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A Provocation for Better Knowledge for a More Just International Cooperation
In a virtual presentation hosted by two behavioral scientists from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on the theme of “decolonizing” democracy, human rights, and governance work in international development, a cognitive psychologist led the presentation. After explaining the history of colonization as a process of intense economic extraction and political subjugation by imperial powers, she then explained that decolonization was something far more modest. In the case of international development, it was not a matter of material reparation or a revision in the global balance of power, but was instead a matter of overcoming one’s psychological biases inherited from the prior colonial era. In this unique rendering of the decolonization concept, it was up to international development practitioners and researchers like us to identify our colonial cognitive biases and correct them through better behavior. During the Q&A at the end, an anonymous participant asked, “Is the United States a colonial power?”
The two hosts of the event immediately grew uncomfortable and strategically ended the recording just as a long-serving bureaucrat answered the question affirmatively, confessing his personal belief that the U.S. was still a colonial power in the world. The poignancy of the question was not just the way it revealed the absurdity of USAID hosting an event on decolonization, but the fact that this reality never occurred to those hosting and leading the event in the first place. A presentation that isolated the problem of colonization to a matter of cognitive bias ironically obscured the historical, material, and political legacies of colonization.
In the field of international development, I regularly meet anthropologists working as researchers, program officers, technical directors, and “social and behavioral science” (SBS) specialists. International development has always been replete with expertise––a legacy of its colonial and Cold War origins––but now it is commonplace for donor institutions to demand “evidence-backed” policy and programming informed by SBS research. While these trends have been underway in the subfields of global health and economic development for some time, increasingly similar demands are being made for the incorporation of SBS into the fields of democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG).
However, donors and practitioners seem to assume an easy commensurability between social and behavioral sciences that does not exist in the academy. Some of behavioral science’s harshest academic critics are social science and humanities scholars, who have gone so far as to accuse it of being a pseudoscience whose emergence is less a story of discovery and more a symptom of the cultural logics of neoliberalism filtering their way into policy. More benignly, others critically observe that behavioral science operates under a set of ethical and epistemological assumptions not shared by social scientists, especially anthropologists. More than just a set of intellectual distinctions, these differences are both salient and crucial in the world of applied international development research, especially for human rights and democracy programs.
In this article, I begin with a brief overview of SBS in DRG work. From there I describe two examples drawn from conversations with other practitioners in the field to illustrate where and why anthropological and behavioral science approaches diverge. Rather than offer a corrective to international development’s colonial past, behavioral science continues this legacy through its paternalistic approach to knowledge production and its crude renderings of social context. Conversely, I observe that the thinking and methods developed by critical ethnographers can be especially useful when the goal of international development is just cooperation. This means mutual respect, reciprocity, and shared power and resources––values that clash with donors’ preoccupation with changing others’ behavior.
Social and Behavioral Science (SBS) in International Development
There is a long history of state, private-sector, and international institutions enlisting the help of applied and academic researchers to inform and achieve various international development goals. Critical anthropological accounts of the longue durée of international development reveal it to be a succession of different paradigms, theories of history, and political-economic approaches that frame what counts as evidence and what indicates “progress.”
The turn to SBS is best understood as the latest successor to that legacy, reflecting the downscaling of development as it shifted away from large-scale interventions to short-term and inconsistent experiments carried out by donor institutions. In this new paradigm, SBS is meant to offer development practitioners insight into how best to use a program’s resources to achieve targeted results. Social science becomes useful to the extent it offers implementing organizations insight into a given context’s history, culture, law, and political economy, while behavioral science is meant to offer insight into individual decision-making by reference to behavioral economics, social psychology, and cognitive psychology. In international development discourse, these two approaches are imagined to be congruent, even though for many social scientists (especially anthropologists), social context, social change, and even human psychology cannot be reduced to individual cognition or “behavior.”
In the academy, social scientists have raised these arguments, but in applied international development these debates have yet to fully develop. Behavioral economics research, some argue, depoliticizes economic and social relations and often lacks meaningful integration of social and historical insights into its analyses. This results in one-dimensional interpretations of social life that tend to misrecognize social and structural patterns of inequality, and interpret them as mere expressions of individual psychological bias. Other critics highlight how behavioral science interventions often place the onus of change on the powerless or marginalized rather than attend to the underlying social inequalities that shape a given context. This can lead to projects that absurdly emphasize individual change as a response to social forms of marginalization, like the implementation of job readiness workshops as a strategy for communities facing endemic poverty. Moreover, because behavioral science research draws largely from experimental psychological studies carried out through online surveys and lab experiments with mostly white and affluent American and European universities, there is skepticism as to whether this research is even useful or translatable to real world contexts.
Efforts by social scientists, including anthropologists, to mark the boundaries between social and behavioral science has been underway the fields of global health and economic development. The spread of SBS into other subfields, like human rights, reflects its popularity with international development elites rather than serving as an indicator of its efficacy. USAID’s efforts over the last two decades to integrate SBS into its DRG programming, for instance, parallels the U.S. government’s own assessment that global democracy is in a state of decline. Despite the glaring evidence of its shortcomings, behavioral science offers programs an easy way to narrate success and justify their funding at a time when policymakers from donor countries are skeptical about international aid.
Mainstream DRG programs funded by donor countries like the United States and United Kingdom increasingly ask implementing organizations to instigate and log a narrow set of behavioral changes that donors believe are associated with democracy, human rights, and good governance. Local civil society organizations who receive donor money are increasingly saddled with obligations to justify their strategy and thinking in behavioral terms even when this approach might offer little insight to the contexts they operate in or the challenges they face. Contrasting with the liberal international paternalism of behavioral science is the tradition of international and transnational solidarity-building that anthropologists have participants in and contributed to. Rather than nudging people with less power to fulfill the wishes of donors, this approach encourages operating with thickly descriptive understandings of local context. It is about learning from and with on-the-ground advocates to build sustainable political strategies that drive meaningful social change that may extend across borders and reverberate back to the so-called developed world.
Networks of international and local civil society organizations have adopted these same principles into their work, drawing from the historical legacies and shared knowledges of past and present social movements and political struggles. Many organizations focus on building knowledge out of meaningful relationships of solidarity, something that has attracted me to this field, yet remains overshadowed by donors’ demands that other people change their behavior.
Example 1: Why Call It a Behavior?
What exactly is a behavior? And why use this term when it sounds so Pavlovian? To officials in one developing country being subjected to a “behavioral change” program to improve governance outcomes, the term behavior had a demeaning and colonial ring to it. As a colleague recounted, the behavioral scientists tasked with the program struggled for weeks with what to do about the problem until they finally asked my friend for advice. She had two questions:
“Did you ask them why they dislike the term?”
“No.”
“Did you learn if they had a different term that captured the same idea?”
“No.”
The ethical issue raised by this example is not just about the appropriateness of the term behavior, but about where knowledge production begins, who is included in the process, and how that knowledge is used. As Sylvia Tidey shows through her research on anti-corruption development programs in Indonesia, understanding the social relations and political dynamics of a local context not only enriches our understanding of how institutions are governed and how “corruption” reproduces itself, but it also potentially presents anti-corruption advocates with difficult questions about the ways they define, analyze, and interpret corruption.
Since most international programs are still devised from the top down, an approach based on mutual learning and revision may be time-consuming, costly, and difficult to measure, even if it is ultimately more efficacious and fit for purpose. Aside from cost and time, this approach also runs the risk of opening a two-way street in which recipients would have the power to call into question the strategy and thinking of donors (by way of a development organization). Despite calls to equalize, localize, and even decolonize the enterprise, this kind of proposal remains uncommon in mainstream international development.
Example 2: How Do You Measure Difference?
An anthropologist colleague had never been more embarrassed in their life than when, in a meeting with an NGO leader in the rural part of a developing country, their behavioral science colleague inquired whether drumming and dancing ceremonies he had read about in an anthropology article from the 1980s could help address the problem of gender discrimination and teen pregnancy. Not wanting to offend a prospective funder, the director of the organization graciously considered the idea before returning to the solutions and diagnosis outlined in her PowerPoint presentation. Where in the previous example not enough attention was paid to local context, in this example, the crude tools deployed by behavioral scientists to understand difference and generate a context become a point of ethical divergence.
As it turned out, underlying the behavioral scientist’s stereotypical and Orientalist questions about drumming was a belief that because the people he was encountering were not “Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic,” (WEIRD) he would need to recalibrate his approach. Recently, some behavioral scientists began to acknowledge the bias in their research by pointing to the fact that most of their experiments were conducted on American college students. Oddly, what emerged from that insight was the “WEIRD” concept, in which a dubious “might is right” neo-phrenological theory of cultural evolution was advanced as an explanation for contemporary uneven development. In some corners of international development, one encounters this new form of race science being incorporated into a range of appliedbehavioral science research.
Anthropology’s way of thinking about difference as not just a matter of hegemonic cultural inheritance, but more precisely as an open-ended set of political and ethical relations with others, offers the kinds of tools (though not necessarily the guarantees) to engage the different people one encounters in international development with respect and mutual recognition. For this reason, my colleague took the opportunity to quietly apologize to the NGO leader after the meeting concluded, since they knew that the behavior of their colleague potentially jeopardized the success of their project. In this way, what anthropology offers over behavioral science is not just a sense that context matters, but a more refined set of analytical tools and ethical considerations for knowing which contextual factors matter and why.
The Struggle for Just International Cooperation
At the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists contributed to incisive critiques against the enterprise of international development. They observed its ability to depoliticize social problems, its asymptotic aspirations, and its reproduction of recurrent patterns of geopolitical inequality. In many cases, they asked critical questions about the market and its translatability, and they encouraged their readers to imagine a globalization built on the foundation of just cooperation and epistemic humility. Though such ideas might seem distant in a world of hardening borders and rhetorical self-righteousness, I regularly meet anthropologists who carry those critiques into their work and return to them regularly for inspiration.
Our discipline has always been a critical observer of international development, even as we have also helped it along, and justified its misdeeds. As more of us enter this space as practitioners and researchers, we must not lose our critical stance under the mistaken belief that it is only suitable for the academy. Where strategic, anthropologists both in and outside of international development spaces should be more vocal about the issues we observe with behavioral science rather than keeping these concerns within professional whisper networks. As more scrutiny of behavioral science enters the public domain, an opportunity is presented to instigate these debates in the field of international development. This provocation, however, should not be misconstrued as a call for anthropology’s “relevance” to international development. It should be understood as an argument for a world where just cooperation and mutual respect across borders are prioritized by donors above behavioral change.