© 2007 Richard Akerman 

His basic theme was that things in Afghanistan are complex, and we have to be realistic about what can be accomplished. He showed the very detailed, technocratic plans drawn up by the international community, with all their lofty (and to be fair, quite noble) goals, and contrasted those ambitious plan with the realities of the country. In a question from the audience, the questioner termed the international approach "PowerPoint democracy". After the event, I overheard others talking about how managerial language and project management have insinuated their way into international development. That was the aspect that struck me most. There is a fallacy of project planning, that by drawing up the project plan, you are creating truth. If you have enough detail, you create a new world. Similarly, if you use enough management language about enabling democracy by transforming the leveraging of the Afghan people, you create this kind of bubble of unreality around what you're doing. You can't assume that an entire diverse population can be reduced to statistic, and considered as interchangable "resources" who buy-in to your project plan. It's madness. Rory put up a slide that said basically they start off creating this huge expectation of democracy coming rapidly to Afghanistan, and then they throw in troops and consultants, and then the plans inevitably fail, and then they make a critical error... they try to make it better by doing THE SAME, ONLY MORE SO Although he didn't use this terminology, I know this as

The First Law of Bad Management If something isn't working, do more of it.

Here are a couple more pics I took

  © 2007 Richard Akerman

  © 2007 Richard Akerman 

Above: Rory Stewart making fun of the approach to state-building, simultaneously impossibly vague, complex, and unrealistic. He lives and works and Kabul, his organisation is called the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. 

UPDATE 2021-04-03:

Video of the talk is available via TVO - go to my followup Big Ideas post to can view it online in the Internet Archive.

IDRC links changed to Internet Archive.

He also spoke at IDRC in April of this year, they have a podcast of the talk available. Wednesday's event was also recorded, and I think there will be a webcast available somewhere on the IDRC site sometime. 

A slideshow of photos taken during Stewart's visit. (Note: This is not the slideshow that he did, it's a slideshow OF him.) 

Audio podcast of his October 2007 presentation in Ottawa, Canada.

Labels: afghanistan, ottawa, rory stewart