Power and Saints: Conflict over the means of production in the charity industry.

Power and Saints: Conflict over the means of production in the charity industry. I am reading Allan W. Eckert’s “Wilderness Empire”. This seminal account of the Iroquois League demonstrates how little things change with the passing of fashion and technology. The same conflict between justice and rent seeking we find in the mission and development field today existed in the vast wilderness of North America as Catholic orders and European kingdoms wrestled for wealth and power. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac's writing, below, explains the conflict between the Jesuits, Recollet friars, and the priests of the Missions Estrangeres concerning his plan to build a fort along the strait – or detroit, as it was termed – which separated Lake Huron from Lake Erie. This plan would bring civil administration into a region largely administered by the church and would “civilize” and “educate” the Indians, including efforts especially focused on teaching them to speak the French language. Cadillac wrote: “It is essential that in this matter of teaching the Indians our language the missionaries should act in good faith, and that His Majesty should have the goodness to impose his strictest orders upon them; for which there are several good reasons. The first and most stringent is that when members of religious orders or other ecclesiastics undertake anything, they never let it go. The second is that by not teaching French to the Indians they make themselves necessary [as interpreters] to the King and Governor. The third is that if all Indians spoke French, all kinds of ecclesiastics would be able to instruct them. This might cause them [the Jesuits] to lose some of the presents they get; for though these Reverend Fathers come here only for the glory of God, yet the one thing does not prevent the other. Nobody can deny that the priests own three-quarters of Canada. From St. Paul’s Bay to Quebec, here is nothing but the seigneury of Beauport that belongs to a private person. All the rest, which is the greater part, belongs to the Jesuits or other ecclesiastics. The Upper Town of Quebec is composed of six or seven superb palaces belonging to Hospital Nuns, Ursulines, Jesuits, Recolletes, Seminary priests, and the bishop. There may be some forty private houses, and even these pay rent to the ecclesiastics, which shows that the one thing does not prevent the other. One may as well knock one’s head against a wall as hope to convert the Indians in any other way [then that of civilizing them]; for thus far all the fruits of the missions consist in the baptism of infants who die before reaching the age of reason”. What I find striking is this notion of rent seeking and the conflict between benefiting targeted communities and meeting rather less sanctified needs that mission and development practitioners frequently experience. Even more alarming is the perpetuation of a state of dependency and subjection in the power relationship. Cadillac is demonstrating this internal contradiction of the mission and development industry; If target communities are empowered, converted or otherwise transformed, than the source of income is diminished. This is especially relevant in the mission and development field because the excesses are not as regulated or reported as in other spheres of society. There is an adage in the developing world that generals and preachers never go hungry. Working in the developing world, it is eye opening to see the modern financial kingdoms created by Central American Protestant families that control the levers of power for North/South Exchanges. Even more alarming is the wave of North American retirees moving to exotic, comfortable locals as modern day missionaries to spread the word and donated shoes, frequently taking up shop in tourist destinations where neither the need nor danger is great. This is not to mask the considerable sacrifices and struggles of the faith-based and development communities seeking justice and empowerment for communities marginalized by the powers of the day. Rather, understanding the historical examples of rent seeking by church hierarchies provides a needed historical context for establishing direct and transformational practices in mission and development.

Development Through People and Not Things

I recently attended the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) conference in Las Vegas. I had the luck of stumbling into a session with Karol Boudreaux, of George Mason University, presenting a paper titled “Land Reform as Social Justice: The Case of South Africa”. I was interested in the title as social justice is not a theme you encounter much at APEE events unless it is demonstrate how us egg headed idealist tend to mess things up in our attempts to realize a more just world.
While her paper focused on examining South African land reform policies in the context of Hayek’s arguments about social justice, she mentioned private land reform policies that offer a comparative sample for evaluating land reform programs.

Her research found that state directed land reform policies were a disaster. The numbers demonstrated that transferring functioning agricultural holdings to poor farmers only decreased output with the majority of farmers abandoning the lands within a decade. While not providing very much analysis on why they failed, it appears that the primary issues were the lack of technical and business capacity to manage competitive commercial enterprises.

An exception to the failed attempts at justice through government intervention was the land distribution program of the sugar growers association. While their motives were self-serving, they wanted to lessen the demands for redistributing white sugar growing lands to blacks by increasing the number of black growers, their results where much better. The primary difference I was able to observe in the presentation concerned the focus of the private sector programs to assure success by not only distributing land but also providing capital, technical assistance and guaranteeing a market while the new farmers got their feet on the ground.

After her presentation, we talked about different land reform models and she commented on how the most successful agricultural programs in South Africa were not based on land or capital. It was working with women living in the slums to understand local markets. They were able to identify an urban market for the housewives in Johansburg looking for organic gourmet produce. With knowledge, these women were able to start producing and growing their business.

The South African land distribution program demonstrates that capital and land are not the critical elements of successful transformational development programming. People have to be empowered to use these tools. These resources are transformed into wealth by ingenuity and hard work. Programs that do not stimulate these attributes while at the same time undermining them create worse results then the injustices they seek to remedy.

HSP’s methodology to focus on the empowerment of people is demonstrated to be the critical factor in successful development programming. While this is obvious to development people, community organizing and empowerment programs are the least funded off all charitable, justice and anti-poverty pursuits. The reason is that these transformational programs are more expensive.

The challenge is to educate funding sources, be they the World Bank or Aunt Jane Doe, about the benefits of investing in real transformation.