Episode 6
Episode 6 critiques how U.S. leaders and institutions repeatedly misread societies they intervene in because they rely on the wrong frameworks and reward the wrong metrics. Michael Brown lays out an operating framework of assumptions that distort analysis from Timbuktu to Tehran.
Is foreign aid charity — or one of the cheapest instruments of power a country has? Dr.
Is foreign aid charity — or one of the cheapest instruments of power a country has?
Dr. Samantha Nutt, physician and founder of War Child, has spent thirty years working in Somalia, Sudan, eastern Congo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Michael Brown has spent fifty on land and natural resource governance in many of the same places. In this conversation they take on the questions the aid debate usually avoids:
— Should NGOs be working themselves out of a job — and why is it still so rarely national staff running them? — Being at the table isn't enough. Why local communities need leverage, and what happens to their voice without it — Is civil society making progress anywhere at war? — The resource curse, and whether the US–China competition over Congo's minerals changes anything for Congolese people — Aid as soft and hard power: something to fight, or something to accept? — Why gutting USAID isn't charity withdrawn — and what it has to do with the next pandemic — Can the current cynicism about foreign aid be overcome — and what's actually in everyone's best interest?
The Unpopular View challenges assumptions and takes positions many in the aid and development world don't like. Host Michael Brown is the author of Redeeming REDD+ and Climate Mitigation in the Land Sector of the Global South.
Dr. Samantha Nutt is the author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid.
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Read episode pageSource episodeLocalization only matters if it changes who holds power, resources, and the ability to make outside aid unnecessary.
Every development program claims its goal is to leave. None of them do. The Green Revolution helped India move from famine risk to food exporter status and then ended because it succeeded. Much of today's aid system has not followed that logic. This episode argues that the only development model worth funding is one designed to make itself unnecessary by shifting authority, capacity, and long-term control to communities.
Read episode pageSource episodeA field-tested look at the development sectors that delivered results and the systems that still struggle to produce lasting change.
AIDS arrested. Ebola contained. Malaria deaths cut in half. That was not charity; it was the international system protecting everyone. But if this system can deliver vaccines and health results, why does it so often fail to create durable economic and institutional change? Michael Brown examines where international development works, where it fails, and why the difference matters.
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