Readership Survey
“People in Canadian universities who engage in anti-poverty research and other anti-poverty activities must be celebrated and supported”
BY GERRY HELLEINER
Editor's note: The following is an abbreviated version of a talk presented at the “Making Poverty History: Doing More of What Works” symposium hosted on campus last week by president Alastair Summerlee. Gerry Helleiner of the Munk Centre for International Studies at Trinity College, University of Toronto, was one of a number of leading international experts and scholars who spoke at the conference.
I have spent a good deal of my professional and personal life trying to address the problem of poverty, both at home and abroad. Though the biblical text tells us the poor will always be with us, I believe that significant reduction of all forms of poverty and the outright elimination of deep material poverty are objectives that are not only possible but also morally and politically necessary. But attaining these objectives won't be easy. That material poverty exists — locally, nationally, globally — is an inescapable reality for all. How do those who are not themselves poor respond to the continuing existence of severe poverty at home or abroad?
To be truthful, even those of us who do care, even passionately, are a long way from spending every waking moment thinking about poverty. Other more immediate problems often seem more pressing. On the evidence of recent federal electoral campaigns, politicians and electorates don't seem to assign high priority to poverty, least of all poverty in developing countries. More negatively, there are those who are not indifferent to poverty but are ideologically or otherwise indisposed to trying to do much about it.
Some responses, although seemingly positive, may, in fact, be even more harmful than doing nothing at all. Those who know they have the answers sometimes want to spring into ill-informed and/or premature action. These know-it-alls are found in governments, aid and anti-poverty agencies, international institutions and private corporations, even NGOs. One of my former economics professors shocked his post-graduate students by observing that: “The biggest mistakes we have made have not been the result of our lack of knowledge. The biggest mistakes have more commonly been caused by the ‘knowledge' we already possessed, but knowledge which was incorrect.” (This wise prof later earned a Nobel Prize, but not for this observation.)
The most pernicious response of all may consist of lofty rhetoric undercut by actions that fail to accord with those lofty objectives. For example, a World Trade Organization development round proves to be nothing of the kind. Much-hailed legislation to help poor countries acquire cheap pharmaceutical products generates zero drug flows. Technical assistance provides jobs and incomes for rich consultants, but fails to respond to expressed needs. Rich countries' governments routinely pad their aid figures to make themselves appear more generous.
But it is also possible to respond in an appropriate manner. The key to appropriate response is careful listening, including asking the right questions. What do the intended beneficiaries really want? What constraints stand in the way of realizing their particular needs? What is the context for decision-making? What can and/or must be changed in that particular place? Such responses build relationships. As Jean Vanier famously observed: “Relationship is the essence of humanity.”
Do our systems and institutions generally encourage careful listening to the poorest and weakest? Of course not. Our institutional responses to poverty have been very weak, for two main reasons. In a global economy dominated by market forces and political power, the poorest have neither market nor political strength and therefore cannot hope to influence systemic behaviour very much. Second, even within the aid and anti-poverty movements, the purported beneficiaries have very limited power or even voice.
How do Canadian international aid and anti-poverty efforts stack up? Despite repeated recommendations from all-party parliamentary committees, other objectives continue to bedevil the international aid envelope. Iraq and Afghanistan — neither previously on any Canadian aid priority lists — have shot to the top of the list of countries receiving aid in the last couple of years. A serious anti-poverty effort requires the exact opposite: the building and preservation of an adequately funded and fully independent effort focused exclusively on poverty reduction. Other economic or political objectives should be met from other budgets. Worse, we have seen continued inappropriate and costly procurement tying. And co-operation with NGOs has been inappropriately scaled back.
I am not so naive or so nationalistic as to believe that Canada should or could lead in international aid performance and the attack on global poverty. But Canadian expertise and diplomacy have been underutilized in the development arena, evidently as a conscious political choice. As this conference and its participants demonstrate, there are plenty of people, both in Canada and elsewhere, who understand these issues and seek to address them. But at least in North America, they are evidently not now powerful in economic or political processes.
Interestingly, North American publics and eventually their political leaders do sometimes respond with remarkable bursts of charitable energy in response to natural disasters: tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Why are they not moved to respond to the much graver ongoing problems created, to some degree, by their own systems? Most of us at this conference know that twice as many people die unnecessarily in Africa and Asia every month from treatable AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and unsafe water as died in the Asian tsunami. Yet a commensurate response is nowhere near forthcoming.
What about our universities and colleges? President Alastair Summerlee has properly emphasized that our society needs people with knowledge, experience, openness and concern to address poverty. I agree that our institutions of higher learning should be working to produce more of them. And I agree that our colleges and universities have a potentially major role in the struggle against poverty.
Many students today are intensely interested in, and motivated to address, poverty issues. It simply isn't true that the current generation is too “cool” and inward-oriented to care. Many of the best and brightest are demonstrating a hunger for programs that permit them both to learn and to be useful in fighting global poverty. This is most obvious in the hot demand for undergraduate programs in development studies. More important, it is also evident in demands for more developmental and anti-poverty content in professional and post-graduate programs such as medicine, law, engineering and agriculture. Add in the multicultural character of Canada's student bodies, and these motivations and connections may also enable Canadians and Canadian universities to help attack global poverty.
Faculty members have often been leaders in research and teaching about poverty and ways of overcoming it, and in analyzing the constraints that our own policies and systems impose on the poor and vulnerable. Some have also managed to interact fruitfully with the relevant NGOs, governments and international institutions. Unfortunately, they have not always received great support in these endeavours from their own disciplines, faculties and broader university communities.
A study published last year by the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development found that faculty members are not typically encouraged to engage in development or anti-poverty activities. For prestige, promotion and tenure, theoretical pursuits usually carry more clout than applied and practical pursuits — much less such practical pursuits in far-off lands. Nor have interdisciplinary efforts, so often necessary in this arena, carried the weight they deserve relative to ascent within traditional disciplinary silos.
Young faculty members without tenure who engage in such activities usually do so at some peril to their university prospects. I need hardly add that universities have not always been typified by a culture of humility and listening. Demonstrating intellectual sophistication, sometimes accompanied by top-down arrogance, has been a more typical path to academic reward.
Realizing university potential in the struggle against poverty may require significant cultural changes within many, and perhaps most, of our universities. And these changes can come only from clear, vigorous support from the leaders of individual academic institutions and their faculties and departments. People in Canadian universities who engage in anti-poverty research and other anti-poverty activities must be celebrated and supported through post-graduate scholarships, fellowships, chairs and other forms of recognition.
Beyond our universities, this should be a much more general proposition. I believe Canadians are, on average, much more concerned than our political leaders and bureaucrats think. I suspect Canadians would take pride in anti-poverty activities and would perhaps contribute to and support them, if they knew more about them. Perhaps we need to work harder to find ways to recognize and honour those many who are working against both global and local poverty. Canadians or not, these are true heroes and heroines whose stories we need to hear more of and celebrate.
