Thursday, October 23, 2008

Searching for Kyle in Akta

Wait, I swear that makes sense. I spent the summer working for ASEAN in Indonesia, and I ran across all sorts of problems, some of which involved undercooked food, but many of which involved what Easterly what talking about. Basically, what I encountered echos parts of Kyle and Akta's posts, and as such, Easterly. Here we go.

ASEAN had an interdisciplinary problems like woah. Basically ASEAN was divided into three components: political, economic, and cultural. Within the two relevant bureaus (guess which ones) there were a number of subdivisions. None of these divisions spoke with each other, and no one was looking at problems from an interdisciplinary nature. The economics people were looking to solve economic problems regardless of political issues, while the political people were pushing programs that ignored economic realities within the 10 member states. As such, literally nothing ever got agreed upon at ASEAN.

Why did nothing get done? Because everyone was planning and not searching. Everyone- especially foreign firms- believed they had the full idea of what to do even before they arrived in Indonesia. Every plan that was implemented was started from theoretical scratch, and no one seemed to be looking to expand existing programs. And as such, very few plans seemed to get much done: there were always unexpected problems at the local level, and many programs had a hard time finding proper labor to implement their programs.

Does this mean the people working at ASEAN were stupid? Only kinda. These were all caring, intelligent people, but many of them hadn't worked in this region before, and few of them believed that their plans wouldn't work. The problem was that they didn't trust existing local solutions enough to expand them, preferring to start the solution all over themselves.

Easterly is frowning somewhere.

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