My trip to a global development conference

Holistic approaches are quite in fashion!

I’m attending the Development2030 conference, where people from non-governmental organizations meet and discuss global development. New in the field I’m excited to learn from experienced folk in global development. I’ve read dozens and dozens of studies by far-removed academics measuring the effects of this and that, but here I get to learn from those who actually walk the walk.

On stage, experts discuss problems using complex terms I don’t understand. Panelists are making points to each other and the audience is listening intently and nodding along. The points are flying way over my head. I leave my first talk dazed and confused.

What on earth was the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, and how is it bridged through quality education again? The speaker next explains how the UN is pioneering a new way of working - and thinking - that supports fast-acting humanitarian responses while embracing long-term goals for sustainable development which will help realize #222milliondreams. Boy, that is a lot of dreams, I think to myself.

The theme of the conference is about solving overlapping crises. We cannot treat conflict, poverty, and the climate crisis as separate problems, states the deputy director of the European Commission's department for international partnerships. They are deeply interlinked and must be treated as such.

I wander around the conference hoping to find a single presentation which doesn’t present a new unique holistic approach to aid. To find a speaker whose lack of contextual awareness provides a unique insight into how problems can be individually broken down and solved. But simply saving lives by handing out chlorine or insecticide bed-nets just doesn’t cut it. For an intervention to be really exciting it should also find a way to mitigate climate change, empower women, and improve democracy too.

The holistic approach conveniently eliminates contentious issues of prioritization. How should treating malaria be prioritized against climate mitigation? By claiming they are interconnected, there is no prioritization to be made. It is impossible to solve one without addressing the other.

Continue the process for long enough, and eventually we can boil down everything into a single issue, that we then can name the “everything-bad-nexus” (sometimes referred to as ‘capitalism’). All difficult decisions are gone, every solution addresses every problem and every problem is addressed by every solution. There is no need to measure, because any measurement inevitably will reduce the issue to some metric that fails to capture the unique effects on each unique individual.

Any question I ask is met with the same response, ‘things just aren’t so simple’. I guess there still is a lot left to learn about global development before I can call myself an expert.