but also women moving into the economic sphere, into workforce as a consequence of economic compulsions - you can't run a family on a single male income anymore. And so you need women to go into the workforce. And that leads to other kinds of political movements or struggles. But the way that NGOs would go about it might be by saying, oh, let's target micro finance to women, because we did some study in 1983, or something that showed us that if you increase a woman's income, then that will increase the amount of food that children are getting, and it might even increase the income of the whole family. And then you'll go into a village and then you will get a bunch of women into a micro-finance program and you will have baseline measures, and then you will have measures about what happened after your program. And if you can show quantitatively that maybe the income went up - to be clear, to be fair, a lot of times now the measure isn't even whether or not the incomes of the families went up, it's whether or not they repaid their loan. Right. So if everybody successfully repaid their micro finance loan, we know that we've been successful - that doesn't tell us anything about what they had to do in order to be able to repay that loan, which in itself can be a very violent process and very contentious process. Because there's men fighting women within the family, there's women fighting women of other families who - you know, the way these things often work is the loans are given out to groups. And so if any one person in that group does not repay a loan, then the rest of the group will not get a loan, will not get a future loan. So now there's pressure within families, they are fighting each other to get those loans repaid. And so if your quantitative indicators are like: they repaid the loan, and therefore we haven't achieved gender equality, or gender empowerment - honestly, on the ground, many people like my colleague at LUMS, Dr. Ghazal Zulfiqar, actually studies this on the ground. And a lot of what I'm saying comes out of her work. You find out on the ground that you don't really have concrete gender empowerment. Those quantitative indicators don't tell you qualitative things like men are still controlling the income of those women, men are controlling their access to money. But you know, you've ticked it off. So that goes onto your thing. Or, you know, I can give you examples. Once in 2011, I went to a part of Pakistan called Kohat - and Kohat is next to what used to be so called tribal agencies. And at that time, the United States was bombing Pakistan through drone strikes, and there was a pitched battle between Pakistan's military and the Taliban. And so a lot of people left tribal agencies, and they came into these more interior parts of Pakistan, so to speak. And I spoke to some of these displaced peoples, internally displaced peoples, and they said, look, NGOs show up, right - they'll come to our settlement, they'll install a water pump, they'll take a photograph, and they'll go away, because they need to show their donors that they've done that. That is the indicator that you have. But the water pump isn't even connected to water, it's built so high up that it is far from any kind of water table that we can actually access. Also, it's built in a place where it's not useful to us, it doesn't make sense to our kind of customs of how we collect water. And that's just a very kind of surface level thing. What does it have to do with capitalist values? I don't know if it has, as such to do with - you know, even in capitalism, there's different ways that you can conceive of capitalism. One way of conceiving of capitalism is that I take some capital, I invest it into some kind of productive activity like a factory, or I invest my capital into agriculture, and that produces a surplus profit, which I can then reinvest. But that's not even what's really happening here. This is like a debased kind of capitalist logic, where the NGO is saying: how do I get an injection of investment from abroad? Or that micro-finance is saying, how do we get investment from big banks or from international finance capital? And then, how do we lend it out, so that we can make -what do you make? Is there any productive process here, that's actually giving people meaningful jobs and decent work? No, what you're doing is you're basically becoming new users, right? You're charging people interest on the loan, that's where you're making your profit. And part of that then goes to the local micro finance, many of them are now banks, more so than institutions. And then that goes back into international finance capital. Or for other forms of NGOs, which really is a business - it is a business, even if they're so called nonprofit, in many instances, you're getting investment from foreign donors, and you want to spend as little money of that as possible. Sometimes you do a better jobs, sometimes you do a worse job. You give a few technicians and some higher university graduates jobs, but most of that income is going to go back so that you can buy a better Jeep to travel the country, and you can throw fundraisers, and you can go into high society and drink tea with other people and talk about all the good work you're doing for the people of Pakistan or the people of India. And that's not like the case, in Pakistan these days, an NGO is almost like an insult, like somebody would look at you and be like, huh NGO, right? Like, people don't like that anymore. They may understand that they need an NGO, because that might be the only place they're getting kind of money from, or some income from, at least some cash flow from, but that not seen with respect, because it doesn't actually increase people's dignity. It doesn't increase their access to productive jobs, to productive employment. It makes people dependent. And so I'm talking about a debased capitalist logic, like, you know, overall, I'm not overall a fan of capitalism, but at least I understand that in some of the classical articulations of capitalism, the idea is that we're going to, you know, again, the logic of structural transformation - move people into decent, well paying jobs, and that is not the kind of capitalism that we even see with NGOs or international aid.

Safa: Yeah. You know, that anecdote you used about the the water tank, there's so many stories like that. And there's this kind of point to be made that it's not necessarily just saying that, okay, your strategy or your approach, or your organization, or the sector at large is not working. Actually, not only is it not working, but it's having negative consequences, it is actually causing harm, it's actually violent in some ways, in some cases. So there's that extra impact or effect. And in your article, you briefly touch on the Green Revolution technologies that were used in Pakistan in the 1970s, and how they actually exacerbated rural inequalities more than anything else. Could you maybe speak to that a bit? And if you see any parallels with that type of intervention, and maybe any contemporary programs that for example promote ICT for development these days? With what happened or what played out with the Green Revolution technologies example?

Noaman: That's actually a really excellent, excellent question. The Green Revolution, the original Green Revolution took place in the 1960s, 70s, 80s. You could even say that, in many ways, it's a long - I think Raj Patel has an article where he calls it "The Long Green Revolution." And there's a debate amongst development scholars and practitioners about the success of the Green Revolution, that first kind of, the first wave of the Green Revolution, if you want to call it that. What is the Green Revolution? And what is its context? That's really important to understand. In the 1960s, new seed varieties for wheat were developed that were seen to be more productive than the kind of traditional seeds that were being used by farmers. And so what you would do is you would use these new varieties of seeds, that would then grow much more. And so what you wanted to do was to improve yields per hectare, or the productivity of land. But in order to do that, what was also often required was the use of better kinds of fertilizer. And I wouldn't say better in a moral sense, but just like more effective fertilizers, which were chemical fertilizer, right? So you want to use chemical fertilizers that go alongside these new seed varieties, and often they would require more water. And so what ends up happening is that it's expensive. New seeds, chemical fertilizers, as opposed to the manure that many farmers used, and still use, in organic agriculture, and more water is required to achieve greater yields per hectare. Side by side with that there's a push from many governments to mechanize agriculture, to use tractors, right? So if I'm kind of an old school farmer in Pakistan, how do I plow the land? How do I actually prepare it to receive seeds? I have like these two bullocks, right, that I attached the plow to, and they just walk through the field back and forth, back and forth. And I might be able, on my own to, like, do 12 and a half acres of land. But with a tractor, I can literally do dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of acres of land. And so that's why a tractor would would go alongside with this. So the idea is that by using these new technologies, whether it's these new chemical technologies, in seed and fertilizer, or if it's these new kind of - you know, tractors aren't exactly new, they're just expensive - with these newly available machine technologies, we want to improve the productivity of agriculture, and in doing that, we can wipe out hunger. Because the idea here right now is that we simply don't produce enough food to feed everybody. But if we produce more food, then the price of food would drop, and everybody would be able to afford it. Or we could just end up feeding everybody, instead of having to import food and stuff like that. What happens, according to myself, Raj Patel and other scholars - now there's other scholars who will contest this version of what I'm saying. So I don't want to pretend that there's only one way of interpreting the data that we have. But what we see is a range of things happening. Because these new technologies are expensive, not everybody can afford them. And if you can't afford it, what happens when these people adopt these new technologies, is that their costs, overall costs of production per unit go down. And my overall cost of production per unit remained up, because I don't have these new technologies, because I can't afford them. So I start getting driven out of agriculture because I can no longer sell at the same prices that those guys are selling at. Or even if I do, I'm just not making enough money. And if I'm not making enough money from agriculture, then I need to drop out of it, and I need to go do something else. And so a lot of people end up you know, losing their relationship with agriculture because they're no longer able to compete with those richer peasants or those bigger landlords and landowners who could use that. In my example, in what I study, that's also tied into big landlords realizing that if they use these new technologies and use these new machineries, tractors, they don't need to rent out their land to so many troublesome peasants. And so, you know, as I said, if one peasant can help only handle about 12 and a half acres of land, I can kick off of my land 10 peasants and replace them with 1 tractor, which only needs to be driven by 1 worker. Right. So you can see how much people are getting displaced from land - whether that's because landlords are pushing them off of lands, and arguably, that's what happens on a massive scale in Pakistan in the 1970s. That's what the research that I'm relying on shows, or it happens through these more nifty kind of market mechanisms of class differentiation, that's what we call it, where richer peasants are better able to engage with the market because they have the capital needed to buy these new technologies. So, our thinking is that all we need to do is introduce technology exogenously into production function, and that will raise everybody's living standards. And that's not the case. You have an interesting and complicated dynamics of inequality and differentiation, because technology is capital, because you need capital to be able to afford that technology. What does that have to do with what's going on nowadays is - or let me just say that that does have the effect of increasing food production, but it also has the effect of making for greater unequal societies so that it's still difficult for people to afford food. Now, again, there's some contention around that because some scholars will argue that food prices have declined historically. And others will argue that at least in the last few years, they've increased sharply, since maybe 2008. That's a different debate. But the point is that the kinds of access that people have to land, the kind of access that people have to productive employment, they did lose that, that did go down. And that's gone down even more so after the introduction of neoliberal reforms. The parallel to today that we can find is - the Gates Foundation has been funding this thing called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). And the idea, again, is that we're going to introduce these new technologies, new types of seeds, new types of fertilizers, that will make African agriculture more productive. But now instead of looking at the question of displacement from land, and those kinds of inequalities, we should be thinking about other questions also. And so there's some researchers, and I really apologize to them that I have forgotten their names, but they're looking into the performance of AGRA, and the kinds of conclusions that they've come up with, at least in certain areas like Rwanda, is that AGRA incentivizes farmers to kind of focus on one crop, right, like you want to focus on corn, because we can apply this technology to corn, and you can grow a lot of it. But what that ends up doing is that it reduces biodiversity and nutritional diversity, you only get one kind of nutrition from corn. Whereas if you're doing small scale agriculture, with different kinds of planting, different kinds of things going on, then you have different kinds of nutrition, micronutrients that you might need from certain kinds of vegetables, certain kinds of fruits - from corn, all you're getting is carbs. And so what we're seeing is, yeah, we want to increase people's food intake, but not the quality of their food intake. And we know what happens when you give people carbs, a lot of carbs to eat, we know that a lot of obesity and diabetes is driven by lack of access to quality food. And so what we've done is okay, people who were maybe at low level of quantity, we want to increase that quantity, without giving consideration to quality. The other thing that these researchers found is that the the kind of tall claims made by AGRA, the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, that we are going to double yields, and that's not what happened. They increased yields by like maybe 30%, as opposed to the 100% yield increase that they were promising. And this is very much - if you go into the field of healthcare, if you go into the fields of the other kind of stuff that the Gates Foundation is involved in - it's again, this kind of top down, technology driven thing, rather than saying, what are the power relations? How do we change the power relations - and remember, the original Green Revolution was explicitly counterposed to Red Revolution, it was explicitly counterposed to the possibility that peasants would take the land away from landlords, because a lot of research in agriculture also shows us that small scale farms can be, under certain conditions, more productive than large scale farms. So another way of thinking about how we could have done that kind of development back in the 1960s, was to say, let's divide this land amongst small scale farmers, then let's give them the kind of technology that they need. Maybe they need better roads, better access, better techniques, greater access to water and irrigation. And that will increase their productivity, which is kind of what happened in South Korea, where the technological interventions were not high tech, that only some people could afford, but were lower tech and more people could afford them. And so agricultural growth was more broadly and evenly distributed, rather than be concentrated among some people. There are still a lot of problems with the Korean growth pattern as well, and the Korean agricultural pattern. I don't want to say that was the best thing that ever happen. But it was important for Korea to become the kind of industrial power that it is, because it raised the incomes of rural inhabitants in an even manner, unlike the Green Revolution, that did it in an uneven manner. And these kinds of top down, technological fixes that we see nowadays, do not promise equitable and broad based development, in my opinion, although the evidence we still have to sort through in more detail. But I don't see that that's what's happening.

Safa: Mhm, yeah, absolutely. I know also Dr. Vandana Shiva has written a lot about the impact of the Green Revolution technologies. So there's a lot of information out there if listeners would like to follow up on it. But one kind of related issue is, for example, for a farmer to participate in this approach, in this way of going about restructuring their farm and trying to improve their livelihood, often it can lead to going into a lot of debt - and just debt, maybe at a global scale to talk about it in a more broader sense, there are countries that have massive debt. And that's something that in the context of international development, financial systems, is a big issue. And there are calls for acknowledging the history of colonialism and extraction that has led to debt for many countries and calls for reparations, instead of having to pay back debt, forgiveness of debt. Could you speak to us a bit about maybe your thoughts about the whole debt paradigm within the financial system in development, and what you think are some of the maybe incorrect or even violent ways in which organizations kind of reproduce or promote debt.

Noaman: Let's start with some history lessons in these terms, right. And I think some of the most glaring examples of this - I can give you two examples. One is Haiti. So Haiti is a very small nation in the Caribbean. It's one of the only French speaking nations in the Caribbean, most of them were colonized by the British, and they speak English. And it's on the same island as the Dominican Republic where people speak Spanish. So Haiti is a French speaking, former colony of France. And in the French colonial empire, Haiti was one of the most profitable enterprises. It grew sugar, which then France sold to its other colonies, and so on and so forth. The thing about the sugar that was grown in Haiti is that it was grown by slaves. And those slaves organized, and they overthrew the French colonial government in a very interesting - these are African slaves, right, descendants of African people who organized themselves -and this, by the way, was happening all throughout the Caribbean and the United States. As we know, slave rebellions were a huge part of it. But Haiti was the first time that slaves actually overthrew and establish their own state, they establish their own country. And the logic of it was not some kind of racial exclusivism. So there were people from Poland in Haiti at the time, they were agents doing this, that or the other, and because they joined the slave rebellion against the French, those Polish people, regardless of the color of their skin, were considered black, because they had joined the rebellion. So in any case, you have this country Haiti, which is now an independent country, that was run by the people who used to be property. What is France do? France - and not just France, France and other colonial nations blockade Haiti, because you can't have that, you can't have that as an example to the rest of the world. And they made Haiti pay reparations to the French. Why? Because Haiti had taken away the property of the French - what was that property? The slaves. So they ended up paying reparations to the French for - correct me if I'm wrong - well into the 20th century, the Haitian Revolution was an 18th century affair and in the 18th, 19th century and well into the 20th century, Haiti was paying reparations to France - that's the absurdity of debt. And even where, you know, it's not that glaring. So for example, in Mozambique, which was colonized by the Portuguese, the Portuguese built a dam. It's called the Cahora Bassa Dam, I think that's that's how you say it, I'm sorry I'm butchering the Portuguese - oh, and speaking of butchering the Portuguese, actually, when the Mozambican started fighting for their independence, the Portuguese did butcher the Mozambicans. Right, there was a massive and violent war in which the Portuguese, backed by NATO, were just bombing, even using Napalm, if I recall correctly, in Mozambique. Now, the dam that I spoke about, upon independence in 1975, it had just been completed, or it was almost completed. So now the Mozambican government had to pay the Portuguese for that dam - they had to pay them in installments. In other countries of the world the example may not be as glaring, but there's a fundamental misrecognition that the global north development was, at least in part, financed by the riches that they took out of the global south. And instead of saying what we need to do is pay reparations to the global south, what they do in the global north is say we're going to give you these loans and they are loans, so they have to be repaid with interest, in order for your development. But that's so called quote unquote development, as I've been pointing out, is all focused on growth, not focused on structural transformation. It's not focused on actually getting these countries to stand on their own two feet. In fact, what happens, for example, in Pakistan, is, you take a loan from the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, $6 billion, but it comes with conditionalities. And those conditionalities, also known as structural adjustment programs, in some instances, actually actively block you from pursuing the kinds of policies you need to develop your own industry and to develop yourself as an autonomous, independent country. So I need that loan because I am in a bind, where my country is underdeveloped and is dependent on imports, and doesn't have enough US dollars to buy these imports. So I'm constantly in debt. So I need to get more debt so that I can pay off my debt. But the condition of me taking more debt is that I cannot undertake those policies that I need to get out of that debt, or get out of that structural position where I'm dependent on imports or not making things in a way that is actually useful for my people. It's a perverse logic. And we have to understand that it's like credit cards, credit card companies are not interested in people repaying their loans. Credit card companies make their money not from the loan that they've given out, but from the interest that they earn on those loans. And so they're not interested in you actually repaying your loan, they want you to stay permanently indebted, so that they can keep making money, more and more compound interest, in smaller installments, rather than having you pay off the whole loan. And that is a similar logic that we need to understand what the IMF and World Bank. The World Bank is a bank, the International Monetary Fund is a bank, they have fiduciary obligations to make profits, or at least to get their loans back and they do that through interest payments. A lot of these private loans that are coming, whether they are domestic loans or international loans, that governments are taking, they're paying interest. What we're paying now - the third world countries, is not the principal, the principal has been paid over many times. What we're paying is interest on those loans. It's perverse, it's perverse, and there's not much that you can do about it. Right, other than defaulting on that loan, in which case, then you are written out of international investment, foreign direct investment is not going to come into your country, which is why there's a lot of scholars in the classic tradition of development thinking, called dependency scholars, who have argued that you need to think about decoupling or de linking from this global economy. It is perverse, it is not in your interest. And you have to figure out what would it mean to wean ourselves off of this debt. But within these countries, the class structures are such that the ruling classes themselves don't have much interest in weaning themselves off of this debt. So really, it really comes down again, for those of us who are interested in development, to what would it mean to organize workers and peasants? What would it mean for us to organize the powerless and bring power into the hands of the powerless so that the priorities of the country are determined by their interests. Having agro ecology that is not bad for the climate, that gives us nutritious food, that takes people out of these overcrowded, dirty cities back into the countryside in a way that we're living with our environment in a good way. And yeah, we want modern technology, and we want the benefits of libraries of community centers, all of that stuff in rural areas too. And we can have that, it's not impossible, but it requires us to undertake some painful breaks. And the pain needs to be eaten by the ruling class, by the rich and not by the poor. So where does development practice, where do development agencies, where do NGOs fall into that?

Safa: Yeah, absolutely. And now in the time of the coronavirus, pandemic, you know, we are seeing how these kind of class politics are playing out globally, in a very heightened way. It's even more pertinent to be asking these questions and kind of rethinking the paradigms that are being used. But you know, you refer to the importance of social movements and organizing, political organizing as a better way, maybe more effective way to really challenge these more structural, ingrained power dynamics. Could you kind of speak to maybe your own research on social movements or maybe some of the social movements you're seeing contemporarily, in the current day, in the current context, that maybe give you hope or that you think, okay, this is an example of an alternative way to really try to change the whole global dynamic and system that currently is disadvantaging so many people and forcing people to live in crisis on so many levels?

Noaman: Social movements are necessary. Social movements, I think, have been the biggest drivers of change in the 20th century for sure. And even prior to that, if it was not for workers movements, trade unions, which I spoke about earlier, than we probably wouldn't see increases in workers incomes, or the dramatic workers incomes increases that we saw in many developed countries, and even in many developing countries or third world countries, if it wasn't for peasant movements in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, then I think the situation of many people in the countryside would be much worse. But because these are movements, because these are political movements, they ebb and they flow, they ebb and they flow. And when they're ebbing, when they're moving back, it's not simply that they ebb and flow according to some kind of natural cycle of gravity - the ruling class or ruling powers are also studying how social movements work, they're actively developing, literally developing counterinsurgency tactics. Counterinsurgency is not simply used against, you know, extremist terrorists. It's also used against social movements. In fact, in Pakistan, many union leaders are often tried under terrorism legislation. And it's not just Pakistan that that happens. So in countries like Colombia and Philippines - Philippines and Colombia are two of the world's leading countries where land defenders or environmental defenders are just killed. They're killed by paramilitaries or they're killed by the official militaries of these countries. In Philippines, it's the Armed Forces of the Philippines often, or in Colombia, it's paramilitaries that are deeply linked to the state and to politicians. So you have this ongoing struggle for power, where social movements often in many cases have very, very, very difficult circumstances in which they have to organize. One thing is repression, as I have pointed out, but the other thing that can be very difficult is when poor people are so used to having to subordinate themselves to richer people and making, you know, not demands, but rather making requests, like: hey, my kid died, do you think you could loan me 2000 rupees? Hey, my, my father is sick, do you think that I could get 1000 rupees from you? And that's become such a dominant way of relating in many third world countries that it becomes hard to pull people out of it and organize. But that's very possible. You know, I'm personally inspired by peasant movements in the Philippines, for example, I was very much inspired by a movement in Nepal, which was led by the Maoists, the Communist Party of Nepal, bracket Maoists, to the extent that I went to Nepal in 2013. And even though the Maoists had entered into mainstream governance, and many people were disillusioned with the way that they seem to have abandon their ideals for social transformation, people had to give them credit, people had to say, look, I used to be literally untouchable. So there's untouchability in Nepal as well. I used to be untouchable. And I used to make little money. But it's after this kind of 10 year long civil war led by the Maoists, that not only did I gain income gains, not only did I have income gains, I found more opportunity for employment, but I also got more dignity and respect. People can't disrespect me for being untouchable anymore. Because the Maoists recruited a lot of untouchables into their People's Army. They literally gave them guns, and they said, go ahead. And now your centuries long tradition of discrimination and oppression, let's see how well it stands up when I have a little bit of power in my hand. Now, that does not mean that I encourage violence. What I'm saying is that we cannot discuss the question of power without discussing the question of violence. That's something that we have to get out of our minds that, as I pointed out, the example of Philippines or Colombia, where land defenders, many, many of them, especially in Colombia, and Philippines are peaceful, legal activists - but they're still brutally murdered in broad daylight. And the coronavirus crisis, the lockdown actually made it easier for these assassins to identify, locate, and kill people. So you know, the number of 'social leaders' they are called in Colombia, actually increased. And so these are challenges. But that's also inspiring. Like I went to Colombia recently, and I was just blown away by how, despite the violence that you can almost feel, like it's almost palpable, and how many people have been killed because of the civil war also in Colombia, where you had agrarian movements, which were trying to get greater rights for peasants and farmers. But aside from them, even though that has wound down, there's still so many different kinds of social leaders who are not violent, who are not armed, who just want to increase their community power. And they're doing this despite these very violent odds. And what that results in is it does result in concrete gains. We know that it results in concrete gains, because ruling classes have to make compromises with social movements. That's what my research shows. I study how those peasants, those tenant farmers organized themselves. They organized themselves under the leadership of radical political parties, specifically the Mazdoor Kisan Party which you mentioned, they organized themselves. They took up guns because they had to, the Khans had guns so they had to pick up guns, they took over the land and that increased their incomes. That increases the food that they were eating, that increased their capacity to send their kids to school. Was it perfect? By no means. Many people got left out. Many people died, many people got left out of the gains. But is it better than what came before? Absolutely. And that kind of change, that kind of movement is inspiring. We see that in the Philippines where farmers have gotten greater rights for themselves. We see that in parts of India, we see that all over the third world where the you see social movements - sometimes they can collapse through repression, but sometimes they can collapse through co optation, which is where the state gives people some of what they want, so that people will stop fighting. But at least you've achieved a change. And in my opinion, what's necessary is for these social movements to come together, and to actually just take over the state, like, we're going to be the ones who run society from now on, not these capitalists, not these business people who have run our economy and ecology into the ground. You know, climate change is a condemnation of the people who've been running the world for the last hundred years. And certainly for the last 30 or 40 years, they knew this was coming. It's not a surprise, it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. So what authority do they claim for themselves? I was teaching a group of students, you know, from relatively well-off backgrounds in Pakistan. And I said, the original meaning of democracy is not what we see today where you know, you elect rich people to represent you, democracy meant ruled by the poor, for the poor. Like it would actually be poor people governing themselves. And these relatively elite students said to me: can poor people actually govern? Like, wouldn't they just screw everything up? And I was like: we live in Lahore, where, especially in the winter, you cannot breathe outside because of the smog, it is so oppressive, that you literally cannot breathe properly outside. We live in a place where when it rains, it floods so badly, that you can't even see anything, there's garbage in poor people's areas in the streets, there's corruption, there's all kinds of stuff - elites have shown themselves to be not only incapable of actually managing the global society and local societies, they've shown themselves to be bad at it. Like they're bad at it. And so what we need, I think, is for poor people to step up. And again, that's what I think development needs, movements of poor people, social movements, political parties of the poor, these are what are necessary to establish radical, far reaching, transformative change.

Safa: I think that's very well said. You know, we've touched on a variety of different issues. When I had spoken with you earlier, you had mentioned that some of the approaches, or maybe the analysis that you use, or we used in this conversation today, they tend to make practitioners very uncomfortable, or there are practitioners who've never thought about this before, or the framing just makes them uncomfortable. In that context, like just thinking about maybe who the majority of the audience for the podcast is, or when you speak to or are in conversation with people who have dedicated their lives to working in the sector, what would you maybe say to them in terms of the way to step into this type of thinking, as a way to allow themselves to, even though they might be feeling uncomfortable with this kind of analysis, really take it seriously, and, as you say, not co opt it - because there are a lot of organizations who kind of use the rhetoric of, oh, let's shift the power, you know, localization, different type of wording and articulation that's used to kind of, sort of, maybe in a little way, talk about the importance of power and economic power and redistribution of power, but not in a fundamental or you know, in an organized meaningful way. So any things you would like to say or mention to those groups of people who maybe this is their first time thinking in this way?

Noaman: I don't know if I have very good news. ( laughs) You are right, Safa, that a lot of this discourse can also be co opted. So I was just looking at a USAID document, which talks about political economy analysis, which is telling practitioners to be sensitive to local power relations, to competing interests, to the kinds of power relations that exist on the ground, so that we can then distribute our aid or get our project executed more effectively. But we really need to ask what the project is. Political economy analysis is not simply about local scales of power relations - it's also about power relations at the national scale and on the international scale, which we've spoken about in terms of debt, IMF, World Bank. Who really directs the ideology of these kinds of conditionalities and programs? Do they challenge the developmental logic championed by global north countries and international financial institutions? Yes or no. If they do not challenge those bigger logics - then ultimately the work that we end up doing, or the work that developmental practitioners and many scholars of development too - most of them are not critical or as critical as I am - it ends up reinforcing those developmental logics that have shown themselves to be anti people, that are shown themselves to be anti planet, anti climate, that are shown themselves to be anti health. We haven't even touched on how COVID-19 is related to all of these things. I think what it means for development practitioners, many of whom are well meaning, I think, I truly believe that, you know, revolution or radical change is so far off, that we really need to engage in stuff today. And we can do that by tinkering with policy, by suggesting better policy to people in government, or by adapting better policies that multilateral organizations like the United Nations or Food and Agriculture Organization, for example - and better policies do have effects. I'm not saying they don't, right. So I don't want to pretend that that's not the case. But they don't have the kinds of effects that we need to face the challenges that the world is facing today. And we need to recognize that policy does not breed power. Power breeds policy. Power determines what policy gets adopted and how it gets adopted. Policy does not determine who has power and who doesn't have power. Unfortunately, it exists outside of the kinds of realms in which we operate. And many times what we end up doing in the name of empowerment, is that we selectively empower certain groups of people within a village or within a context, sometimes because it's easier to just deal with the people who already have some degree of capital. I wouldn't - I'm not going to give you an example, but there was an example that I could have given you. Sometimes it's easier to work with a few people, and therefore, quote, unquote, empower them, while actually disempowering the majority of people who are sitting around. What it means to empower the majority of people might mean having to break fundamentally with the logic of development practice as it exists right now. And that is, of course, very uncomfortable. It means doing politics. And that is, of course, very uncomfortable, nobody's going to pay you to do the kinds of politics that will go against their interests. So why would any NGO receive funding from the global north, or even from their own local government, to do things that could challenge the entrenched power of elites and politicians? I know that, you know, it's not very good news, because, hey, I need a job - I'm not saying academia is very good, either. I'm not saying that the academic stuff - the majority of academics are also part of this mill. They're also part of this kind of NGO industrial complex and development industrial complex. They're not critical of it. They look at how to advance it because they absorb and live, breathe its ideological coordinates. So we are faced with a dilemma, especially in a context where there's fewer and fewer jobs, many of us are professionals. So even though we're well off, that does not mean that we have assets that we can retire into. So we're faced with a dilemma. And I think oftentimes, what I tell students and others is what you do from nine to five is your employer's problem. But what you do from five to nine is your own. And if you're using your five to nine to do exactly the same thing that you were doing, from nine to five, there's a problem. Speaking truth to power is not sufficient. And it's not even necessary. What we need to do is to take their power away, and really meaningfully organize working class and peasant people to build their power. And we have skills that we can share with working class people and peasants, but what they have is their experience, and the power is in their hands ultimately. So it's going to take this kind of symbiosis to make this kind of change. And that is a difficult process. It is a long term process. It is not something that's going to happen tomorrow. But it is so necessary, it is much, much more necessary now than it ever has been, I think. I mean, it's always been necessary for the poor. But now for the sake of the entire planet, it's necessary. And so I think development practitioners do need to work through the kind of discomfort, you know, have an honest sense of our place in the world. As I said, much of the poverty reduction you've seen over the last 30, 40 years has to do with gigantic transformations and political movements than it does with development practice. And so locating our own role in that context, ask ourselves the difficult questions about - fine nine to five I might be doing what neoliberal, IMF ideology or NGO ideology requires me to do. But what am I doing from six o'clock to nine o'clock in the evening? Am I out there in working class neighborhoods, asking people sincere questions about the way they live and the power relations in which they're embedded? So that we can help build on their power to overthrow those power relations? And if not, then the rest of the questions at the end of the day don't matter.

Safa: Mm hmm. Yeah. Thank you so much, I think that's very powerfully said and there's a lot of food for thought. And I really thank you for sharing your time with us, for sharing your thoughts and reflections. It's been really great and very thought provoking, enriching to speak with you. So thank you.

Noaman: Thank you Safa, thank you for the opportunity.

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