Everything's coming up facilitation.

In college I had a class on intergroup dialogue facilitation – my groups were women of color and white women – which had all kinds of long-lasting detrimental effects like a persistent habit of identifying as feminist and an occasional tendency toward annoying social-justice-speak. But in large part, practice in active listening, group observation, fostering trust and maintaining impartiality, and intergroup power dynamics fell by the wayside after college; law school doesn't really lend itself to “fostering communication,” unless you're trying to tell to the court how opposing counsel is a troglodyte whose arguments are a Threat to the Rule of Law Itself. Recently, though, these concepts have been emerging again in ways that would allow a nice “I-told-you-so” in the direction of everyone who was skeptical about such a use of my tuition dollars.

For example, the idea of facilitation itself came up twice at a lecture by William Easterly I went to earlier this week. It was a launch for his new book, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, which assumes that the ability of the world's poor to seek self-determination should be the goal of development at least to the same degree as national economic progress.

One of the ideas Easterly presented was that a “morally neutral” technical solution to poverty is impossible, because efforts to provide water or infrastructure or health care are always intertwined with rights to remain on the land or not be ruled by autocrats who are supported by the aid dollars that fund the project. In other words, it's a mistake to ignore the fact that every technical measure undertaken will either help or hinder the rights of the local poor.

Easterly emphasized that what he advocates is not laissez-faire development but a re-direction of workers' efforts toward facilitating the ability of the poor to invoke their individual political rights. His striking use of the word “facilitate” made me think not only of my work in college, but of the need to remove one's ego (also anathema to a law school grad) from international development work.

The issue of facilitation came up again in a conversation after the lecture with a friend and Sierra Leonean expat who's involved in international economic development on the corporate/private sector end. He was telling me how, in his work around a controversial cultural practice, he doesn't refer to the practice by the alarmist name invoked in common Western parlance – instead he uses the more innocuous “traditional” term, in order to engage and not alienate the groups he's working with. From there he identifies common values and goals shared by the group and the people who want to see the practice change, and builds on this to develop alternatives to the practice that work toward eventually ending it.

Development workers looking to local processes instead of steering them down a prescribed linear path is apparently transitioning out of the wonksphere into public consciousness. In one of my grad school courses on comparative development, this idea appeared in writings by Rodrik, Pempel, Sen, etc., but since then I've run across it in venues from writings by African development theorists and conversations with American NGO directors to TED talks and podcasts.

I want to take the time to extract some common strategies from the different circumstances where this idea has appeared, but what I'm curious about right now is why this is the case at this particular moment. Is it the fact that we've tried everything else – democratizing, structural adjustment, star power? Like, is this just the development trend for the 2010s which will be subsumed by The Next Big Thing once the Zeitgeist has shifted? Or is it some sort of confluence of factors, like sufficient research on earlier strategies, widespread use of social media and increased availability of information, and the private sector's exploitation ad nauseum of most other global regions? Or something else?

At any rate, it's odd how this weird little niche part of my life really seems to be coming into the spotlight as a profitable skill. It's good – it definitely adds a(nother) extra dimension to the possible ways to market myself – but oh lord there are so many ways to go.