A contribution to the policy setting of the new political leadership of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development
By PositiveBlockchain
We warmly congratulate Ms. Svenja Schulze on her appointment as Minister of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As a community of technology-minded people who align their actions with the U.N. SDGs, we take this historic opportunity to contribute some perspectives to the recalibration of work in this important policy area.
The high expectations for impact and the very generous funding of the ministry are great ingredients for good things to happen, but they are also a burden. For this reason, we suggest avoiding a “business as usual” approach at all costs. The form of development cooperation practiced in recent decades has achieved too little; in some cases, it is associated with development-inhibiting effects, at least in the medium and long term.
The recent experience from Afghanistan shows that the extensive deployment of people and resources has been futile in many ways, with dramatic personal and societal consequences.
There are many conclusions to be drawn from this. Based on our preoccupation with the potential of decentralization in both technical and social terms, we would like to emphasize in particular the importance of decentralization and local responsibility:
- Acknowledging the complexity and dynamics of social reality in any society, we should stop overwhelming social development cooperation with overly ambitious and exaggerated expectations. There is a need for a methodological and operational separation of political development cooperation and truly locally responsible and controlled projects for gradual changes in social reality.
- International cooperation could more consciously distinguish between 1/ cooperation WITHIN the country and 2/ aid FOR the country.
1/ The first form should in the future — besides humanitarian aid — preferably consist of decentralized, community-based and locally-led projects. Similar to humanitarian aid, these projects should be shielded from political considerations and conditionalization. Thus, there needs to be a program category that organizes projects with communities and individuals, focuses on local change, and relies heavily on local structures, formal and non-formal businesses as well as civil society.
2/ In contrast, aid FOR a country is clearly political and should be communicated as such. There needs to be much clearer communication of the conditions for such cooperation and clear, quick, and politically communicated decisions in this category. - Incentives need to be designed so that instead of pressure for ever-larger&more-complex technocratic projects and procedures, we create a trend toward smaller-but-more projects with solutions that can be easily replicated and scaled. This is a challenge for the implementers and their business models obviously, but it needs much more room for experimentation and procedures that allow projects to adapt to change and experience. In short: No more big, mighty, overblown efforts, but lots of smaller, agile, locally-led programs.
- Consistently decolonize and push for a locally-led portfolio of German Development Cooperation. This means, for example, transferring decision-making powers to the communities, which of course limits the donors’ ability to exert influence. Hereby we take into account the fact that it has proven impossible to change social realities from the outside. The competencies in the partner countries must finally be recognized and utilized, and the technical capabilities that have recently emerged must be used much more consistently than in the past to create framework conditions that enable self-directed development.
- Engage actively and courageously in the field of technologies that, if used cleverly, can become transformative key technologies - distributed ledger technology and the token-based economy are vivid examples of this.
However, for all the enthusiasm for technical possibilities that characterizes us, we always see technology in service; Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in particular, as a “social technology”, must always be seen in close relation to the social, societal, and political context in which it is intended to have a positive impact.
We are happy to contribute to the discussion with our enthusiasm for technical possibilities, which, however, must always be used responsibly as a means to an end. The SDGs are consequently the orientation for us as well.
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