Q & A: Matt Warner on Empowering Communities, Not Bureaucracies

In discussing the Arabic translation of Poverty & Freedom, Atlas Network’s president shares his vision for a lasting exodus from poverty powered by local solutions

Poverty & Freedom: Case Studies on Global Economic Development was translated into Arabic by Ideas Beyond Borders.

What drove you to write Poverty & Freedom?

At the time, I was looking at ways to improve our own model and see what other people were doing. I quickly came to appreciate that many of the academics and practitioners in international economic development were really frustrated with the mismatch between what outsiders thought they could do, and what the actual results and unexpected consequences were on the ground. I wanted to create a network where people working on the same problems could connect and learn from each other. I also wanted to point out the work of local civil society organizations, in particular think tanks, because it's a growing network, and they are best positioned to be working on local solutions.

Where do you currently see the most scope for creating a tangible impact on poverty at the global level?

One of the bigger themes right now, that's probably one of the most important and practical ways to reduce poverty, is to focus on the large populations of people who work in the informal economy and make it easier for them to join the formal economy. Around 60 percent of the world's workers work informally, and for the vast majority, it's simply because it's not easy to join the formal economy. So, the informality challenge globally right now is both a big problem and a huge opportunity for people who care about practical solutions to give people more economic freedom. That's where a lot of our local think tank partners are focusing their attention and making a lot of progress.

In Poverty & Freedom, you advocate for “permissionless innovation.” How can we move away from traditional models of aid to achieve this?

International aid and development absolutely must change, both because it hasn't been very effective, and because recipient countries are experiencing a lot of the intervention in a very negative way. One of the consequences is that classical liberalism in some places is being misinterpreted and given a bad name because they associate these ideas with foreign intervention. Successful economies are ones where there's a wide variety of activity going on that is working because individuals are making choices for themselves. We have to trust them and afford everyone the dignity of self-determination, not just because it's morally correct. It’s also the way that economies become more dynamic and interesting.

How can classical liberal ideas be most impactful in spearheading new approaches to international development?

By encouraging the establishment of liberal institutions that give everybody more freedom to solve these questions for themselves and their communities, according to their own culture, religion, and preferences. Institutions that protect their rights allow them to make choices in their environments, with their own local knowledge, that will solve their problems over time. That's how all of us who live in more prosperous economies with better human rights records have done it. We're not special. When people living in low-income countries move to high-income countries, they prosper. It's the environment of rules and regulations and government abuses that make it almost impossible for people in these countries to prosper unless they're politically connected, etc.

What institutional barriers are inhibiting this change?

Governments around the world are trying to do way too many things at once. They are neglecting some of the fundamental functions that governments can provide, such as a consistent and legible property rights system so that people can protect property, the ability to open a bank account, or to be able to go to a judge and resolve a dispute peacefully in a timely fashion. These are basic functions of government. If they try to do too many other things and they're not doing those things well, then they've got to get back to basics.

In Poverty and Freedom, you criticize donor-driven development efforts that impose external solutions to local challenges. How do you define the scope of international actors?

One of the key messages of the book is a message to outsiders: to philanthropists, to foreign governments, to foreign experts. And that message is that you have a very limited role, and you should stay in your lane. It doesn't mean no role—I believe very much in us all working together and sharing ideas across the globe. That's very healthy. But poverty is not something that either the government or foreign experts need to solve for people. If a society is going to achieve progress, they have to define that for themselves. I'm not claiming that there's some clean, easy solution to the challenge of societies becoming more free, but they have to go through the iterative pluralist process of making and trying to strengthen their institutions themselves.

How do you hope that students reading Poverty and Freedom in places like Mosul, Sulaymaniyah, and Baghdad respond to the central thesis linking poverty to lack of freedom?

I hope that people who read these texts can appreciate first the relationship between the freedom of the individual and prosperity for society, and then that this relationship has nothing to do with any particular culture. It's something that has been true across many cultures, across much of time, and there is a homegrown version of freedom and prosperity that people can find for themselves. I think we've made the mistake in the last 50 or 60 years of thinking that the versions of liberal democracy that the West has demonstrated are the versions others should copy. There's certainly a lot to learn from looking at other countries and taking ideas freely, but adapting them and making them your own is really important.

You support the impulse of spreading liberal democracy around the world. Where should foreign input end and local agency begin?

Liberal democracy is the opposite of top-down. We can't impose liberal democracy on others; there’s a very messy track record of us trying to do that. Even though a country may go in ‘the wrong direction’, it has to be their decision to make. People have to choose liberal democracy for liberal democracy to work. Outsiders absolutely have the prerogative of deciding who to support and what resources to provide, but need to limit their own aptitude for designing change and imposing that on others.

To what extent do the ideas in Poverty & Freedom become even more relevant in post-conflict settings like Iraq?

Instead of looking at a post-crisis environment and getting experts to redesign and solve all these challenging problems, look to communities themselves and how they are responding. Amplify the best among them so that others can learn from and adopt those practice. Oftentimes, the solutions that work in context are going to be idiosyncratic, and they're going to be discovered first and foremost by the people who have no choice but to wrestle with it because they're living it. The tragedy is when those emerging, idiosyncratic solutions are ignored and then overshadowed or made illegal by a top-down solution that tries to solve it for everyone. But people are different, geographies are different, religions are different, historical practices are different, and so the solutions are going to look a little bit different.

You talk about the way that foreign aid fosters dependency rather than empowering communities. How do you feel this has played out in the Middle East?

Iraq is an obvious example of where foreign interference, well-intentioned or not, has failed to make a (positive) difference. Foreign support is helpful, but it’s not a silver bullet, and it comes with a lot of risk. But it’s a two-way street. There is an important opportunity for the Arab world to stop looking to its own leaders or to outside institutions and to solve problems for themselves. If someone is coming in with a huge checkbook, it's very difficult to say no, even if it comes with a lot of conditions and inappropriate influence. Both outsiders and locals have to resist allowing the well-intentioned desire to help from turning into foreign solutions and foreign-led solutions.

In Poverty & Freedom, you say that local leadership, given “the freedom to grow and develop,” can create “a lasting exodus from poverty.” How do current development models inhibit this progress?

Large philanthropic organizations from the West can provide a lot of resources, but with that comes the mistaken belief that this should include their own ideas about what should be done. The best intentions do not take away the problem of a lack of local knowledge. Local knowledge is not something that can be centralized and put into a textbook. It lives in the minds of people and their lived experiences. The safest route for foreign support is not government to government or philanthropy to government, but philanthropy to philanthropy to civil society, and allowing diversity to flourish.

How optimistic are you that a lasting exodus from poverty can be achieved in Iraq?

There’s no reason that any society can’t make progress on these questions, but there’s also no denying that Iraq suffers from a history of foreign intervention. That’s a particular set of challenges that evoke a lot of my sympathy, but it comes back to the power of self-determination—from those seeds, the most promising solutions can emerge.

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