The Road to Hell by Michael Maren Page A

agriculture people there, but I had just come from the best fucking production agriculture school in the United States. I was an experienced aid worker and an educated person. And it seemed to me that these people had a home gardening mentality with an environmental slant. They were good with the rhetoric but weak on the science.” But he took the job anyway. He was restless teaching in California and longed to be out in the field doing the work.
    Cassidy hated every moment of the training, but he remembers little of it, because he just ignored most of what happened. His friend, a former Peace Corps colleague and fellow trainee, JoséOrtiz, admired Cassidy’s ability to just transcend everything.
    â€œWe felt embarrassed by the training,” Ortiz remembers. “There was some woman, an ex-nun I remember, who hadn’t done a lot of adult education, lecturing us in some condescending way about real remedial development stuff.”
    She’d say things like, “The Save the Children approach is not to give aman a fish but to teach him how to fish.” Cassidy and Ortiz felt as if they were back in Catholic school and started rolling their eyes and kicking each other under the table.
    The trainees, headed for different parts of the world (Ortiz was going to Sudan), were taught about Save’s new and exciting approach to development called participatory development. The idea, as explained to them, was that PD would let the Third World beneficiaries of Western largesse have a say in what they were getting, ensuring that they really want what you’re trying to give them.
    The whole thing, thought Ortiz, was a scam. “They had us doing exercises on how to develop consensus, but in reality it was subtle manipulation in the name of participatory development. It was like law school or business school. Here’s how you shoot down the other guy’s argument. That’s a game I refused to play. It was really distasteful to me.
    â€œThat’s what modern business practices are today,” said Ortiz, who now has an M.B.A. “It’s no different from total quality management. In the business world you try to get employees to buy your strategic plan and make them think it’s theirs.”
    This was the buzzword of the month. Experienced aid hands know that development concepts are generated at universities, accepted as profound by policy types in Washington, and then declared as gospel. In order to raise new money to do the same types of projects you’ve always done, you have to be sure to include the appropriate current jargon in your project proposal and in subsequent progress reports. And you have to be conversant with the jargon so you can use it when the academics who coined the terminology are sent by USAID on junkets to inspect your project. When you use their jargon, it makes the academics happy and they write you a nice evaluation and you can get more money.
    While participatory development never really caught on, by the late 1980s, the development industry had found a new mantra it could use: sustainable development.
    I n a brief statement before the House Appropriations Committee in April 1994, Carolyn Long, vice president of InterAction (a consortium of NGOs), used the term
sustainable development
sixteen times. Not one representative asked her what she was talking about or requested that she define the term. Was it supposed to contrast with the “unsustainable” development that member organizations had been spending taxpayer money on for years?
    In part, yes. Sustainable development emerged as a reaction to criticismthat most development projects for the last thirty years fell apart the moment the foreign money was pulled out. So project proposals started referring to
sustainable
development. (In fact, the term is redundant; if it’s not sustainable, it’s not development.) What this novel approach meant, in essence, was that the designers of