International Aid as Modern Imperialism—What Does Cross-Cultural Psychology Really Have to Offer? A Commentary on “The Positive Role of Culture: What Cross-Cultural Psychology Has to Offer to Developmental Aid Effectiveness Research,by Symen A. Brouwers”

International and Developmental Aid

In his argument, Brouwers correctly identifies many problems associated with international and developmental aid provided to developing parts of the world, mostly to countries of the Global South. In the United States alone, more than US$28 billion were budgeted for foreign aid during the 2018 fiscal year (see Foreignassistance.gov, 2018, for more information). As of March 2018, the United States Agency for International Development, known as USAID, carries US$49 billion in obligations to countries around the world. These financial obligations are based in various U.S. governmental agencies, such as the Department of State, Department of Defense, Peace Corps, and Department of the Treasury (see Explorer.usaid.gov, 2018, for more information). International aid provided by governmental agencies is not issued only by the United States. According to the World Economic Forum, Germany, the UK, France, Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, Norway, Canada, and the UAE, along with the USA and others, are particularly generous governments when it comes to international aid, with each of them currently contributing more than US$4 billion each (Myers, 2016).

The aid provided by national governments is only part of the story, though. Huge amounts of money are also raised and distributed by not-for-profit aid organizations. Save the Children, one of the largest private providers of international aid around the world, brought in more than US$2 billion in revenue in 2016 and claimed to have supported 53 million children that year (Save the Children, 2016). In a similar vein, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC; 2016) manages an annual budget of billions of U.S. dollars. At the other end of the spectrum of private aid organizations are innumerous small, localized international charities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which manage relatively small programs with annual budgets of well under US$1 million. Many of these smaller organizations (but also most of the larger ones, too) rely on the volunteered time and effort of people from developed, or Global North, countries who travel to developing areas to offer assistance in various forms.

Many, or all, of these organizations and governmental agencies have the explicit goal of improving people’s lives in some way. While some may focus on particular issues such as education, health, nutrition, sexuality, human rights, or clean water, they all tend to see a problem in a part of the world located far from them that they think they can solve. Unfortunately, much of this aid fails to meet the specific goals of the funding or supporting agencies. Brouwers argues that the major reason for this failure is that the interventions put in place by aid agencies are not “entrenched” enough into the culture(s) of the aid recipients. In other words, the behaviors and values introduced as interventions do not become “scaffolds” on which other indigenous cultural behaviors and values come to rely.

Generative Entrenchment Theory

The ideas and arguments that Brouwers put forth are based on Wimsatt’s (2007, 2013) generative entrenchment theory. Based on this theory, if aid providers want their interventions to last long term (or even just beyond the time in which programs are being evaluated), the thoughts and behaviors related to the interventions must become entrenched in the receiving culture and turn into scaffolds (that is, constructs upon which other important behaviors and values rely). Brouwers uses the example below from Ghana (originally produced by Jedwab & Moradi, 2016).

During British colonial rule in Ghana, a network of railroads was constructed in the early 1900s. These railroads then had a large impact on already existing economic patterns and created new ones. When the railroads lost their preeminence as the major method of transportation, various other economic structures in Ghana also collapsed. This is because, in the context of Wimsatt’s entrenchment theory and according to Brouwers’s current argument, the railroads had become “entrenched” into the economy and culture of Ghana. The railway had become a scaffold, or support, for other behaviors and values that crumbled when they lost the scaffolding. Brouwers suggests that international and developmental aid interventions must become like the railroads in Ghana—so entrenched and important in the receiving culture that if they were to be discontinued other important activities would also end. In this way, the recipients of the aid would be motivated (or perhaps a better word is compelled) to maintain their engagement with the intervention.

In a technical sense, Brouwers is probably correct that if an intervention becomes entrenched in this way, it will have a greater likelihood of lasting long term in the lives of the recipients of the aid. This is where Brouwers makes the claim that cross-cultural psychologists (CCPs) are vital to the success of international and developmental aid: he states that CCPs can be and should be tasked with helping aid agencies figure out how to make the interventions become entrenched enough to serve as scaffolding in the locales that receive aid. There are, we believe, various problems in Brouwers’s suggestion. Some of them, such as his conflation of CCPs and cultural psychologists (CPs), has been deftly handled by Chaudhary in her accompanying commentary (though she does not address Brouwers’s inclusion of indigenous psychology or indigenous psychologists [IPs] as CPs in her response—something we address later).

Chaudhary also addresses Brouwers’s tendency to take an etic approach in considering international and development aid, in solving problems related to poverty, and in seeing Western solutions as normative. Because these issues have been so well addressed by Chaudhary, we will not dwell on them here. Instead, we argue that Brouwers’s position in favor of the entrenchment of aid interventions misses a very large and important target: a discussion about the ethics of implementing many international and development aid programs.

The Ethics of International and Developmental Aid

There may be some situations where Brouwers’s argument that CCPs (a group he implies includes CCPs, CPs, and IPs) should help aid agencies to ensure their interventions become entrenched could be correct outside of considering the ethics of international aid. For example, ensuring that interventions aimed at decreasing rates of HIV/AIDS, child-sex trafficking, or crises of starvation are successful may justify concerns of entrenchment, trumping concerns of ethics and cultural sensitivity—at least in the short term. However, we believe these situations are rare and that any attempt at international and developmental aid should make ethical concerns a top priority.

It is true that aid agencies would be more successful in having their interventions become entrenched with the help of CCPs. Many CCPs have spent years working within particular cultural contexts as researchers and educators. They have knowledge and insight to share about their areas or cultures of expertise that could lead to greater rates of entrenchment. They can provide information on social hierarchies, gender norms, history, politics, economics, and much more. But we do not think this is the primary role of CCPs in international and developmental aid. Instead, we argue that the primary concerns of CCPs working in this field should be whether or not the proposed intervention is ethical, appropriate, desired by recipients, and will do more good than harm as predetermined by the recipients of the aid. Otherwise, the aid runs the risk of replicating colonial dynamics.

In his article, Brouwers makes passing allusions to these issue, arguing for the participation of recipients in decision making and claiming CCPs and aid agencies should “let recipients tell us what they want and what they need and give them decision making authority” (p. 6). We could not agree more with this assertion. This type of recipient participation is reminiscent of the basis of community-based participatory research, which argues that any research conducted in community settings should include the equal participation of members of that community (Hacker, 2013; O’Toole, Aaron, Chin, Horowitz, & Tyson, 2003). Any attempt at international and developmental aid should follow the same precept.

However, after making passing acknowledgment of this issue, Brouwers seems to drop this important insight from his analysis. As an example, he refers to the GoBifo program in Sierra Leone (Casey, Glennerster, & Miguel, 2012). The program, sponsored by the World Bank, claims to have been developed within the communities of the recipient villages. The program focuses on providing skills training for trades and vocations, requiring a quota for leadership from women, and providing grants to purchase materials for new construction. Evaluation of the program revealed that the ownership of assets and the amount of consumer goods had increased in the villages; however, even though women had received training, they did not represent a higher proportion of leaders, new construction (such as barns and sheds) remained unused, and community property was controlled by local elites.

Brouwers’s argument is that these failures are due to the provided interventions not becoming entrenched scaffolds in the receiving villages. On one hand, the failure of some of the aspects of the intervention could be (and probably are) due to a lack of entrenchment. On the contrary, it is naïve to believe that a single intervention can alter cultural, societal, or political norms and practices—especially those that produce and maintain inequalities. When one considers how many places in the world where women are not equitably represented in politics, business, or education, or where the financial elites do not control social and economic life, it becomes clear that many interventions are destined to struggle and ultimately fail. ¹ A related question we have is whether these interventions do not become entrenched and hence fail because the interventions were not desired, needed, or valued by the local recipients. Unfortunately, simply involving local members of the community in the planning of aid interventions does not guarantee the interventions will be acceptable to the larger community. This is where the role of indigenous psychologies and IPs is so vital.

Indigenous psychologies are psychologies that are native to and developed within their own particular culture, and focus on the way that cultural context is fundamental to understanding human behavior (Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006). Another way to think of this is to consider that when most people think about psychology in general, they are really thinking about U.S. indigenous psychology because it has developed as a way to understand how and why U.S. Americans do and think the things they do. Other cultures will have their own indigenous psychologies, which are based on local ways of knowing and understanding the world and should not be confused with folk psychologies, or naïve ways of understanding human behavior (Goldman, 2010). The work that CCPs and CPs can do to help aid agencies be culturally sensitive and aware when implementing interventions will always be limited without the equal participation of IPs.

Related to the issue of entrenchment, another aspect of Brouwers’s argument that is distressing is his focus on neoliberal outcomes when discussing the success or failure of aid interventions. To be fair, we realize that this is not an issue unique to the way that Brouwers presents the topic, but an issue with the way that most international and developmental aid agencies think about the effectiveness of international aid. Neoliberalism is the economic idea that protecting and providing for the capitalistic free market (with little or no regulation) is paramount and necessary to protect and provide for the human rights of all people (Harvey, 2005). As neoliberalism has, unfortunately, become perhaps the most dominant current global economic philosophy (Harvey, 2005), many international aid agencies and organizations rely on measurements of economic progress and financial improvements for the recipients of their aid as evidence of their success.

Following the logic of neoliberalism, improvements in personal finances and societal economics should lead to improvements in health, nutrition, education, and so on. However, as the currently increasing gap in wealth around the world indicates, this is not necessarily the case (see Inequality.org, 2018, for more information). International aid organizations and agencies should resist the urge to use financial markers as measures of success—especially if these markers (often based on Western-based beliefs about success) are considered outside the context of the culture in which the intervention was introduced. This is evident in the GoBifo program in Sierra Leone discussed above—while measures of economic success increased (e.g., increase in owned assets, more consumer goods), other aspects of the program failed (e.g., increased leadership from women). If the focus of funding agencies continues to prioritize both neoliberal practices (e.g., microcredit, projects that focus on individualistic interventions rather than communal solutions) and neoliberal assessments of success, we believe such interventions will either continue to fail or have deleterious effects on the local communities and their cultures. ² While we recognize that Brouwers does point out that the non-neoliberal-based failures of various interventions are indeed failures, it seems to us that this is done only in passing and that much of his concern is based around neoliberal arguments.

Well-trained and ethical CCPs can and should be involved in international and developmental aid—but perhaps not in the way Brouwers suggests. They should have the goal of maintaining ethical and culturally appropriate standards first and foremost, rather than devising ways to increase the entrenchment of the interventions. To do this, though, requires that we be able to trust that CCPs and CPs will behave in ethical and culturally appropriate ways. Unfortunately, this is not something we can assume of all CCPs and CPs. It is important to evaluate what is meant by CCP and CP. What type of training have they received to do the research they are doing? Do they have experience and training in working with aid organizations? Many of them do, of course. But many psychologists who refer to themselves as CCPs have not received any specific culturally based training (and especially no training in culturally relevant and appropriate ethics). Instead, they are what we like to refer to as “safari researchers”—psychological researchers who show up and collect data from a culture other than their own without the deep and important understanding of the cultural context required of good, ethical CCPs. These are not the types of so-called CCPs we should want supporting international aid agencies and organizations.

In a related vein, even CCPs who have received formal training as cultural researchers can take inappropriate stances in their cultural research. For example, we recently heard a story about a CCP who discussed their work as “saving the people of [countries] X and Y. ³ ” This approach to cultural research and to international aid should be troubling to all of us. It underscores the arguments that have existed for decades that international and developmental aid is simply a modern form of imperialism (Hayter, 1971), in which wealthy, Westernized, and Christian cultures and nations (usually located in the Global North) are able to influence the policies of less wealthy, non-Westernized, and non-Christian cultures and nations (usually located in the Global South). CCPs and international aid organizations that strive to behave in ethical and culturally appropriate ways should (perhaps literally!) flee from any whiff of this attitude. Finally, a related concern that is beyond the scope of this article is the issue of what happens when an intervention becomes entrenched, but the aid and support is then withdrawn. When interventions do become entrenched, indigenous ways of doing are replaced by outside solutions—and aid rarely, if ever, lasts forever. Whether (and how) communities will be able to maintain an entrenched intervention after outside help and support ends should be a serious concern of all aid organizations and the CCPs who assist them. ⁴

These situations strengthen our earlier call that indigenous psychologies and IPs should be included in any type of culturally based research and especially in any attempt at international and developmental aid. These IPs must be considered as vital members of the team, and provided with leadership and veto power in the planning and implementation of any intervention, and recognized as the best intermediaries and connections to the local community. Otherwise, international aid organizations and CCPs run the risk of mistakenly assuming that they have done their due diligence in engaging in ethical and culturally appropriate interventions. We must attempt to resolve these issues long before we can consider Brouwers’s call for CCPs to help aid organizations increase the entrenchment of their interventions. Based on some of our own research about (not for or with) international aid organizations in Guatemala, it is clear to us that these ethical considerations happen far too infrequently.

A Case Study: Guatemala

Based on some preliminary analyses for a project we are currently preparing for publication (Buck, Ashdown, Sutherland, & Guerrero, 2017), we have been able to gather data on how international aid is perceived by various parties in Guatemala: long-term employees of aid organizations in Guatemala, short-term volunteers (who often refer to themselves as missionaries and are sometimes referred to as voluntourists) who travel to Guatemala to work, and local Guatemalans themselves. We interviewed approximately 10 members of each group, and some common patterns and themes quickly became apparent.

We chose to investigate this issue in Guatemala for various reasons. One of us has visited, lived, and worked in Guatemala for nearly 20 years, providing a solid understanding of Guatemalan culture and the issues of international aid there. Guatemala is also a common destination for short-term missionary volunteers and has attracted the attention of many international aid organizations, both large and small, for many years (Berry, 2014). This issue has also attracted the attention of other CCPs and CPs who work in Guatemala, which provided us with a foundation of previous research on which to build our work (Berry, 2014).

Examples of how international aid has influenced life in Guatemala range from large scale, community-encompassing effects, such as the Guatemalan government providing less financial support for medical care after foreign doctors begin arriving to offer free clinics, to smaller scale influences on everyday lives of individual Guatemalans, such as high school students “prescribing” aspirin at medical clinics or groups passing out delousing shampoo to people who cannot read the instructions on the bottle (Berry, 2014). While some of these issues may not rise to the level of impact or attention that Brouwers suggests CCPs support, it is important to note that all of these situations (and thousands more that have not been recorded in the scientific literature) have affected the lives of recipients in some way. And often, recipients are not consulted (or only consulted in passing), with the main goal of the aid organizations being to figure out how to entrench their interventions, rather than focusing on whether they are locally desirable and appropriate. Before any CCP should be concerned with helping an aid organization entrench their interventions, they should be concerned with ensuring appropriate ethical and cultural considerations have been thoroughly explored and instigated.

In our own preliminary work, based on our interviews with long-term aid workers, short-term volunteers, and Guatemalans, it is clear that these ethical and cultural issues are not given due consideration—and this is often true, unfortunately, even when CCPs or CPs are involved in the implementation of the interventions. From the local Guatemalans we interviewed, it was clear that they were curious about the motivation of aid workers. One of the interviewed Guatemalans stated,

We would have to investigate these people and where they come from. That way we would know if their intentions are good or if they are here to bring more problems. It is good for people to receive aid, but we do not know where they come from . . . One becomes interested to know about this. It is important. I want to know where they came from.

Other Guatemalans we interviewed had the attitude that Guatemala requires help from foreigners to succeed (always vaguely and ambiguously defined). For example, one participant stated, “. . . because there are countries that can help the poor. The people here cannot because they need help.”

They also clearly understood that much of this help arrived from foreigners who came from far away and did not always do things the way locals would do them. One even told a heartbreaking story of receiving land and a house from an international organization, only to have it taken away because she left the house for longer than was allowed by the organization—to spend time with her son who was in the nearest high-quality hospital, which was in a far-off city. In part, she recounts her story this way:

They asked me why I did not take care of the house . . . I was in the hospital with my son so I could not take care of the house . . . They. . . told me to get out of the house and that I would not be allowed to return . . . . I took all my things out of the house, but now the house is in someone else’s name. The person is living in the house now and they threw me out. You do not even treat an animal like that. They treated me very badly. They gave it to me first, they put me there, and then they take it away from me. So, I would only trust people that do want to work and if it’s legal. I will not trust just words. What happened to me a year ago was horrible . . .but on the other hand, it is good that some foreigners have the need to help others that really need it, then that is good. To avoid problems it has to be real, because it is important to help the poor.

It is evident from these interviews that many of our local Guatemalan participants were not clear on how international aid organizations function, why they do the work they do, or their own role in the process. These are issues that CCPs and CPs, working in conjunction with IPs, should be concerned about long before they worry about how to ensure an intervention sponsored by a foreign agency becomes entrenched.

From many of the short-term volunteers, we heard talk about how their trip to Guatemala as missionaries or voluntourists changed their own lives. For most of them, the focus was on their own experiences, rather than the needs or perceptions of the recipients. This is summed up well in the following comment from one of the short-term volunteers:

I did it for several reasons. You know, the Catholic Outreach portion of it was a part of it. The adventure of going to a third world country, the chance to learn about their culture and their language . . . all of that, there’s just a lot of reasons that I wanted to do it.

Although many of them suggested that the recipients should be involved in making decisions about the type of aid they received, there were participants who claimed that these decisions should be left to the aid organizations and volunteers. This was reflected in various comments from volunteers who implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) a savior mentality (Flaherty, 2016), where the volunteers saw themselves as helping, saving, and doing for the Guatemalans what the volunteers thought the locals were incapable of doing themselves, without knowing whether this was actually the case. For example, one short-term volunteer said,

I really do think it has to be kind of driven by the individual [volunteer] . . . it was nice when we were there, there was another group that was at the site or at the place we were at and . . . so every day we had options as far as what type of work, like if we didn’t feel the physical work that was there to do you could opt to do something else that was less physical . . .

These concerning issues were echoed in some of the statements from the long-term aid workers, many of whom had been living and working with Guatemalan recipients of international aid for years. For example,

This desire that we have . . . as North Americans and Westerners on a broader level to, you know, I need to go help . . . I need to go do something, I think, can be a very short-sighted and ignorant perspective. We don’t understand the broader context, we don’t understand why this community is suffering in the way that it is, we don’t even know [whether] that community considers itself to be suffering or needing . . . and even with the greatest of intentions of “I’m here to help” “I. . . bring resources” “I bring a big smile on my face” can be racist, it can be . . . very ugly and, again, you know, just short-sighted.

They spoke of the frustration of having to be more concerned about donors’ and volunteers’ perceptions and feelings than the needs of the aid recipients. One said, “a short-term volunteer, in terms of impact, in a lot of ways the impact is more on the volunteer than it is on the community.” They were also clear that the outcomes of many interventions would not and could not last long enough to have a meaningful impact unless the interventions were directly based in the needs of the recipients and culturally appropriate. This reflects Brouwers’s argument that interventions must become entrenched to be long lasting; however, the experienced aid workers also recognized the need for these interventions to be culturally and ethically appropriate. This concern should, as we have stated previously, have priority over any consideration of making sure an intervention becomes entrenched.

Conclusion

To be clear, we agree with Brouwers that involving CCPs in international aid is important, but not necessarily for the reasons he suggests. As Chaudhary explains in her own response to Brouwers, the goals, methods, and priorities of CCPs may not match with those of CPs, which could lead to very different types of interactions with local communities. We hasten to add that this critique would also apply to IPs, whose voices might be some of the most important and necessary in this discussion.

Instead of focusing on how to increase entrenchment, we argue that CCPs (and CPs and IPs) should focus on making sure the actual needs of recipients are understood and met. Local recipients of international aid (whether coming from large or small organizations) should be involved in every aspect of the intervention, from identifying problems to carrying out solutions. We believe that not only should locals be involved in the process, they should have ultimate veto power in the process. How this would play out on the ground for any particular intervention would depend on the identified problems, the local community and culture, and the way that the aid organization and CCPs interact with the community. Again, we want to make it clear that this underscores the importance of involving IPs in the process. Foreign countries and cultures cannot be treated monolithically as boxed or contained entities that can be approached in uniform ways (Rogoff & Angelillo, 2002). Instead, aid organizations must have the patience and commitment to involve CCPs and IPs in ways that will allow them to deeply and meaningfully interact with local recipients throughout the intervention process.

Doing this in a culturally appropriate and ethical way will mean not focusing too much on using neoliberal and economic measures of outcomes. It will also mean ensuring that local customs and values are respected, especially at the community level. Any interventions that CCPs are helping aid organizations entrench must be beneficial on both the macro (i.e., community) and micro (i.e., individual) levels. Care must be taken to ensure that interventions do not replace or destroy positive existing cultural constructs or behaviors, again requiring the expertise and support of both CCPs and IPs.

To conclude, we agree with Brouwers—CCPs should be involved in supporting and working with international aid organizations; however, we do not think their priority should be what Brouwers suggests. Instead of focusing on helping aid agencies and organizations become more effective and efficient at ensuring their interventions become entrenched enough to develop into required scaffolds in the local community, we argue that CCPs’ primary concerns should be the ethical and cultural appropriateness of the interventions. This will require patience and time on the part of the aid organizations and the CCPs, as well as deep and meaningful engagement with IPs and the local community. Only after this has occurred should CCPs and aid organizations focus on how best to entrench their interventions. Otherwise, as Hayter (1971) suggests, international and developmental aid runs the very real and high risk of being nothing more than aid as imperialism.