Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (38 page)

Support for a capacity-building orientation at local levels is also clear from opinions now held inside Myanmar. One NGO worker interviewed several months after Cyclone Nargis said this: “Capacity building is important. INGOs should be used for their knowledge and resource persons. They have to give and share capacity. We need to know about project management, community development and emergency responses. We want to be taught how to fish, not to be given fish.”
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Another noted that external engagement is often not supportive. “Needs and interests are different with donors sometimes. Sharing information is ok but some groups just come through and collect information and take photos and don’t return.”
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Even for INGOs immersed in the local setting, apparently minor issues require focused attention, as is clear from this account of meetings convened by a large external agency: “They are held at a grand hotel. The participants of the women’s organisations are from the villages in remote areas. They are worried about their dress and footwear. They have to pay at least 2000–3000 kyats to get to the location of the hotel.”
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Another person captured the views of many local NGO workers: “We need donors to have a good knowledge of our reality. We don’t want to pretend with them. They must accept our reality and think about our capacity-building. Trust is really important. We want a donor to always be involved with us and working collaboratively. Good or bad, we have shared responsibility for our work. We want to develop proposals collectively and be flexible and open. It can be difficult to find donors like this.”
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Similar expectations of external engagement were visible in interviews conducted with ethnic leaders in mid-2009 mainly on the topic of national reconciliation. Although some doubted whether the international community could do much in Myanmar, others foresaw a positive contribution provided that outsiders “create more connections with domestic actors” and “more fully understand the situation and its complexity.”
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Again, capacity building was a key theme. As an older Bamar male INGO worker put it, “NGOs need to revive and re-strengthen thinking skills and open our eyes. Help us set goals. Don’t just distribute things and give charity, but also give knowledge and training.”
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In late 2009, CDA gathered similar testimony.
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These injunctions also link back to a remark made by Aung San Suu Kyi in 1994, when Myanmar’s civil society was in a much more desperate state and capacity building a far greater task: “It is not enough merely to provide the poor with material assistance. They have to be sufficiently empowered to change their perception of themselves as helpless and ineffectual in an uncaring world.”
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Here, the link with Duffield’s point about extending the frontiers of political space is explicit.

Moreover, if a domestic rebuilding program of this kind does advance, a supporting role for high-level consensual state engagement will eventually be triggered. Indeed, if Myanmar is to avoid the fight to the finish witnessed in Sri Lanka in 2009, key external powers will one day need to build on local change and reach out to government officials through multiparty talks designed to entrench grassroots progress. In small collaborative steps taken by UN agencies, INGOs and local NGOs to build civil society capacity and boost space for local action, they will find a platform for engaging political leaders. It is also important that they do so, for securing local progress through institutionalization is ultimately critical, with power-sharing mechanisms, third-party security guarantees and transitional justice to the fore.
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Once civil society reaches a point where these kinds of issues surface for attention, external powers thus become essential actors.

In the sphere of consensual engagement lies a potentially large and onerous agenda going far beyond current attempts to shape political development inside Myanmar. In no sense would implementation of these initiatives represent a minor incremental advance on current external action. Rather, it would constitute a step change in intervention. Led from the grassroots through civic action undertaken above all by UN agencies and INGOs, it would ultimately require a recasting of major power engagement. The aim would be to reset Myanmar’s political trajectory through local empowerment ultimately backed by systemic reform negotiated at the elite level.

Investing in reform

The external actors on whom imperfect duties of global justice most clearly fall, and who thereby bear the greatest responsibility for delivering on a substantive agenda of this kind, can be identified only in broad terms here. Far more detailed consideration is necessary to allocate actual duties with any precision. Nevertheless, some clear pointers exist and have already been sketched out. Focusing on special duties of historical injustice, some duties of repair may still be borne by the UK and Japan as former imperial powers. While many have been discharged, others may have lapsed and yet others were in a perverse sense discounted by Ne Win, the possibility that some remain live needs to be explored. Alongside them, large duties of rectification may have been incurred in recent years through a raft of western sanctions known to be ineffective and kept in place mainly for unscrupulous domestic reasons. They could trigger stringent negative duties to stop visiting harm on the Myanmar people and important positive duties of restitution. In addition, culpable Asian inaction in dealing with the Myanmar problem could be brought within the frame. Entailed under a separate heading are general duties of universal justice that are still more difficult to apportion, and best allocated through the UN.

Even this initial attempt to list potential duty-bearers clearly injects a considerable degree of unreality into the analysis. The chance that surviving imperial duties of repair will be computed is slim. The likelihood that sanctioning powers will accept that their policies are unjust is close to non-existent. The probability that damaging Asian engagement will ever be called to account is slight. The ability of an unreformed UN to take the lead in determining duties of universal justice is compromised.
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Nevertheless, if outsiders are one day prepared to consider the demands of justice in this case, such positive duties need to be examined. Furthermore, they do not automatically trigger direct engagement, but could rather be met through financing in-country programs implemented by others. In Tokyo in January 2002, the International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan assembled a multi-billion dollar fund.
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A parallel future initiative for Myanmar, perhaps also convened in Tokyo as part of a larger process of interactive intervention, might learn from it. Contributions could be gauged by evaluating special duties of historical injustice. External claims of interest in the country’s future development could be turned into vehicles for delivering on general duties of universal justice.

Certainly, though, in the two key substantive domains of mediation and capacity building identified here, it will be necessary for some foreign agents and agencies to play a constructive role inside Myanmar. How best to do that brings two large contemporary debates sharply into focus. One concerns aid agencies, both state and non-state, which are already working on this agenda. In recent years, vibrant analysis of the international aid business, currently worth about $10 billion annually, has posed major questions for this sector. The other concerns global corporations, which though not always viewed as positive political actors in the development literature are profiled that way through notions of corporate social responsibility, and the wider contribution of business to social change. While the two debates overlap at several points, they can be separated for analytical purposes.
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Controversy has surrounded the aid business for decades, but can perhaps be said to have found a true voice in 1997 in de Waal’s
Famine Crimes
, focused on the politics of disaster relief in Africa. The core argument made there was that “Western governments and donating publics are deluded into believing the fairy tale that their aid can solve profound political problems, when it cannot.”
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Indeed, de Waal’s position was especially radical, for he argued that “the ‘humanitarian international’—the transnational elite of relief workers, aid-dispensing civil servants, academics, journalists and others, and the institutions they work for” limits indigenous politics by weakening domestic accountability.
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As he put it, reaching across a border to deliver aid triggers “a leaching of power from those who suffer.”
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While outsiders can offer support, a lasting solution to development problems can come only through domestic political action. On this basis, he held that “most current humanitarian activity in Africa is useless or damaging and should be abandoned.”
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In
Dead Aid
, published in 2009, Dambisa Moyo reiterated the point.
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In the past decade many others have reinforced this critique. From inside the aid industry in 2002, Fiona Terry in
Condemned to Repeat?
held that all too frequently aid is delivered in blind ignorance of political context, and ends up feeding oppression rather than alleviating suffering.
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From outside in 2003, David Rieff in
A Bed for the Night
condemned the political naivety of much humanitarian engagement, and charted a descent into something close to modern-day colonialism.
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Looking at the development industry, William Easterly in
The Elusive Quest for Growth
and still more in
The White Man’s Burden
similarly argued that foreign action pays insufficient attention to local accountability and feedback.
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He maintained that the world’s poor do not benefit from aid, but rather become imprisoned in a trap formed by rich-country planners intent on imposing grand designs on impoverished nations. On this basis, he took aim at ambitious proposals found in Jeffrey D. Sachs’
The End of Poverty
, which marks out clear steps to the eradication of extreme poverty within 20 years, and in the aid work of global celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof.
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Beyond the revisionist critique, others also acknowledge the deficiencies of much past practice, the importance of promoting what Sen calls
Development as Freedom
, and the need to adopt evidence-based ways to help what Paul Collier terms
The Bottom Billion
.
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In this debate are found not only the main axes of quintessentially twentieth-century dispute between proponents of planning and champions of markets, but also the broad middle ground sketched by less combative and rhetorical economists. Easterly holds that “The right plan is to have no plan,” and against advocates of traditional ways (“planners”) promotes new agents for change (“searchers”). “Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.”
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However, in between two rather caricatured poles lies a vast range of potential activity that may or may not be productive depending on context and circumstance.

The task taken up by many is thus to document success and failure, and to determine how development agencies might learn from both. In a generous review of
The White Man’s Burden
championing “ground-level explorations of what is feasible,” Sen put it this way: “The challenge is to respond to the plight of the hopelessly impoverished without neglecting to insist that help come in useful and productive forms.”
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He agreed with Easterly that “the failure of many grand schemes results from their disregard for the complexity of institutions and incentive systems and their neglect of individual initiative, which must be societally encouraged rather than bureaucratically stifled.”
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At the same time, he wrote approvingly that Easterly is “moved by a rich vision of indigenous creativity that can flower in the absence of extraterritorial grand designs.”
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