A Friend’s Dinner with David Harvey and Reflections on Intellectuals, Progressive Publishing and Kumarian Press

At the post office the other day, I met a neighbor who works with the progressive nonprofit Solidago Foundation. She was all excited because she had just come back from New York City where she had dinner with David Harvey. In my opinion, David Harvey should be a household name, but in case his is a new name to you, Harvey is distinguished professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

His numerous books, heavily influenced by Marx and characterized by dialectical engagement with issues of social, political and economic injustice, are required reading for many graduate students in the social sciences. His online course on Volume One of Marx’s Capital is the best guide that I know to unraveling the complexities of this gargantuan and wonderful book.

Back to my friend: She hoped that she could encourage David to help spread the word about progressive organizations such as Solidago. Her comments got me to thinking about whom to enlist in progressive causes and the position of intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense of a distinctive class of individuals: clergy, philosophers, professors and teachers, etc. that engage in intellectual activity as a specific social, political and economic function) in these causes. I have heard David Harvey speak in both formal academic settings where his language (or “discourse,” rather) and argumentation is complex and “informal” gatherings where he communicates the same ideas with an awareness and sympathy to a “non-specialist” audience without condescension or dilution of his arguments and ideas. And he is a wonderful teacher: do watch his video on Marx!

But his books, marvelous and penetrating as they are, can be difficult, reinforcing the Marxian conviction found in Volume One of Capital that there “are no royal roads to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” This is not to denigrate the value or importance of Harvey’s work, but I doubt if many beyond the institutional venues where intellectual activity is commodified and exchanged would have the time and energy to read, say, Harvey’s The Limits of Capital, let alone in conjunction with Marx’s Capital itself!

In these times of economic, environmental and all manner of turmoil and conflict that indeed pose a threat to the very survival of the human race, the role of the intellectual and the role of Kumarian Press as a site for the transformation of intellectual labor into a commodity that both sustains and questions the structures, systems and practices that characterize our era is both paradoxical and critically important. Paradoxical in the sense that Kumarian Press is after all a capitalist business venture that has to be competitive and has to reap continued growth in terms of sales and profits in order to survive and important in the sense that Kumarian, in spite of its imbrications in the contradictions (and perpetuation, albeit slightly) of capitalism, seeks to provide viable alternatives that run counter to the interests and power of dominant groups in society.

One of my favorite passages in a David Harvey book comes early in his Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.

While attending an academic conference on globalization with its tense and frequently hard to follow arguments afflicted by the radical and no doubt chic skepticism of poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism and so on, he sat in on a conference of evangelical Christians that was taking place at his hotel. Harvey was struck by the enthusiasm of the crowd as they listened to the preachers and it was clear that what was happening at the evangelical conference was an “orchestration of emotions and passions rather than of intellect.” But it was an orchestration that was explicitly scored with expressions by the evangelical of foundational beliefs. Harvey wondered what would happen if he returned to the academic conference and spoke of foundational beliefs. He would probably be put out to pasture or seen as a dinosaur. While I believe, as does Harvey, that one should scrutinize all manner of foundational beliefs (including those of the secular Left), his experience with the evangelicals led him to a rather disturbing conclusion: “…when a political group armed with strong and unambiguous foundational beliefs confronts a group of doubting Thomases whose only foundational belief is skepticism towards all foundational beliefs, then it is rather easy to predict who will win.”

The tensions and imperatives of capitalist commerce, the necessity for global social, political and economic change, and encounters with the powerful armed with foundational beliefs: all these are familiar components of work at Kumarian. The bulk of my career at Kumarian has been during the bleak years of the second Bush administration. Talk about foundational beliefs and power! And as the evermore seemingly dysfunctional and rough beast that is the US government slouches towards Bethlehem (and possible default), I ask myself the same questions that I do every day: what is the role of Kumarian Press, what the role of its authors is and how to be “progressive” during periods of intolerance and myopia. I’ll conclude with another of my favorite David Harvey reflections, this one from The Limits of Capital as he gives me a valuable answer to my questions and hope. He writes about the need to project theory “into the fires of political practice” so that “new strategies for the sane reconstruction of society can emerge.” This statement I have emblazoned on my wall as it encapsulates for me the very essence and purpose of Kumarian Press and forms the framework for my editorial strategies. We need sanity now more than ever and Kumarian Press needs authors who can write for wide audiences with a diversity of experiences and knowledge so that the fires of political practice will burn brightly and guide us to, if not a promised land, at least one in which empathy, justice and equity and environmental preservation are primary concerns.

Charles Buxton Announces New Civil Society Book

The Struggle for Civil Society in Central Asia:
April-June 2011… April 7th was “black and red” day as Bishkek’s evening paper put it: one year after Kyrgyzstan’s bloody uprising, during which the President’s forces shot over 80 protestors dead on the main square…That event happened as I was putting the finishing touches to my book for Kumarian “The struggle for civil society in Central Asia”. As Kumarian’s editors “got their teeth” into the book, an even worse loss of life took place, in June 2010 – over 400 people dead after inter-ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan’s southern capital Osh and neighbouring Jalalabad.

I have been living in this region for almost ten years, working in civil society development. The ex-Soviet countries that seemed so similar are now moving apart so fast. Kyrgyzstan having had two revolutions (2005 and 2010) while in Turkmenistan there are few independent NGOs at all, and in Kazakhstan President Nazarbaev has just won a new term with – apparently – 95% of the vote in a turnout of over 80%!

Some brief thoughts for Kumarian readers:
Indeed, civil society development is a “struggle”. Often we don’t see clearly where the CS struggle ends and the political struggle begins.
Over the last year, as the political struggle in Kyrgyzstan took more and more of people’s energies, CSO had the important role of trying to ensure some basic rules (legality, non-violent behaviour, not sacrificing everything for the sake of power) still obtained.
It is CS’s fate seemingly to be used by other actors. Unfortunately, our region has seen it used for neo-liberal gains, then sidelined by the foreign donors as their government focus on the search for oil or political stability. We see civil society used by national government (setting up their own “GONGOs”) and by political radicals. But the more it is used, the more important, it seems, is the struggle to keep open a space for debate and collective action by citizens.

Watching the news from the Middle East… Having seen violence close at hand in Central Asia, I can’t say I feel euphoric about the demonstrations. Like here, the motor for them is ordinary people’s pent up economic and social demands. It is not clear what the new regimes will or can do, especially as far as democracy is concerned. When big changes come, the little changes (our project work, more participative ways of doing things, attention to minority – or majority - groups of all kinds) seem to take a hit. All we can say is there are more difficult times ahead.

Last week I was in Osh starting a programme training local NGOs and government staff in analytical and research skills. The idea is to help develop new policy and practice around the idea of diversity – to increase government accountability to citizens and reduce the risk of violence. I hope my own analysis in the Kumarian book will be of use in the region – both to international development practitioners, and to local NGO activists.

Charles Buxton, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 23.6.2011

About the Author:
Charles Buxton is an INTRAC Capacity Building Specialist based in Central Asia. The Struggle for Civil Society in Central Asia was published in May 2011 and is now available in paperback.

Jenny Pearson's Creative Capacity Development - Now Available in Paperback

Ground control to Major Tom
Creative Capacity Development – reaching out across the space between multiple perspectives on capacity development

Several times in recent years I have found myself sitting in a room with some high powered people – bureaucrats, academics, technical experts, donor policy makers and the like – gathered together to discuss capacity development. At the first of these events I started by wondering what on earth I was doing there – I felt I was out of my depth and wouldn’t be able to contribute anything of value. Within an hour I had changed my mind and knew that what I had to contribute to the discussion was a much needed ‘voice of practice’. As I sat and listened to some eminent people saying some very interesting things, the title riff of the David Bowie number ‘Ground control to Major Tom’ kept popping into my head, and it just wouldn’t go away. From my perspective as a long term capacity development practitioner in a developing, post-conflict country it seemed to me that some of the ideas and opinions being expressed were just out there in the stratosphere. ‘Ground control to Major Tom’ is now my private mantra for all such meetings – it helps me stay grounded when the conversation is going off in directions I don’t understand, and it also helps me frame my contributions.

My book, Creative Capacity Development: Learning to adapt in development practice – launched June 2011, is the story of me and the organisation I founded trying to understand and integrate learning and change into our work as essential components of achieving sustainable capacity development. It explores the challenge of overcoming the profound blocks to capacity development that arise in complex cultural and post-conflict societies. It shows clearly that sustainable change only comes when you leave behind doing business as usual and embrace creative approaches that help people overcome their fears and move forward. My hope is that this book will make a contribution to building the bridges that are so badly needed to connect all the different groups concerned with capacity development – from practice on the ground to the upper echelons of political policy making, and all the levels in between, especially the in-country missions of international organisations, donors and INGOs.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t get it about the political and economic considerations and other mechanisms that drive aid and development policies, whether at global, home country or local office level. I realise that lack of understanding may reduce my capacity to be effective in facilitating positive change. However, on the other hand, I don’t very often hear any of the bureaucrats or experts I meet admit that they don’t get it about the realities of capacity development practice. The good news is that many are now recognising that the problem isn’t so much about knowing what good practice for capacity development should look like – the theory and some good examples are well documented - the problem is about knowing how to operationalise what is known. The bad news is that even in this changing understanding the voice of practice is rarely heard and even less valued in most of the debates about aid effectiveness, country ownership, and so on. Those who have something to say about the realities of actually doing capacity development don’t get a lot of air time in the complex agenda that seems mostly concerned with political considerations, accountability and measurable results. Despite the fact that we all (allegedly) have the same end goal in sight, there isn’t a lot of space for those who want to argue to doing things differently at the level of operations. Within the aid and development sectors there are multiple realities, world views and ways of doing business that are very far apart and this is reflected in the language we use, what we value and how we go about our business.

So who needs to learn to talk whose language? Who needs to understand whose perspective? Who needs to change their ways of working? The answer, of course, is that we need to learn how to understand each other in order to find a middle way that will increase the level and pace of change for the better. I learn about the issues and imperatives driving aid from going to meetings, reading position papers, research documents and so on. I hope that if some of the people working at other levels of the sector read my book, they will start to learn more about the challenges and realities on the ground and that will help us all move one small step closer to a shared understanding. Only when we all have appreciation and respect for each others perspectives and take them into account when framing our approaches to capacity development will we jointly be able to make a real difference.


Jenny Pearson has lived and worked in Cambodia since 1995. She has qualifications in social work and management and worked in the public sector in England before coming to Cambodia. She arrived in Cambodia as a volunteer and went on to found and direct VBNK, Cambodia's leading capacity building institution. She has played a leading role in developing the capacity of the not-for-profit sector in Cambodia, introducing creative approaches to capacity development and serving on the boards of several prominent development organisations.

In 2007 she was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK. Since her retirement from VBNK in 2008, Jenny spends her time consulting and writing about capacity development, drawing on her years of experience to contribute the voice of practice to the international discourse on capacity development. She holds dual British and Cambodian citizenship and lives in a village outside Phnom Penh with her adopted Cambodian family.

Augusta Dwyer's "Broke but Unbroken" is Ready to Read

Read on to get an insider's view into "Broke but Unbroken" by Augusta Dwyer. Here, Dwyer talks about her inspiration for the book and what readers will get out of reading this new smash hit.

In 1987, in Rio de Janeiro, I saw a documentary that had just been released by filmmaker Tete Moraes, the friend of several journalists I knew back then. Her film was called “Land for Rose,” in English, and was about the struggles of a fairly new social movement attempting to take land – in this case, a huge, unproductive estate called Fazenda Annoni – so that they could make a living. Over the course of the filming Rose, a poor field worker gave birth to a baby boy. At the end of the documentary, however, we learned that Rose had been struck by a truck that rammed its way through a picket line, killing her and two others. I remember thinking to myself that, like the landless peasants interviewed in the documentary, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST, didn’t stand much of a chance.

In 2001, I took part in the large protests in Quebec City revolving around that year’s Summit of the Americas, and attended a lecture given by an MST delegate. I remember spending most of it, sitting in the dark, internally rocking in astonishment. Against all odds, the Sem Terra movement had become an enormous success. It had won tens of thousands of hectares of land for more than 250,000 Brazilian families. It had set up schools and cooperatives, sent dozens of peasants’ children to study medicine and agronomy in other countries and carried out training courses for its continually recycled and evolving leadership. Fazenda Annoni itself, by then renamed Sarandi, was producing and selling enormous quantities of milk, grains, meat, vegetables and even herbal tea.

Four years later, I decided that the public needed to know more about the positive outcomes of the many growing social movements of the Global South. In a world where ostensibly sane and clear-thinking people had accepted the travesty of the Iraq invasion, increasing global environmental destruction and a host of other depressing phenomena, I felt we were all in need of some good news for a change.

The result of my research brought me into contact with scores of impoverished people from Brazil to Indonesia and Argentina to India. They and their fellow members had all made similar strides in overcoming poverty on their own, rights-based, terms. Among the participants of these movements, moreover, I found a determination not only to grasp the resources that should have been theirs, but also to foster democratic decision-making in their methods, to preserve and protect natural environments, educate themselves and their children, and share the fruits of their victories among ever-wider communities. I found innovative ideas and strategies, and the desire to turn the top-down anti-poverty mechanisms of giant bi-lateral and multi-lateral aid institutions on their head in favor of managing the struggle against poverty themselves.

What I hope people will pick up from Broke But Unbroken: Grassroots Social Movements and Their Radical Solutions to Poverty is an entirely new way of looking at traditional poverty alleviation – and at the poor themselves. I believe that their stories of organized struggle and achievement paint a collective picture of them not as victims but as protagonists. Most of all, however, I hope that they will be inspired to learn more about and support these movements.


Augusta Dwyer is an award-winning independent journalist living in Canada.

Professionalizing the Humanitarian Sector

I recently attended the Second World Conference on Humanitarian Studies at Tufts University. The “humanitarian sector” is a growing field with anticipated 6% annual growth in terms of expanding needs for humanitarian assistance and concomitant increases in the numbers of those engaged in humanitarian work.

About 400 scholars, practitioners, educators and the Kumarian Press editor attended the conference. As Peter Walker, Director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts, explained the conference was to be very much a work in progress where ideas, suggestions and musings could be distributed in an open and receptive environment. I found the meeting fascinating. Clearly, with the growth of the humanitarian industry, something similar to what happened with business schools as explored in a wonderful book by Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton University Press, 2010) is a distinct possibility. Khurana notes the emergence of the MBA, designed to inculcate standards and levels of competence for those at managerial levels in the private sector. The professionalization of business required codifying knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct.

The Tufts conference attendees noted that professionalizing the humanitarian sector would entail devising sets of core competencies, enacting processes of certification and accreditation, inculcating opportunities for apprenticeship and lastly, forming a kind of professional association.

Obviously such professionalization is not without controversy or challenge. For one, the question of voice and who determines standards and core competencies remains unresolved. For another, the possibility of a professionally trained humanitarian elite—comprised of individuals from both the global North and South—runs the danger of devolving into the trajectory Khurana observes for business schools. Initially envisioned as training that would create a professional business class that would serve the needs of both society and business, the moral and ethical framework of professional education and apprenticeships in MBA programs became muted as business schools increasingly adopted the perspective that professional managers are merely agents of shareholders, responsible only for increasing profits.

Given the fact that humanitarian aid is also big business with a wide range of economic interests and competing stakeholders involved (indeed, among the attendees at the conference were some hedge fund managers), my fear is that a cadre of professional humanitarians could lose its way and professional humanitarians could become more the servants of special interests and organizations and less the helpers for those in need.

What do you think? Is there a need for defining and professionalizing the humanitarian sector? What would be some features needed to professionalize the sector?

KP Author Chris Corbett Reflects on Three Cups of Tea and its importance for NGO accountability

At a prior time, the Three Cups of Tea controversy could have been, and would have been, comfortably ignored by many of us and dismissed by others as a “tempest in a teapot”. That time is long passed.

We have all been subjected to too many nonprofit scandals, over too many years. We find them online, in newspapers and magazines, or on 60 Minutes, like the recent expose alleging malfeasance at the Central Asia Institute (CAI). We are faced with investigative reports, like Three Cups of Deceit, by authors like J. Krakauer-- reports that deprive all but a few us of the luxury of ignoring or dismissing the allegations.

And now the long investigations and lawsuits begin. The federal government (IRS) must step in; the state has stepped in (Montana AG) and two state lawmakers have initiated a class action lawsuit against CAI. And over how many months and years will all these and future investigations take their toll on public trust and confidence in nonprofits? How much more can the public, elected officials and the sector bear?

And the impact of this scandal far exceeds most others. Three Cups of Tea sold over 4 million copies. CAI markets itself to schools and schoolchildren through its Pennies for Peace Program. Who will tell all those children and what are they going to say? No easy answers here. Our President reportedly donated Nobel Prize money to CAI. Our military reportedly promotes the book with soldiers to provide valuable perspective. What happens when government leaders become vested or reliant on a nonprofit-- and then that trust is damaged or destroyed? No easy answers here.

Ignore the scandal we cannot. Learn from it we must. As donors, we must more effectively scrutinize who we donate to. We must be alert to experienced watchdogs that give us much insight into individual nonprofits. One watchdog (AIP) found problems in 2009 and publically exposed them a year ago (Vol. 54, April/May 2010). Any donor who read that report would likely have already written his or her last check. As board members, we must ask: could I find myself in similar shoes as CAI board members do now? When I express a concern at a board meeting, is it taken seriously? When I ask for information, do I have access? Are we handling and scrutinizing conflicts of interest proactively? Do we grasp that the mere appearance of a conflict of interest can be every bit as damaging-- or more damaging-- than an actual conflict?

The burden of improving the status quo lies on all of our shoulders--whether as a member of the public, a donor or, most especially, as a board member where opportunities for improvement can be but a board motion away. We must become more conscious of our responsibilities to choose nonprofits wisely and understand how we can make a difference while expecting more of our nonprofit leaders. Otherwise, the alternative harsh reality will very likely be more government regulation and intrusion that will come at great cost to all nonprofits and the communities they serve.

Note: These views reflect the author’s perspective that self-regulation is far preferable to more government regulation and intrusion by the IRS, or other federal and state regulators that will come at great cost to fragile nonprofits and the communities they serve. His views are contained in Advancing Nonprofit Stewardship Through Self-Regulation: Translating Principles Into Practice (Kumarian Press, April 2011). The book identifies ways to implement the 33 Principles of Good Governance and Ethical Practice issued by Independent Sector’s Panel in 2007 which are relevant to various areas of CAI controversy.

Living and Working in Aidland

What kinds of stories or people did you find in research that surprised you? How have you seen people coping with the cultural divides between foreign and local aid workers who spend every day together?

Heather: What has surprised me the most is the changes that have occurred over the last dozen years within the world of development professionals in Nepal. Many of the larger aid agencies, both governmental and non-governmental, have dramatically reduced their permanent staff, both foreign and local. There has been a turn towards hiring consultants and shorter-term contracts since in the mid-1990s. This is changing both the kinds of people who come to Nepal to do aid work and their relationship with Nepal.

Consultants and those on three to six-month contracts have less incentive to learn anything about Nepal, and being based in hotels or temporary housing means they have less reason to venture beyond a defined route between home and work. This new employment structure has also driven a wedge between long-term foreign residents or those on long-term contracts in Nepal and this new consultant class.

The Chinese, Japanese and South Korean aid workers who are becoming more numerous in Kathmandu are not following this short-term pathway. Instead, one sees East Asian nationals investing in learning Nepalese and making friends with local colleagues. There has also been an expansion of businesses and schools to serve this new group of foreign aid professionals. The shops that once catered to European and American families now are stocked with Korean, Chinese and Japanese groceries and household supplies.

Anne-Meike: I was initially surprised that a place like Phnom Penh could have become a destination for “lifestyle migration”--people mentioned how good it was for expat families with young children; how village-like, how easy, how comfortable. I know it’s a special case, simply because there are so many international aid workers there, but it amazed me at the beginning. It also meant that people could--and did--continue the kind of lifestyle they might have had in Europe or the US: buying organic vegetables, go to Yoga or Pilates classes, buy fair-trade accessories. It all makes sense, but I wasn’t quite expecting it.

The other big insight for me was how much was going on in terms of aid work that was NOT related to organizations or agencies. For example, quite a few of the people I talked to were engaged in “aid activities” in their free time, like helping to establish a local NGO, sponsoring their cook or domestic worker to learn new skills, spending time with Buddhist monks at the weekend.

I thought if their day job was all about aid, they might want a break, but some continued this in their spare time. Related to this, I was interested to see so many “aid entrepreneurs”--people who had come to Cambodia independently, and set up their own projects, kind of outside the established NGO/governmental aid sector. I think this is also worth looking into more.

- From an interview with authors Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman (Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers) by Daniel J Gerstle, HELO Magazine. Read the rest of the interview here.