This blog largely shares the evident current enthusiasm for exploring more imaginatively, as a matter of public policy, the potential explicit developmental contributions of the private sector.
By this I mean not the process of using aid to develop a more functional local private sector (for the development cascade that may bring), but harnessing the potential contributions of especially big business to the achievement of development goals, as well as including business voices -- as and where appropriate -- in debates about what those goals should be and how they should be achieved.
Many posts to date on this blog deal with the issues arising in such encounters and relationships. A major theme of those posts is that far from being enthusiastic about such engagements, many policymakers either overlook their potential or, if they consider the business community, are unduly ambivalent about exploring working together on issues of mutual interest.
There is, nevertheless, a wave of at least official policy interest from OECD aid donors in these issues.
(There is alot of material being produced. Perhaps the most comprehensive and reflective survey of global bilateral approaches is a Canadian one from January this year, Investing in the Business of Development (here)).
Thus having argued in many previous posts that the problem is arguably too little attention by policymakers to the potential 'synergies' and shared goals, I use my blogger's prerogative to suggest that in many respects there exists in parallel a contrary problem: an approach that sees engaging the private sector as a development panacea, without applying the same caution and critical thinking that is applied to donor-government relations.
Indeed one thing particularly commending the 2013 report referenced above is that it rightly expresses skepticism about this new policy orientation as a development 'silver bullet', arguing that many current advocates assume that from harnessing business's interest and attributes, a 'win-win-win-win' situation must result for communities, companies, donor and recipient governments.
Such assumptions (and the enthusiasm they engender) pay too little attention to just how political, as with 'regular' development, pro-development interactions with business will be at both the general and project-specific level; in pointing out the obviously huge shared public and private sector interests in peace and prosperity, they can tend to gloss over how politicised is the question of who one means by 'the private sector' (who gets a seat at debates to shape the post-2015 development agenda? Which companies does a donor agency engage or neglect? And so on).
Thus current enthusiasm for orienting development policy in search of alignments with business tends to underplay how political, indeed ideological, will be the questions merely of choice -- choosing development partners from among the diverse 'private sector' (for working with on goals, or for discussing those goals), and indeed choosing the overall policy of building such relationships. Such choices go directly to large questions about the role of business in society generally, or the role of the state vs business in providing public goods.
In previous posts I have lamented the narrow-mindedness of most public policy for not thinking imaginatively enough about engaging with business (and vice versa). This reticence does, however, reflect very real awareness of the policy dilemmas involved and often well-founded reservations about explicitly tying-in business to development projects and policies.
Still, I'll conclude in a tone that continues the lament: yes, the decision to engage business, and then the process of doing so, is full of policy minefields and trade-offs and problems; but these are not that different from the problems and dilemmas encountered in dealing with governments and other familiar development actors. The challenges of our century are too big and inter-connected to be left to public policymaking alone, quite apart from the reality of the huge de facto development impact (for better or worse) that business activity has. One needs as many 'wins' as one can reasonably find. Public and aid policy in Africa should embrace embracing the private sector, and figure it out as we go.
Jo
