How Dignity-First Development Can Spread Liberal Democracy Better

Outside experts must restrain their impulse to “solve” problems for the developing world.

Matt Warner — Mar 24, 2022

Summary: This article presents a new model for international development based on local knowledge. The author argues that dignity-first development can foster economic growth and institutional innovation, which are essential for spreading liberal democracy. He contrasts this approach with the failed top-down models of the past, which ignored the lessons of the Great Enrichment and provoked resentment and authoritarianism.

The Great Enrichment, which raised living standards by a whopping 3,000 percent since 1800, was not planned from above. It was driven by individuals who, once free, could work to improve their lives and societies.

Unfortunately, this insight is lost on the international development community, which continues to ignore local knowledge and push outsider-led projects on the developing world. In our new book, my co-author and I present a new model for international development, which combines the lesson of the Great Enrichment with the latest interdisciplinary research and our own experience supporting locally-led change around the world. We call it dignity-first development.

To define dignity, we look to local perspectives. For example, in 2019, the Overseas Development Institute interviewed refugees in Bangladesh and Lebanon to learn what the term dignity meant to them in the context of receiving aid. While interpretations varied slightly across cultures, two aspects stood out: dignity as respect and dignity as self-reliance. One refugee is quoted as saying, “Working hard and earning your own livelihood is a big part of Rohingya identity and our idea of dignity.” In development rhetoric, dignity as respect is the familiar interpretation, while dignity as self-reliance is absent from most models.

Stressing the importance of self-reliance in development is not just a “bootstraps” argument for solving poverty. It’s an argument that when individuals participate freely in the economy, they contribute more than the marginal product of their labor. With dignity and freedom, individuals become active agents whose day-to-day decisions create economic growth and whose knowledge helps craft institutions that favor the free exercise of those decisions.

The innovation that enabled the Great Enrichment required what Carl Schramm and Bob Litan refer to as “a process of constant and continual entrepreneurial revolution.” Such a process, we argue, is best served by the ideals of liberal democracy. However, those ideals cannot be spread through what some experts call “isomorphic mimicry” or “cargo cult thinking” – the copycat approach to institution building. Real institutional change is idiosyncratic both in the process of change and in the outcome. After all, those who will be governed by the new institutions – who will either be oppressed or set free by them – are in the best position, both morally and practically, to build them.

In this way, dignity means self-determination at the individual and institutional levels of development. Liberal institutions are not the West’s gift to the rest. We have tried that approach, and the result has been a rise in authoritarian populism, not as a preferred ideology to liberalism, but as an expression of resentment towards outsiders whose ill-fit institutional models failed to function as promised.

The global development community is now trying to fix the mess it created by practicing “localization,” an attempt to limit the influence of outsiders by supporting local NGOs. Rhetorically, this is a step in the right direction, but in practice, unsurprisingly, outsider influence remains outsized. In 2021, USAID, which has new targets for increasing the proportion of its funding to local NGOs, earned unflattering media coverage for its failure to attract local partners in Central America after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris promised to investigate the “root causes” of migration.

Localization must be about more than who gets the money. It must be about who leads development. We offer the following three guidelines for getting localization right.

First, projects, strategies, and definitions of success must come from local NGOs. Outside experts must restrain their impulse to “solve” problems for others. They must accept their limitations and give up on setting priorities and designing and leading projects. Instead, local NGOs must present themselves along with their vision for change and compete for support.

Second, award amounts must be proportional to the project. Predetermined development budgets are often too large and represent too much of an NGO’s total budget. Single-donor projects and/or single-donor NGOs struggle to maintain independence and often fail to diversify their funding sources, creating organizational volatility.

Third, accountability still matters. While local organizations should define success, grant makers should only fund organizations with ambitious, measurable, and meaningful goals. Subsequent funding should be contingent on a combination of achievements promised and authentic learning from shortfalls that can inform future work.

Government-funded aid agencies may be structurally incompatible with true localization. In that case, private philanthropy would lead this new model. But regardless of where the money comes from, all outsiders must take human dignity seriously and understand its fundamental role in economic development and the future of liberal democracy.

Video | Democracy & Autocracy

Dead Wrong: Is Democracy Dying?

We never got to experience the end of history. The dictators returned. The authoritarians are at the gate. Democracy is dead or dying. Luckily, that’s Dead Wrong.

Johan Norberg — Jul 25, 2018

Blog Post | Human Freedom

The Reports of the Death of Democracy Are Exaggerated

All in all, it would be premature to write democracy's obituary just yet.

Marian L. Tupy — Jul 5, 2018

Is democracy in trouble? Asked about the state of democracy in the world during a recent interview, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, “I am worried about the fact that there are conditions out there that provide the petri dish for something terrible to happen, where some of the definitions I gave of fascism would take hold.” In some places, such as Russia and Venezuela, democracy is already dead. In other countries, including Turkey and the Philippines, representative government seems to be on its last legs.

Even in America, many believe, democracy is under threat. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” warned the Washington Post after Donald Trump’s election as U.S. President. “Fascism’s coming to America,” Bill Maher opined on his popular HBO show last week. The data, however, tell a different story. While the number of countries that can be characterized as democracies fell from an all-time high of 121 in 2016 to 120 in 2017, the quality of democracy continues to improve in countries that have remained democratic. On that measure, the world is more democratic than it has ever been.

Writing in 1989, an American academic reflected on the gradual implosion of communist dictatorships and growing democratization around the world in an article titled The End of History? “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history,” Francis Fukuyama wrote, “but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Since he penned those words, Fukuyama has come under much criticism. Today, Fukuyama himself seems to be having second thoughts. “Twenty five years ago, I didn’t have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward,” said Fukuyama in a 2017 interview. “And I think they clearly can.” True enough, populism of both the left-wing and right-wing varieties is on the rise in many parts of the world. Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss Fukuyama’s original thesis altogether.

From a historical perspective, democracy is a relatively new phenomenon. For most of humanity’s recorded history, people have lived under some form of autocracy. Power was concentrated in the hands of one person, such as an absolute monarch, or a small group of people, such as oligarchs. Even ancient “democracies,” such as Athens and republican Rome, denied the vote to women and slaves.

Modern democracy or, to be more precise, the representative form of government, arose in Western Europe and North America during the 18th century. It then slowly spread to other parts of the world, reaching a high point in the early 1920s. The rise of fascism, nazism and communism between the world wars reversed some of the democratic gains. To make matters worse, many of the countries that gained independence after World War II fell into the hands of autocrats. By the early 1970s, roughly twice as many countries could have been described as autocratic as democratic.

All that changed with the collapse of communism. The Center for Systemic Peace (CSP), a research institution in Virginia, USA, evaluates the level of democracy in each country on a scale from -10, which denotes a tyranny like North Korea, and 10, which denotes a politically free society like the United Kingdom. Most countries fall somewhere in between those two extremes. In 2017, for example, the United States scored 8 and France 9.

According to the CSP’s research, the combined score of the world’s autocracies fell from 571 to 282 between 1989 and 2017. The combined score of the world’s democracies rose from 494 to 967. Similarly, the number of countries with positive scores rose from 58 to 120, while the number of countries with negative scores declined from 82 to 43. The picture is equally encouraging, once democracy scores are adjusted by population size. In 1989, less than half of humanity lived under some form of democracy. By 2017, two thirds of people on Earth enjoyed the benefits of some form of representative government.

None of the above denies the dangers of excessive populism. But the fortunes of democracy should be kept in a proper perspective. In terms of the number of countries that qualify as more-or-less democratic, the world had reached its peak in 2016. The quality of democracy, however, has risen steadily and has never been higher. All in all, it would be premature to write democracy’s obituary just yet.