Page 453 - Cultures and Organizations

418 IMPLICATIONS

the donor side, however, the situation is not always better. Many develop-
ment agencies have grown out of the foreign service, the main objective
of which is the promotion of the donor country’s interests abroad. Diplo-
mats lack both the skills and the organizational culture to act as success-
ful entrepreneurs for development consulting activities. Development aid
money often has political strings attached to it: it has to be spent in a way

that satisfies the values, if not the interests, of the donor country citizens
and politicians, whether or not such values are shared by citizens and poli-
ticians at the receiving end. Projects funded by international agencies such
as the World Bank in theory do not have this constraint, but they have to

satisfy the agency’s objectives, which often also conflict with the receivers’
objectives. 40
The institutional problem at the receiving end is the most serious for
countries in which traditional institutional frameworks did not survive
colonization and decolonization. Most of these lie in sub-Saharan Africa.
Even when local wars do not destroy the products of peaceful development,

forces in society make development difficult to attain. Without institu-
tional traditions, personal interests can prevail unchecked. Politicians are
out to enrich themselves and their families without being controlled by
traditional norms. Institutions cannot be created from scratch: they are
living arrangements, rooted in values and history, which have to grow.
The economic success of certain countries of East Asia owes much to the
fact that centuries-old institutional frameworks existed that were adapted
to modern times.
Development cooperation has suffered from various implicit models of
how organizations should function (see Chapter 9) between donor and host
country technicians.
Take the story of a German engineering firm installing an irrigation

system in an African country. Overcoming serious technical diffi culties,

the engineers constructed an effective and easy-to-operate system. They
provided all the necessary documentation for later use and repairs, trans-
lated into English and Swahili. Then they left. Four months later the sys-
tem broke down, and it was never repaired. The local authority structure
had not had an opportunity to adopt the project as its family property; the
project had no local “master.” 41
A classic study sponsored by the Canadian International Development
Agency looked at factors determining the effectiveness of donor country
personnel overseas. It covered 250 Canadian expatriates in six host coun-