My “Sliding Doors” Book: the Divide

Do you remember the film with Gwyneth Paltrow where we see the different path her life would have taken, if she had not missed her train?

I bought The Divide by Jason Hickel when it first came out in 2017. The subtitle “A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions” drew me in immediately. I knew this was the kind of book that would set me on fire. I also knew it would be a hard read, and would keep me up at night. Like so many working in the development sector, I was already not getting enough sleep as it was. So I didn’t read it.

7 years later, I can’t help thinking about “Sliding Doors”, and wonder what might have shifted for – and in – me, if I had read it back then. Maybe nothing, and I needed to live through what I lived through for it to resonate as strongly today. Maybe everything.

What this book does beautifully is showing the bigger picture, putting development into the wider economic system of which it is part. The loudly outspoken raison d’être of development cooperation is to tackle global inequality by alleviating poverty and fostering development. Many of us work on subsections of this big goal, zooming in and attempting to mitigate the specific ways in which injustice and inequality show up. But we don’t often get/take the time to zoom out.

First of all, there is really no surprise we are all exhausted. Jason Hickel shows that “For every dollar in aid that developing countries receive, they lose 24 dollars in net outflows.” Why? The global neoliberal capitalist system and its extractive practices including interest payments, illicit financial flows, structural adjustments, exploitation through trade, transaction fees on remittances, trade mis-invoicing, foreign patents, land grabs, etc. Amongst many others explained in the book.

I know what you are thinking: One dollar going back to the Global South is better than none. From my experience working in impactful INGOs, that “one dollar” can indeed be life-changing, the difference between someone seeing or not, attending school or not, being included in the workforce or not. But imagine what the world would look like if Global South could invest 4 times more in public education, health services, social security, not with a charity label attached but as economic profit earned fair and square?

Now, I understand how uncomfortable it feels for development professionals to look at this bigger picture. Remember the book stayed unread on my shelf for 7 years. We are questioned so often about how effectively our “one dollar” is spent, and are dependant on our donors’ trust in our work, that we prefer to focus on what we do, lest we compromise the already fragile eco-system, and put our organisations and jobs at risk. Our (less loudly spoken) goal becomes trying to increase the one dollar by as much we can, and hope that others will advocate to decrease the 24 dollars.

Do you work for an organisation which mitigate the harm done by the economic system while at the same time actively advocating for a fairer global economic system? I would love to hear your practical examples! 

Jason Hickel goes further. And this is the real stinger. He argues that “The discourse of aid distracts us from seeing the broader picture. It hides the patterns of extraction that are actively causing the impoverishment of the global South today and actively impeding meaningful development.” So it is not just that we are outnumbered 24/1 and fall short of addressing the root causes of global inequality. But that we hold up the unjust status quo, and stand in the way of systemic change: “The aid paradigm allows rich countries and individuals to pretend to fix with one hand that they destroy with the other, dispensing small bandages at the same time as inflicting deep injuries and claiming the moral high ground for doing so.” We encourage people to show solidarity, often in ways that perpetuate stereotypes and the false narrative that the Global North is “developing” the Global South, when it clearly is the opposite, and has been since the end of the 15th century.

Ouch. So according to Hickel we are the colloquial sugar that makes the neo-liberal medicine go down?

So what now? Hickel suggests some key areas we should be addressing collectively, which would contribute to tackle some of the root causes of global inequality and the climate crisis. (He also does this in his latest book Less is More, which I also recommend makes the link to the ecological crisis)

But what concretely do we development professionals do with this? We must resist the temptation to look away, and ask ourselves some fundamental questions, both as organisations and individuals. Can we realise our mandate without understanding – and acting upon – the wider economic system? How do we actively support / encourage addressing the root causes of global inequality? Can we accept that neutral is not an option and speak truth to power as members of civil society?

“Poor countries don’t need our aid, they need us to stop impoverishing them. Until we target the structural drivers of global poverty – the underlying structure of wealth extraction and accumulation – development efforts will continue to fail, decade after decade. (…)”

But I also believe we should take the fears of development professionals very seriously. In the current political climate, especially in the Global North, there are many leaders who will be more than happy to print the first part of that sentence (“poor countries don’t need our aid”) onto t-shirts and use it as a justification to slash any remaining form of ODA, turning people’s well-meaning solidarity into apathy. It is happening already and we cannot let that happen.

It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, by Murri artist Lilla Watson: “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Let’s take a clear-eyed look at the development sector, understand how the fight for all our respective liberations are linked, learn to better tell that story and what we can practically do together to create a better more equal world for everyone.

Are you working in development cooperation sector? What do you think about all this? Are you keen to understand this big picture better (if so definitely read the Divide)? Would you be interested in more content and/or discussion spaces around this? Let me know!