Higher Education, Policy Schools, and ... - Semantic Scholar

von Hügel Institute Working Paper WP2002-12

Higher Education, Policy Schools, and Development Studies: What Should Masters Degree Students be Taught?

Michael Woolcock1 World Bank and Harvard University

This draft: September 13, 2002

Abstract As graduate degree programs in international development studies proliferate, it is important that attention be given to the distinctive skills and attributes asked of Masters students. Where undergraduate programs provide a general introduction to core issues, and doctoral programs prepare specialist researchers and teachers, the backgrounds and future career paths of Masters degree graduates are far less clearly defined. Moreover, the pedagogical styles and curriculum content of the policy schools where most development students receive their education—vis-àvis other professional schools, such as business, law, medicine, and the military—vary enormously, and lack the coherent external constituency of employers that requires and expects a (more) clearly-defined set of skills and behaviors (offering in exchange a more stable, identifiable, and lucrative career path). These factors create large asymmetric and incomplete information problems for prospective students, graduates, and employers. Given the diversity of their academic and cultural backgrounds, the inherent uncertainty of their career trajectories, the variety of country contexts and organizational environments in which they will be working, and the range of constituent groups with which they are likely to interact on a regular basis, I argue that Masters degree students in development studies need to acquire three core competencies—the skills of “detectives”, “translators”, and “diplomats”—no matter what their primary disciplinary orientation, regional background, or sectoral interests. 1

Development Research Group, The World Bank, and Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. The written version of the arguments in this paper was sparked (and sharpened) by conversations with my students (past and present) and colleagues (especially Xavier Briggs, Carol Finney, Lant Pritchett, Robert Putnam, and Dani Rodrik) at the Kennedy School of Government. Please send comments on, and any communications pertaining to, this paper to . The usual disclaimers apply. This paper is written from my somewhat unique perspective as someone simultaneously engaged in both the “supply” (teaching) of and “demand” for (i.e., potential employer of) policy-oriented Masters degree students in development.

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Irrespective of the empirical accuracy or intellectual coherence of the recent wave of antiglobalization protests, they surely demonstrate in public what many academics on campus have known for some time, namely that students in the 21st century care deeply about issues pertaining to poverty, inequality, and foreign aid—certainly more than their counterparts of the previous two decades. Moreover, as an item of public concern, the idea of development is currently enjoying something of a renaissance, fueled by a renewed focus by the international community on poverty reduction and the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals, and greater humanitarian and geo-political pressures (especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks) to respond more directly to civil wars, famines, financial crises, and pandemic diseases in “failed states”. Even if there is little consensus about what exactly needs to be done, how, by whom, and in what order, among students at least there seems to be an encouraging sense of renewed commitment to wrestling with these vital (if vexing) concerns. In any event, many universities have responded to this growing interest by offering a suite of new undergraduate and graduate programs in international development studies. These programs and corresponding research centers are relatively cheap to supply and promote, since—unlike their counterparts in the physical and natural sciences—they typically require little new infrastructure other than a handful of staff, and can serve as a useful organizational umbrella under which to bring together scholars (and sometimes practitioners) from a range of disciplines and area concentrations. In this age of integration and specialization, it is not hard to see why administrators, parents, sponsors, and prospective students are attracted to such programs. New and upgraded international development courses of study have been launched at all levels, but the focus of this article is on the particular situation facing Masters degree programs. Though not without their own sets of important issues, those managing undergraduate and/or doctoral students in development studies—i.e., BAs and PhDs—typically have a much clearer sense of their mission and the means needed to realize it. In essence, undergraduates need a broad introduction to the central issues and debates, and have little expectation that they are being prepared to assume any immediate high-level professional responsibilities. They are usually taught in and through orthodox departmental structures, the rubric of a major in “development studies” providing a commendable (and convenient) opportunity for students to integrate course offerings in the social sciences, natural sciences (e.g., environmental studies), and humanities (e.g., history, foreign languages). For their part, doctoral students are enduring

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the long rite of passage associated with entry to membership in the research and teaching club of their chosen academic discipline, where their “practical” contributions to development will be largely limited to those relatively infrequent occasions on which their narrow expertise is called upon to resolve a particular technical concern (e.g., as a “consultant” on an AIDS awareness project). If PhDs do not take the academic route, it is usually to the research unit of a specific government unit, non-profit organization, or international agency, or if completed as a matureage student with many years of prior work experience, to a senior post in the profession from whence they came. Those with Masters degrees, however, do the bulk of the development planning, managing, and implementation activity around the world. Graduating in their late twenties and early thirties, and usually single, they can be expected to travel to countries all over the world and to take up any number of entry-level (and beyond) professional jobs, many of which are inherently unspecified and difficult (even dangerous); they will be responsible for helping make, manage, and enforce decisions that are likely to have a significant impact on the welfare of the poor. As such, it is worth reflecting for a moment on how the plethora of new Masters degree programs in international development (see Appendix 1 for a selection of the most prominent among them) might best prepare this particular group of students. In the current global climate, what should Masters degree students be taught? What should employers reasonably expect them to be able to “do”? This paper attempts to answer these questions in two parts. The first seeks to locate “development studies” within the broader pedagogical landscape of professional schools in contemporary higher education. Usually taught in a graduate school of public policy, government, or administration, the content of international development programs, I will argue, needs to be explicitly attuned to (a) the distinctive educational environment in which it is located, vis-à-vis graduate schools of business and law, medicine and the military, and arts and science; (b) the enormous diversity of employment options and career trajectories (most of which are difficult to predict ex ante) that graduates face; and (c) the heterogeneity of their students’ academic, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The second part builds on the first to argue that, irrespective of a student’s disciplinary orientation, regional background, or sectoral interests, three distinctive core competencies will be expected of him/her in the early years following graduation. I call these competencies the skills of the “detective” (finding, generating,

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analyzing, and interpreting information, especially where prevailing forms are either nonexistent or inadequate), the “translator” (mediating a dialogue between very different constituencies—policymakers, managers, field staff, villagers, local officials, academics, donors), and the “diplomat” (brokering differences, doing deals, and upholding good-faith agreements, since even, or especially, when it succeeds, development necessarily generates conflict).

I. Policy Schools and the Pedagogical Landscape of Higher Education Graduate studies in public policy generally, and “development” in particular, occupies a somewhat unusual position in higher education. Apart from being a relatively recent arrival on campus, policy programs must constantly strive to maintain a difficult balance between being simultaneously the “applied” branch of serious social science theory and empirical research, and a place where senior government officials and international bureaucrats can spend some extended time reflecting more systematically on their experiences. Both groups—the practical “thinkers” and reflective “doers”—moreover, must strive to maintain cordial professional relations with their peers in, respectively, mainstream academic departments and the public/private/nonprofit sector. Similar tensions doubtless characterize faculty life in schools of medicine, public health, business, theology, and education, but in each of these sectors (a) the school in question is largely recognized as the place from where the leading ideas on the subject emanate (or are at least adjudicated), (b) the thinkers and doers are very often one and the same group, and (c) graduation from these schools is usually an essential pre-requisite to professional careers in that field. In public policy, by contrast, a vast assortment of individuals from think tanks, private foundations, consulting firms, religious groups, and academic departments clamor to gain control of the hearts and minds of key policymakers; moreover, one does not have to have a public policy degree to be either a public official or to teach in a policy school. (Indeed, a senior public official, international bureaucrat, or professor who does actually possess a policy degree is the exception rather than the rule.) Some of the key differences between the educational features of policy schools and their academic neighbors are outlined in Table 1. For reasons of parsimony (and elective pedagogical affinity) I group law and business schools together, as well as medical and military schools; given that most policy school faculty and students were trained by, and have many of their

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closest colleagues in, mainstream academic departments (e.g., economics, political science), I also list the features of graduate schools of arts and science. A quick review of nineteen variables as they pertain to business/law school (hereafter BL), medical/military school (hereafter MM), graduate school of arts and science (hereafter AS), and public policy school (hereafter PP) shows that those teaching and managing international development programs in policy schools need to address some rather distinctive issues. [Table 1 about here] Consider, for example, how and where graduates of these different programs get their first job, and the corresponding level of responsibility, remuneration, and job security they will likely be offered. In BL school, employers (most emanating from the private sector) court the students, offering them well-paid fixed-term contract jobs (often including a sign-on bonus) with moderate levels of responsibility. In MM school, prospective graduates enter their employment preferences into a centrally coordinated system, which duly assigns them to a post, whereupon they will assume relatively high-level responsibilities (life and death decisions pertaining to patients or citizens/colleagues) for which they will be paid modestly but effectively guaranteed lifetime employment. Those graduating with a Masters degree from AS school usually continue on for a PhD, or seek a job with a limited range of employers associated with their discipline. Graduates of PP school, however, almost uniformly find themselves courting a range of employers from the public, private, nonprofit, and international agency sector, who will at best offer them a modest salary, relatively low-level responsibilities, and little long-term job security. As PP students receive their degree on graduation day, it is almost impossible for them—unlike their peers in BL or MM, or those going on for a PhD in AS—to anticipate what their career trajectory will look like. Those embarking on a career in development studies face a number of other unique challenges. Graduates from medical and law school (not to mention engineering, theology, dentistry and social work school) are receiving Masters degrees that provide necessary professional certification (and with it conferred membership in a high-status profession), and expect that this degree is the highest one that they will need to reach a senior position. Policy school graduates, by contrast, are admitted to no professional group, and soon discover that (a) many senior policy professionals do not have a policy degree, and (b) even if they do have one, it

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is not their highest degree—certainly this is true in core central government ministries such as finance, education, and health, where PhDs and MDs occupy the top slots. Given that these ministries are precisely those most closely associated with development, and that the senior-most members of the various international agencies that manage development are also PhDs, the ambitious policy graduate in international development studies soon realizes that their education is not over, and/or that without further study they are likely bound for a career that will peak in a middle-management position. Faculty teaching development studies in a policy school environment experience their own set of distinctive concerns (in addition to those outlined above regarding their relations with their external colleagues). Their students, for example, while broadly familiar with the social sciences, come from a great variety of disciplinary and vocational backgrounds, having achieved few formal common prerequisites, especially in terms of quantitative skills. While this need not necessarily undermine program coherence or its intellectual “rigor”, it does mean that individual courses often must begin from a broad base, but then accelerate very quickly. Given that students in development necessarily come from all corners of the globe, with varying degrees of fluency in English and expectations regarding the nature of the student-faculty relationship (e.g., friendly and informal versus deferential and structured), this inevitably means that it is difficult to ensure that everyone remains on board. In short, faculty and their assistants in PP school have to work additionally hard to help students master both breadth and depth under what for many of the students will be a new educational philosophy. Even when students are well versed in quantitative skills, this need not mean they are equally able in terms of persuasively and cogently expressing complex ideas orally or in writing, or of working well with others (e.g., on group projects), all three of which are vital skills for the future policy professional. To be sure, these skills matter in other professional domains as well, but they are especially important in development, where so many of the decisions required to deliver the services so vital to the well-being of the poor cannot be resolved by (or reduced to) better technocratic “policies” or standardized bureaucratic “programs” (Pritchett and Woolcock, 2002). That is, the successful delivery of key services such as schooling and agricultural extension nearly always require literally thousands of idiosyncratic highly discretionary face-toface transactions by people from many different walks of life, but students whose confidence stems from, and identity is solidly grounded in, quantitative (i.e., technocratic) skills alone risk

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becoming part of the problem rather than the solution if they cannot grasp this. Why? Because a good measure of the repeated failure of the “aid industry” over its fifty-year history has been its enormously strong organizational imperatives and institutional incentives to frame all development problems in terms that are amenable to the logic and techniques of technocrats and bureaucrats, of which quantitative skills are a central component. Faculty are thus required to manage a difficult tension between seeing quantitative expertise as both a very necessary but very insufficient component of the development professional’s skill portfolio. A related issue concerns the differences across professional schools regarding the incentives to deliver high-quality classroom teaching and to mentor individual students. Faculty in graduate programs of Arts and Sciences are notorious for being indifferent to their classroom efforts, though they face reasonably strong incentives to attract, train, and retain talented individual students, many of whom will be colleagues in the long term, and valued research assistants in the short term. In medical school, faculty consistently report that obtaining large grants is all that their superiors really care about, though of course working closely with talented individual students brings some intrinsic rewards. As in military school, however, MM faculty responsible for practical instruction (brain surgery, combat strategy) to small groups of students presumably have an abiding interest in ensuring that at least a minimum level of competence is obtained, lest genuine tragedy ensue on their watch. Importantly, none of these factors holds in the case of BL and PP school: faculty will only be involved with students for a few years; most will go on to pursue careers very different to those of the faculty; and only a handful of students will be willing or able to contribute to research projects. To counter this, and because the high-profile annual “rankings” of BL schools are so crucial in terms of establishing status and profile, BL faculty (certainly in the leading business schools) are given sizeable incentives to excel in the classroom; weak teachers simply are not tolerated. Classroom teaching is taken seriously in PP school too—certainly much more so than in AS—but not as much as it is in business school, and standards vary considerably (perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the challenges outlined above). In any event, whether because of material incentives, the nature of students’ career paths, the life-or-death nature of the skills being imparted, or the relatively short time they spend together, PP faculty as a group have only a moderate interest in truly excelling in the classroom and few reasons (other

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than upholding adherence to their professional norms) to seriously invest in the mentoring of individual students. The combined impact of all these issues is that potential and actual employers face a broad array of graduating students armed with a (necessarily) broad array of skills from a broad array of international development programs: it is little wonder, then, that there is at present a huge incomplete and asymmetric information problem, with employers unsure as to what type of skills they are getting, and students unsure about how to present the skills they do have, or who is likely to be most receptive to them. Some programs have attempted to address this concern by providing students with a more focused course of study (e.g., in economics), but at the Masters degree level this may only serve to put graduates in competition with those with PhDs (as opposed to those with Masters degrees from rival programs). While it is clearly the task of senior administrators to assess the comparative advantage of their faculty and institution, and to design and promote their program accordingly, a category of professional programs whose curriculums are largely idiosyncratic and supply-driven, but who fail to strike the right balance between depth and breadth, are unlikely to have enduring credibility with those employers—international development agencies, national planning authorities, non-governments organizations, and the private sector—they hope will hire their graduates.

II. What Should Masters Degree Students in Development Studies Be Taught? Faculty, students, and employers associated with graduate schools of public policy, then, face a unique set of challenges and constraints, which are only amplified in the case of Masters degree programs in international development. Given the issues that I have outlined above, I argue that specific attention needs to be given to working on cultivating a common set of skills that essentially all Masters degree graduates in development will need, especially in the early years of their career. The great heterogeneity and unpredictable nature of their career trajectory means that additional emphasis needs to be given to the particular skills of these early years; where MBAs are largely taught “how to be a CEO” even though they may be a decade away from actually attaining such a position2, those doing policy degrees have a far more disparate range of career destinations, precise preparation for which cannot be taught to everyone in graduate school.

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I argue that three core competencies—the skills and dispositions of “detectives”, “translators”, and “diplomats”—characterize the common set of activities that Masters degree graduates (as opposed to graduates with bachelors or doctoral degrees) in development studies are most likely to be engaged in, both immediately after graduation and the foreseeable future thereafter. These skills and dispositions are needed irrespective of the student’s disciplinary orientation, regional background, or sectoral interests. Before making the case for each of these core competencies in greater detail, however, a couple of other comments pertaining to the particular characteristics of contemporary international development education are in order. First, there is little doubt that, for better or worse, economics is the lingua franca of international development. As such, it is only proper that students acquire a solid grounding in its methods, assumptions, and discourse, the better to engage with leading academics, senior officials, and public commentators, and to more accurately identify its shortcomings, basing critiques not on hearsay or crude stereotypes but first-hand knowledge. Having said that, it is vital that students appreciate that development is not a single (if highly complex) technical problem awaiting a solution from a lone genius or a single discipline: no, development is necessarily a multi-dimensional problem, and thus will require multi-dimensional solutions (plural). Of course, most contemporary Masters programs in development trumpet their “interdisciplinary”3 approach, but as Smelser (1997) correctly points out, interdisciplinary teaching and research remains the most called for but least rewarded feature of academic life, largely because faculty remain trained and socialized into single disciplines, and are evaluated and rewarded by those disciplines’ senior members. Students thus find themselves caught in the tension between their need and desire for a capacity to work across disciplinary lines, but a faculty who themselves are largely predisposed to remaining safely within them. One possible solution to this conundrum is to allow students to receive an initial grounding in the theories and methods of individual disciplines, but to have their assessment geared to their capacity to apply and integrate different approaches to solving concrete policy problems (cf. Kanbur, 2002). Disciplinary divisions, however, are but one of the many fault lines in development, and I discuss below how integration skills in general might be conducted more systematically and effectively. 2

Thanks to Lant Pritchett for this observation.

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Second, an enduring feature of working in developing countries (or, for that matter, on development issues more generally) is paucity of quality—or sometimes any—data. Whether because of lack of financial or human resources, most of the data needed to make informed decisions about the viability or impact of development projects and policies, especially below the national level, are simply not available. Students armed with only a narrow arsenal of data analysis tools, even (or especially) highly sophisticated ones, are going to be less than fully equipped to handle situations where they will be routinely required to work with fragmented, dated, and flawed data originally collected for other purposes, to design new instruments from scratch, and/or to coordinate in-country teams who may only have their local knowledge of people and places to offer. Knowing when and how to incorporate qualitative approaches to data collection and analysis is thus a crucial skill of development practitioners (Rao and Woolcock, 2002). Third, though there remain strong incentives against it (Pritchett, 2002), it is highly likely that the coming years will see an increased emphasis on policy and program evaluation. As the development community moves slowly and painfully from a world where accountability for impact attained trumps dollars dispersed, the need for evaluation skills at all stages of the project cycle will increase dramatically. “Evaluation” is clearly an exercise requiring a range of technical skills, but it is also a necessarily political act (Weiss, 1997), bringing researchers and their findings into a domain where strength of evidence alone does not always carry the day. Though it may be difficult to prepare students to negotiate such moments, in this sense evaluation is but a subset of the entire development process of “giving and receiving” (Klitgaard, 1990), one in which (potentially very) diverse interests, epistemologies, and objectives must be repeatedly reconciled if successful exchange is to take place, and to be mutually understood as such. Development cooperation, in short, is not just a technocratic problem that can be solved (and the efficacy of those “solutions” determined) by more “smart people”: it is inherently a social and political act, requiring correspondingly savvy negotiators on both sides who know how to create and maintain environments in which meaningful negotiation is possible.

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Some programs prefer the more neutral term “multi-disciplinary”, but this implies that students are merely exposed to different “perspectives” rather than actively encouraged to put the pieces (back) together.

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To these ends, the three “core competencies” of Masters-level development professionals can now be spelled out in further detail. These skills and dispositions can be summarized as those of “detectives”, “translators”, and “diplomats”.

1. “Detectives.” Development can be usefully understood as a series of messy, elusive, and complex mysteries, with suspects, evidence, and witnesses of varying quality.4 How does one discern the reliable and the high quality from rival forms? In situations where evidence is necessarily piecemeal, scattered, and imperfect, how does one work with what one has to build (or dismiss) a plausible case? Econometrics provide one set of tools for the development detective, but the cutting edge (and truly rigorous) detective should have a variety of tools and techniques at her disposal, and most especially a flair for combining them as needed. Even if she does not possess the full arsenal herself, the good detective should at least know (a) the limits of the skills she does have, (b) what she needs to know if she is to improve the strength of her case, and (c) whom to turn to for those skills she lacks. A good detective is a data entrepreneur, able to make connections across disparate sources and forms of evidence to build or refute a case (cf. Mills, 1959). Such skills are central to establishing not only informed views about large development processes such as “globalization”, but also whether everyday activities in the field are having their desired impact. Is what I am doing as a practitioner making a difference? How do I know? How would I know if I was wrong? How do I distinguish between the effects my project is having and the impact of other events happening simultaneously? How do I go about assembling the data (qualitative and quantitative) I need to answer these questions? In many respects program evaluation is just a practical application of standard econometric techniques, but good practitioners know that, for want of adequate budgetary, technical, and administrative resources, good formal data is often (if not usually) unavailable, and that even when it is it may provide only partial information. What to do? Practitioners rigorously trained in diverse research/evaluation methods will be able to discern an innovative and fruitful way forward. Properly taught, such a course of study would help students acquire not only basic and broad analytical skills for applied development

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This is the essence of the scientific method; it is also one of the reasons Jared Diamond’s (1998) Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book on economic history, was (a) so popular and acclaimed, and (b) able to be written by a physiologist.

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concerns—how to design a survey, do a poverty analysis, conduct a community focus group, think systematically about “cases”, integrate different forms of data, etc.—but a confident sense of when and how to incorporate complementary analytical tools in the face of a given empirical policy/project problem.5 For those programs that include summer internships as part of their curriculum, such a course could provide a solid foundation for the types of activities they will be doing during this period; it also prepares them for their final research or policy analysis paper, and the type of work they will most likely be doing after graduation. Those with Masters degrees in development are unlikely to have their first job in the ministry of finance measuring the impact of inflation or import taxes on economic growth; it is far more likely that they will work for a medium-sized NGO, or regional government department, or consulting firm, and be sent to the field to monitor (perhaps even supervise) a small, new project with an expectation that they write a progress report documenting its impact. The development detective will be well placed to respond to that challenge.

2. “Translators.” One of the key tasks in any field, but especially development, is finding ways and means to connect various agents and agencies of expertise (Woolcock, forthcoming). We are all too familiar with the fact that ideas and discoveries generated in one field (agriculture in Albania, public health in Pakistan, education in Ecuador) have a hard time making headway in others, and vice versa. There are many reasons for these diffusion inefficiencies (see Rogers, 1997), of course, but an important one is that any given field has a “language” and set of working assumptions that are often incommensurate with (or at least not readily understood by) those in another. Where some hope for the day when a unified scientific theory will provide such a language (cf. Wilson, 1999), at least among intellectuals, the fact that “development” spans a wide variety of cultures, contexts, disciplines, and vocations surely means that it is vital to find more effective ways of connecting meaningfully across these different realms. One step in this direction is to explicitly train the category of development professionals most likely to engage in such “translation” activities, namely young Masters graduates. Though not necessarily specialists in any one field of endeavor (certainly at the beginning of their career), Masters degree graduates can perform an invaluable service as “translators”, communicating the results and implications of academic research to policymakers (and their 5

An excellent interdisciplinary book on these issues is Gerring (2001).

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fellow practitioners). As empirical research itself shows (e.g., Burt, 1992; 1997), those individuals who can mediate across boundaries (in any field of endeavor) are the most valued.6 Moreover, in their role as advocates (for, say, funding for AIDS or debt reduction), it is absolutely vital that practitioners be able to build broad political support by knowing how to communicate with the general public and policymakers. Unlike scholars, who communicate primarily with their peers, practitioners find themselves at the interface of many different worlds—academia, donors, governments, multi-lateral agencies, activists, NGOs—and thus need to be able to operate in (what might be called) multiple communicative modalities. A crucial constituency for young field-based Masters graduates in development is likely to be the poor themselves; indeed, these graduates may be the only immediate link the poor have to those in power, and/or the only channel through which they receive information regarding policy changes, new programs, or the latest scientific findings. If something other than the lowest common denominator is to characterize the uneasy relationships within and between these different worlds, it is absolutely essential that those who routinely find themselves in many places in these worlds know how to navigate their way around and across them. Developing the skills of the “translator” and the capacity to communicate in different modalities—e.g., to academics (including those from different disciplines), general audiences, senior policymakers, those who are illiterate—does not necessarily require a high level of expertise in any of them; rather, it requires an ability to express similar ideas in different ways for different audiences. One relatively simple way that all policy school faculty can best prepare their students for this is by requiring students to present written and oral work for different audiences as part of their course assessment. Leading policy school faculty themselves do this routinely as part of their professional activities—e.g., on a given topic write papers for high-end academic journals, op-ed pieces for major newspapers, and general articles for popular policy magazines—and it is a practice that can and should be cultivated in the rising generation. In the case of debt relief, for example, students could be asked to review the empirical evidence for a development journal, then later in the semester prepare a corresponding piece for a generalinterest magazine (say, The Economist), then conclude the course by preparing (a) a grant proposal for submission to a foundation to examine the likely impact of debt relief in a particular

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For a related argument and empirical evidence as it pertains to the poor, see Fafchamps and Minten (2002) and Isham (2002).

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country, or (b) an information booklet on debt relief for high school students, or (c) a policy briefing note on debt relief for cabinet members in poor country X preparing to meet an IMF delegation. Engaging in this range of communicative tasks is precisely what most Masters graduates in development studies will spend large amounts of their time doing at the beginning of (and likely throughout) their careers.

3. “Diplomats.” A willingness and ability to work across different organizational, epistemological, and communicative boundaries is central for young development professionals, but so too is the capacity to negotiate, because not only will they often be neutral (if strategic) bearers of “the message”, they will be senders and receivers of it as well. An appropriate metaphor here is diplomacy; while popularly construed to mean being merely accommodating or tactful, in reality diplomacy is a high-stakes negotiation between parties with legitimate differences conducted by professionals who understand the others’ interests and aspirations. There are inevitably setbacks, delays, disappointments, and continued disagreements, but at best there is also real progress that both sides can own (cf. Fisher and Ury, 1992). Skilled diplomacy entails, among other things, upholding clear professional standards of dialogue and conduct, detailed knowledge of and respect for ‘the other’ (i.e., making a serious effort to understood their position), and an ability to communicate persuasively and clearly to diverse audiences, the better to clarify expectations, build public support, mobilize resources, overcome resistance, and pacify critics, knowing that any final agreement worthy of the name must be one that all parties can abide by and be held accountable for enforcing. Reducing poverty and disease in not only a technocratic exercise awaiting new and better ideas from smart individuals; it is also a highly political one requiring skilled team players and negotiators who are willing and able to do together what they know cannot be done alone. Because the very process of development cooperation—loans, grants, aid (food, medicines), and technical assistance to help spur “development” in poor countries—is in the end a social transaction, it is only likely to succeed if agreements are designed, negotiated, implemented, and enforced by people who all have some degree of discretion regarding the tone and terms of that transaction.7 Washington bureaucrats with little knowledge of the country can

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I leave aside larger questions regarding the relative efficacy of particular instruments of development cooperation (e.g., structural adjustment loans, family planning programs, agricultural extension).

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deliver it as a non-negotiable and standardized package; it can be imposed on poor villagers who see little need to use or maintain it; it can consolidate the rule of questionable leaders; it can grossly distort local incentives to produce food; it can overwhelm rather than nurture public service bureaucracies. Or it can be the opposite of all these things. Which it will be is largely a function of the overriding incentives that participants face (Easterly, 2001), but also the time and effort that both sides of the agreement are willing and able to put in to make effective, credible, mutually beneficial negotiations possible. Diplomacy is the procedure of choice for solving most of the world’s major differences, conflicts, and political problems; the spirit of that approach should be more prevalent in managing development cooperation, and in the training that young development professionals receive. This is so because succeeding (as well as failing) at development means changing existing power relations in society, which means generating conflict. In this sense, the entire process of development is largely one of successfully managing the conflicts that rising prosperity engenders (Bates, 2000). Successfully doing so is largely a matter of creating and sustaining an appropriate set of dynamic democratic institutions, but these issues are equally salient on a day-to-day basis, and are ones that young development professionals can expect to routinely encounter. As students, they can be prepared for this in part through taking orthodox management courses in negotiation and conflict resolution, but unless such courses are exceptionally well taught (as they sometimes are, by seasoned worldly negotiators) they can struggle to replicate the seriousness of the stakes, the complexity of the issues, and the diversity of the available strategies. Students readily (and often correctly) perceive abstract academic courses on the practicalities of negotiation to be “merely theoretical” and thus of secondary importance. While not at all denying that effective negotiation skills per se can be taught and learned in a university setting, an alternative approach is to make a virtue of “theory” by pushing the fundamental basis of negotiation back to its philosophical foundations. That is, “diplomats” need not only hard-won practical skills, but also knowledge of how different groups are guided in their thoughts and actions by different epistemologies (or, coherent ways of understanding how the world works, or should work) and ontologies (or, capacities to assign different properties and status to otherwise similar objects and concepts, and the relationships between them). These otherwise highly esoteric and philosophical words are actually of enormous practical importance,

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because they help to locate the fundamental sources of difference and disagreement among development’s various constituencies, and, perhaps most importantly, encourage students to think critically about the very idea of “development” (cf. Escobar, 1995). Understanding the basics of epistemology and ontology would help potential development “diplomats”—even, or especially, the practitioners on the front lines—to properly contextualize knowledge claims in general (e.g., the status assigned to male children; the merits of market competition versus regulation), and development knowledge claims in particular (e.g., why diseases spread, why crops fail). Religious versus scientific cosmologies are the most common examples of different epistemologies at work, but even within a narrower range or nominally similar category of understanding, explosive tensions may remain. Perhaps the most contemporary manifestation of this is the vocal and even violent disagreements surrounding “globalization”: these are a product less of ignorance or indifference on one side or the other, or because it encourages a “clash of civilizations”, but rather because the more integrated and more rapid flow of money, goods, people, and ideas forces fundamentally different epistemologies of how the world works and ought to work to regularly confront one another8. Unless and until students appreciate that by becoming a “development professional” they are effectively buying into a particular way of understanding why there is poverty in the world and what should be done to rectify it, they will not truly be able to forge partnerships with those who see these things very differently. Helping different parties to come to at least a shared, common ontological understanding of (and commitment to) what “development” in a particular context will look like—lower infant mortality rate, cleaner water, smoother roads, better schools, greater equality—is a first important step on the road to discerning how these goals might actually be achieved. Importantly, cultivating a shared ontological understanding of particular development goals does not mean that participants have to share a common world-view (or epistemology), but they do need to be reflexively self-conscious of their own assumptions and predispositions, the better to accommodate those of others. Development “diplomats”, then, need both concrete negotiation skills (however acquired) coupled with, and grounded in, an abiding awareness of how and why different people make sense of the world in the way they do. Merely exposing students to

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different “perspectives”, or hoping that they will implicitly “add context and stir” when asked to divine specific policy advice for a specific country on the basis of data fed into a formal abstract model, does not accomplish this deeper intellectual task.

III. Summary and Conclusion Public policy degrees in general, and masters programs in international development studies in particular, occupy a unique but unorthodox place on the higher educational map. Unlike their counterparts in other professional schools, or in either undergraduate or PhD programs, Masters degree students in international development programs are highly diverse in terms of their academic and cultural backgrounds, and graduate onto uncertain career paths, assuming first jobs with modest degrees of responsibility and security. Their degree may not be a sufficient qualification for them to reach the highest realms of their profession, especially if they are interested in the activities of core government ministries or large international development agencies. Students will be taught by faculty who may or may not have a policy degree or direct policymaking or project experience, and who at best have modest incentives to mentor them, given the short period of time they are on campus and that a given student’s career path is unlikely to resemble their own. Though students, parents, faculty, administrators and employers have an abiding interest in “professionalizing” development—that is, construing it as a problem amenable to analysis and resolution via the deployment of sophisticated theories, methods, and techniques—large and significant parts belie such an approach, requiring instead collaboration across vastly different agents and agencies of expertise (much of which cannot be codified). Even in those areas where it is entirely necessary and appropriate, the data development professionals need is inevitably partial and imperfect, and frequently unavailable in any form. If “development” is “successful” in the short run, in the long run it inevitably creates its own set of problems, most notably the management of political conflict and social change. Given these particular challenges and constraints, employers can be excused for being somewhat bemused by the range of program offerings and correspondingly varied skills sets

8

Joseph Stiglitz, for example, can simultaneously be the holder of a Noble Prize in economics and a leading voice of dissent regarding how his erstwhile colleagues at the IMF and the US Treasury have managed the development process generally, and international financial crises in particular (see Stiglitz, 2002).

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being offered. While each program naturally needs to identify and exploit the comparative advantage of its faculty, institution, and location, all should be attempting to educate graduates who can evaluate programs and ideas, integrate different perspectives, and communicate to (and negotiate between) diverse audiences. Graduates who can do these things will maximize both their employment prospects (short and long term) and their positive impact on issues they clearly care so deeply about. In short, development needs more and better detectives, translators, and diplomats; the skills of all three are eminently practical tasks, and training practitioners capable of performing them at the highest level should be goal of the world’s leading programs in international development.

References Bates, Robert (2000) Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development New York: Norton Burt, Ronald (1992) Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Burt, Ronald (1997) “The contingent value of social capital” Administrative Science Quarterly 42: 339-65 Diamond, Jarred (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies New York: Norton Easterly, William (2001) The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Escobar, Arturo (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Fafchamps, Marcel and Bart Minton (2002) “Returns to social network capital among traders” Oxford Economic Papers 54: 173-206 Fisher, Roger and William Ury (1992) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (2nd ed.) New York: Viking Penguin

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Gerring, John (2001) Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework New York: Cambridge University Press Isham, Jonathan (2002) “The effect of social capital on fertilizer adoption: evidence from rural Tanzania” Journal of African Economies 11(1): 39-60 Kanbur, Ravi (2002) “Economics, social science, and development” World Development 30(3): 477-86 Kligaard, Robert (1990) Tropical Gangsters: One Man’s Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa New York: Basic Books Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination New York: Oxford University Press Pritchett, Lant (2002) “It pays to be ignorant: a simple political economy of program evaluation” Harvard University: Kennedy School of Government, mimeo. Pritchett, Lant and Michael Woolcock (2002) “Solutions when the solution is the problem: arraying the disarray in development” Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, Working Paper No. 10 Rao, Vijayendra and Michael Woolcock (2002) “Integrating qualitative and quantitative approaches in program evaluation”, in Francois J. Bourguignon and Luiz Pereira Da Silva (eds.) Evaluating the Impact of Policies and Programs on Poverty (Washington, DC: The World Bank, forthcoming) Rogers, Everett (1997) Diffusion of Innovations (4th ed.) New York: Free Press Smelser, Neil (1997) “The interdisciplinary enterprise” ASA Footnotes Stiglitz, Joseph (2002) Globalization and its Discontents New York: Norton Weiss, Carol (1997) Evaluation (2nd ed.) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Wilson, E.O. (1999) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge New York: Random House Woolcock, Michael (forthcoming) Using Social Capital: Getting the Social Relations Right in the Theory and Practice of Economic Development Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

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Appendix 1: Websites for some of the leading Masters programs in international development studies (correct as of date of submission). Not all of these programs have a direct policy focus, but are listed for the sake of completeness. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

American University, http://www.american.edu/sis/academics/grad/degrees/maid.htm Australian National University, http://ncdsnet.anu.edu.au/course/econdev.htm and http://ncdsnet.anu.edu.au/course/devadm.htm For other Australian universities, see http://devnet.anu.edu.au/courses.html Bath, http://www.bath.ac.uk/econ-dev/postgraduate.htm#id Bradford, http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/dppc/postgrad.html Brandeis, http://www.heller.brandeis.edu/sid/degree/sid_home.asp Brown, http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/DevStudies/grad/index.html Cambridge, http://www.devstudies.cam.ac.uk/ Clark, http://www.clarku.edu/departments/idce/degree/idma/index.shtml Columbia (SIPA), http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/MIA/index.html Cornell, http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/grad/fields_1/int-dev.html Delhi School of Economics, http://www.econdse.org/ East Anglia, http://www.uea.ac.uk/dev/postgrad/made.shtml and http://www.uea.ac.uk/dev/postgrad/mads.shtml Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, http://www.iss.nl/mscdevecon Jawaharlal University, http://www.jnu.ac.in/sis/csdile.htm Johns Hopkins (SAIS), http://www.sais-jhu.edu/admissions/docs/maadm01.html LSE, http://www.lse.ac.uk/graduate/courses/msc_development_studies.htm Manchester, http://les1.man.ac.uk/ses/pg/mscdev.htm and http://les1.man.ac.uk/sociology/pg/devdegree.htm#MA Nagoya, Japan, http://www.gsid.nagoya-u.ac.jp/index-en.html Natal, South Africa, http://www.und.ac.za/und/cadds/development_studies.htm Oxford, http://www2.qeh.ox.ac.uk/ Princeton, http://www.wws.princeton.edu/degree/mpa/fieldii.html Sussex (IDS), http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/teach/mphil.html Tufts (Fletcher School), http://www.fletcher.tufts.edu/academic/Fields.html Tulane, http://payson.tulane.edu/mad/curriculum.htm University of London (SOAS), http://www2.soas.ac.uk/Economics/degrees/msc/devecon.html and http://www2.soas.ac.uk/Development/devstma.html Williams, http://www.williams.edu/cde/curriculum.html Yale, http://www.yale.edu/graduateschool/academics/international_deveconomics.html *

*

*

*

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Table 1: Key Pedagogical Features of Different Masters Degree Programs

Diversity of students’ academic background Diversity of students’ cultural background Ex ante coherence of likely career path Job-finding mechanism Level of responsibility in first job Level of first job’s interaction with different groups Is the program tied to professional certification? Primary mode of teaching Primary mode of assessment Do the most senior practitioners have this degree? In this the highest degree most senior professionals have? Must faculty necessarily have this degree? Nature of analytical skills being imparted

Nature of technical skills being imparted

Business and Law School (MBA, JD)

Medical and Military School (MD, Applied MA/MSc)

Graduate School, Arts and Science (MA, MSc only)

Policy School (MPP, MPA)

Moderate

Low

Low

High

Moderate

Low (relatively)

Moderate

High (especially in development studies)

Moderate

High

Moderate

Low

Employer courts student

All students enter centrally coordinated pipeline

Student enters PhD program, or courts employers

Student courts multiple employers

Moderate

High

Usually low

Usually low

Moderate

Moderate

Low

High

Yes

Rarely

No

Lectures, practicums, intensive internships

Seminars, lectures

Exams, class participation, ‘presentations’ Biz: Usually Law: Always

Exams, viva, on-thejob performance review

Exams, term papers

Case studies, seminars, lectures Exams, term papers, ‘policy ‘briefings’

Yes

In effect, yes (PhD subsumes it)

Sometimes

Yes

Yes

No

Varies (Yes, in services; No, in core ministries)

Biz: No Law: Yes

Yes

Biz: Maybe (accounting?) Law: Yes Case studies, lectures

Logic, planning,

Strategy, rhetoric, negotiation

Planning, induction and deduction on the basis of partial information Deep knowledge of ‘facts’ and ‘systems’; precise execution under high pressure

In effect, yes (PhD subsumes it) Abstraction (‘models’), links to/from theory Serious data and/or textual analysis

No From ‘evidence’ and constraints to ‘policy implications’ ‘Policy analysis’, modest quan skills (maybe), ‘leadership’

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Socialization into given professional culture Importance of “national ranking” for program’s prestige, profile Tensions among faculty between ‘thinkers’ and ‘doers’ Quality of classroom teaching taken seriously? Structural incentives to mentor individual students

High

High

High

Low

Obsessively high (because rankings in flux)

High (a measure of grants/contracts received—crucial for everyday work)

Moderate (ranking of university more salient)

Moderate (but ‘respectful’)

Low (largely one and the same)

High (though rankings change only marginally in the short run) Moderate (but only manifest as theorists versus applied scholars)

Yes, definitely

Somewhat

No, not really

Yes, moderately

Low

Moderate

High

Low

High

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