Seeing Like a Slum: Towards Open, Deliberative Development
I have an article in the most recent version of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs that makes an effort to connect the open development movement to some theories of political sociology without which I think transparency initiatives are likely to run into trouble, perhaps even leading to regressive outcomes.
Efforts like open mapping of low-income places or budget transparency websites are now quite trendy in development circles. One of the primary goals of these initiatives is to make “legible” what was previously inscrutable (e.g. the location of public health facilities or public spending on provincial education). To borrow from James Scott of Yale University, my worry is that “a thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations and measures. At the same time, it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher” the transparent environment (Scott 1998).
These questions of differential power dynamics – and the way openness will be harnessed by different entities to their own interests – are often absent from the technically-driven conversations about the value of transparency. Furthermore, not all transparency is created equally: openness in government processes versus community mapping are substantially different concerns, but often get lumped together in the new push for open development.
While the paper didn’t include time to substantively address solutions, I argue that theories such as Peter Evans’s concept of deliberative development should be a strong component of any development initiative working on transparency and openness.
A prepublication version of the paper is available for download here.
Interested readers should also see the World Bank’s papers on the topic which take a thoughtful tact of linking technical and legal openness to political participation.
Does Mobile Money Harm the Poor?
[The following piece originally appeared at Mobile Active]
The unprecedented diffusion of mobile connectivity around the globe has caused much excitement from development practitioners, especially those seeking to advance financial inclusion. And as with any excitement, there is bound to be detractors. Jamie M. Zimmerman and Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation have put a forceful stake down in that camp with regard to mobile money. They have sparked undoubtedly a useful debate but their cautionary piece on why mobile money “is hurting huge swaths of the developing world” ultimately missteps.
Zimmerman and Meinrath argue that despite having significant benefits to users, mobile money is out of reach for broad swaths of the world’s poor because (a) connectivity is not universal and (b) mobile money has “remarkably high fees”. Taking Kenya as one of the countries on the avant garde of mobile money availability and adoption, they fear that mobile money “may, in fact, be driving a new wealth divide… leaving [Kenya’s] poor in even more dire straits.”
However, their well-intentioned but dour speculation misses key features of the financial landscape in developing countries and misinterprets fundamental characteristics of mobile money.
There is a measure of truth to their argument. It is true that mobile connectivity is not universal. The most recent data available (PDF) from the Kenyan regulator, for instance, puts mobile coverage at only 86% of the population, and this doesn’t account for the frequent complaints of “dead zones” in the country. Additionally, mobile phones are not ubiquitous and lack of device ownership is the largest reason for not adopting M-PESA. However, as mobile phones are becoming cheaper all the time and given the widespread practice of sharing phones, access is less of an issue over time. And, yes, it is true that M-PESA is offered as a for-profit service, with users incurring fees.
But in rushing to defend the poor from sluggish regulators and extractive mobile operators, Zimmerman and Meinrath miss the big question: is mobile money better for the poor relative to the available alternatives?
In the half-dozen or so markets where it has reached scale, the answer is almost certainly yes. Mobile money has grown because it is by-and-large demand-driven, filling a role desired by citizens in countries as diverse as the Philippines, Pakistan and Kenya. And instead of “remarkably high fees”, mobile money services like M-PESA are profoundly cheaper than alternatives.
More than just a lack of money, poverty involves a lack of access to the instruments and means through which the poor could improve their lives. The real promise of M-PESA is not that it will “combat global poverty” or “save the poorest of the poor” (as strawmen headlines put it), but rather that it creates a generalized platform on which a wellspring of new start-ups, services and opportunities (see a recent survey of that proliferation in Kenya). The new mobile infrastructure is being used to deliver reliable, secure and efficient services – financial and otherwise – that were fundamentally out of reach for most Kenyans ten years ago. No one realistically believes mobile services are the solution, but it is clear that they will increasingly be used as a component of many solutions.
But what about the “poorest of the poor” that Zimmerman and Meinrath laudably emphasize? Is it true that M-PESA’s fees are “prohibitive to those living below the poverty line – currently about 50 percent of the Kenyan population”? Prima facie, of course not, since the service has been adopted by more than fifty percent of Kenyan households. Certainly, a proportion of Kenyans are unable to adopt M-PESA for the reasons suggested, and in a forthcoming piece I argue that we mustn’t lose sight of universal access and service goals. But non-adoption of M-PESA does not leave “a substantial portion of the nation’s poor in even more dire straits.” Indeed, because you do not have to register and it is free to receive money, many rural Kenyans who make up its poorest citizens are actually able to benefit from it. Further without focusing on the systemic efficiency and productivity gains (PDF) that mobile money entails, critics miss the forest for the trees.
Of course we should “fight the tough regulatory battles necessary” to attain universal service, but Zimmerman and Meinrath do not suggest anything specific. In fact, their example country Kenya is widely considered to have one of the more enlightened and forward-thinking regulatory regimes. Innovative policy from the Central Bank and Communications Commission of Kenya are a big reason mobile money took off. Referring to Kenya specifically, two close observers of Africa’s ICT development – Professors Jenny Aker and Isaac Mbiti – note that “The right national policy can therefore benefit poor consumers.”
E.J. Hobsbawn once wrote that the poor work “the system to their minimum disadvantage.” Mobile money is helping them to do so. While it could be less proprietary, more accessible and, yes, cheaper, impatient ambition is more likely to neuter a beneficial service than lead to positive changes.
The Paradox of Anonymous’s ‘Anarchy’
What are we to make of Anonymous, the collective of technologically savvy individuals whose accelerating campaign of hacktivism has targeted everything from Scientologists to defense contractors?
One of the most common labels for this phenomenon is that of “anarchy” and in a recent article, NYU’s Biella Coleman deftly analyzes the relationship between Anonymous and anarchy along three axes: black bloc protest tactics, the everyday usage of “anarchy” to mean the absence of rules, and what she calls contemporary political anarchism (drawing heavily on David Graeber’s work). For each axis, she finds the fit for Anonymous to be imperfect.
I would like to follow her by putting Anonymous under the lens of another scholar of anarchy: Yale’s James C. Scott. Specifically, Scott’s most recent book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, gives insight into the activities of Anonymous.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Most people consider the trajectory of history to be from hunter gathering, through rudimentary agriculture, ending at sedentary, sophisticated civilizations. Scott provides a radical reinterpretation of this linear approach where nomads and tribal populations are not premodern remnants, but instead are groups that have consciously chosen to remain outside the control of the state. Because the state is a relatively new phenomenon, existence outside the state is, in fact, the predominant historical form of society, even though today it is relatively rare. As the scope of the state expanded, certain populations sought “anarchy”, meaning the absence of state-rule; these groups are considere uncivilized barbarians, but, in reality, they are only called that because they exist outside the confines of those who write history: the state.
In order to exist, a state must have a population from which it can extract forced labor, conscripts and taxes. His analysis focuses on the hill people of South East Asia who have resisted the practices that make state appropriation possible (such as sedentary agriculture, hierarchical organization, and fixed identities). Scott finds that,
“Virtually everything about [the hill] people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them.”
He provides a convincing theory of anarchy in which the expansion of state power drives some people to adapt their lives to avoid its reach.1 Historically this has been the case in diverse episodes, such as the Berbers, runaway slaves, and much of the Balkans, but today, Scott believes his “analysis largely ceases to be useful.” This is because “the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies – railroads, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, helicopters, and now information technology – so changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states” that living outside the power of the state is now exceedingly difficult. Because of this, “the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it.”
It is into this tension – between taming and evading state power – which Anonymous falls and where Scott’s analysis does prove useful.
Anonymous’s Imperfect Anarchy
In his previous book, Seeing Like a State, Scott explains how in order for states to exert their will upon their territory and populace, they must first render them ‘legible’ through rearranging and labeling them in uniform ways. One historical manifestation of this was through fixing identities, including mandatory secondary names so that people were tied to their father. In the case of Anonymous, their distaste for this means of state appropriation is self-evident. Other tactics – from encryption to one-time use websites for releasing information – can be understood as strategies through which Anonymous has attempted to render themselves and their activities illegible to the state.
Another significant tactic that helps Anonymous exist outside the confines of the state are the relatively egalitarian social structure that they – and other hacker organizations – have. Scott notes that “a highly egalitarian social structure” makes it hard for the state to appropriate groups. This can be accomplished through “open and equal access” to resources such as through “common-property”. It is no coincidence that hackers, and others who believe that “Governments of the Industrial World… have no sovereignty” in cyberspace – have these values at their core.2
So, like the nomadic tribes whose identity evolved to fit their political goals of autonomy in South East Asia, Anonymous has adopted organizational and technological approaches that enhance autonomy. In this way, they can be understood as anarchic in ways that are broadly analogous to the tribes Scott studies. In contrast to the everyday usage of anarchy to mean the absence of rules (which Coleman finds to be misleading), Anonymous is anarchy in that it is designed to exist outside the power of the state.
But, the fit here is imperfect, as well. As Scott warns, the current power of the state is enormous, and the alleged Anonymous members who have been arrested around the globe are learning this painfully. Even as the Anonymous members pursue their autonomy at their computers, we do not have evidence that they rejected fundamental state appropriations such as taxes.
The Paradox of Anonymous’s Imperfect Anarchy
Beyond this imperfect model of anarchy, Anonymous embodies a paradox due to a tension between their ends and means. Although their activity can be roughly understood as analogous to people who have sought to avoid state control throughout history, their ends seem to necessitate the state.
To what end does Anonymous strive? They “can be difficult to ideologically pin down” but one consistent goal seems to be the defense of free speech (“as one Anon had put it, ‘free speech is non-negotiable’”). As Coleman notes, though, this is less of an emphasis in Anarchism than it is in classical liberalism.
One of the reasons Anarchism does not emphasize free speech is because it is a negative liberty, meaning it arises in the absence of constraints. Negative liberties, such as freedom of speech, are “most commonly assumed in liberal defences of the constitutional liberties typical of liberal-democratic societies” - that is, those operating under the power of the state. A long history of 1st Amendment jurisprudence in the United States is evidence that the state is needed to protect free speech (albeit, sometimes against itself).
To take a recent example, Anonymous has launched a campaign against San Francisco’s BART for shutting down cell phone coverage, but in order to enable free speech in this scenario, they would realistically need the state to intervene. It is possible that their illegible activities could bring attention to an unknown problem, thus spurring a state response, but thus far that has not been the case. If anything, the tactics of Anonymous have spurred authorities to render the members legible through intense investigations and, ultimately, arrest.3
Anonymous, then, shows that in the modern world, it is difficult (if not impossible) to achieve ends which require the state’s support through means which exist outside the power of the state to understand and act. Taming Leviathan requires confronting, not evading, it.4
–
- Scott understands ungoverned populations as “an effect of state-making and state expansion,” not unincorporated residue. In Anonymous, as well as the writings of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, it is clear that their ‘anarchic’ activities are motivated by what they deem to be illegitimate state expansion. On a similar note, it would also be useful to consider how the expansion of the market (as enforced by the state) drives individuals to oppose it. On this avenue, the case of Sealand seems particularly promising. [↩]
- After all, Yochai Benkler, one of the sharpest theorists of this general area, does follow the tradition of the Pyotr Kropotkin, a philosopher of Anarchism. [↩]
- Of course, this is not to suggest that anonymity cannot support negative liberties. The case of Watergate and Deepthroat is an obvious example of it doing so, but it took the work of very mainstream, non-anarchic entities (namely the Washington Post) to engender change. [↩]
- In defending DDoS as a form of political disobedience, Morozov notes that under a Rawlsian reading, activism by Anonymous is only legitimate if they are willing to accept the consequences meted out by the state. Anonymous’s approach seems to suggest otherwise. [↩]
The Political Economy of M-PESA
During my senior year in Georgetown’s Science, Technology & International Affairs program I worked on a thesis on the political economy of M-PESA. I’m currently editing a much shorter version for publication, but thought I would post the longer, pre-publication version. It is available for download here.
Abstract
The role of information and communication technologies in development is contested between those who believe it will facilitate broad-based human development and those who believe it is at most, impotent, and at worst, counterproductive. This paper takes a meso-level approach to specify the impact of a large-scale mobile phone-based financial service in Kenya, M-PESA. When analyzed through the related theories of freedom of Amartya Sen and Philip Pettit, the impact of M-PESA is of a dual nature. In many ways, new forms of empowerment are possible through mobile money, but adoption of the standard also leads to limitations on choice and new forms of dominance. Institutional arrangements that are most likely to minimize the trade-offs of mobile money are recommended.
Your feedback would be very welcome.
Mobile Money in the Developing World: The Implications of M-PESA for Development, Freedom and Power
Below is the prospectus for my senior thesis. It should be finished in the coming months. In the meantime, feedback and comments are more than welcome.
Information and communication technologies have enmeshed the globe in networks, and none is as widespread as the mobile phone, a technology that has billions of users. Development practitioners are increasingly looking to the pervasive device as a facilitator of broad-based human improvement. This project seeks to add to our understanding of the role that ICTs have in the development process through the study of a particularly promising application, the use of mobile phones to deliver financial services or, more simply, mobile money.
The effectiveness of ICT for development is widely disputed. Both those who believe ICT will lead to development and those who disagree can marshal theory and empirics to their side. For example, sophisticated regression analysis identifies relations between rates of mobile telephony and the rate of economic growth, and other studies show individual incomes rising with the introduction of mobile coverage. Others demur, arguing that local contexts and global inequalities can stymie, or even reverse, the benefits of ICT. These competing claims may be mapped:
| Utopians | Dystopians | |
| Macro | E-development, information society and knowledge economy literature | Castells’s “Black holes of informational capitalism” |
| Micro | Individual income improvements (e.g. Kerala fisherman) | “Social shaping” of technology |
Method
The field of technology assessment is wrought with such disputes, often divided between those who look at “broad causal patterns” and those who examine a “tightly focused story [of] complexity and diversity.” In surveying this debate, Thomas Misa argues that understanding the complicated interplay between technology and society requires moving beyond, or, more accurately, in between the macro and micro framings.[1] He argues that meso-level approaches that examine the actors, institutions and processes that intermediate between micro (e.g. firm or individual) and macro (e.g. market or state) are the most promising methods towards resolving disputes such as those plaguing the ICT4D research and policy-making. Similarly, Brey writes of specification where an abstract phenomenon is examined through the study of a specific type.[2]
Meso-Level Case Study: M-PESA
Taking this methodological cue, my thesis will focus on M-PESA, a popular mobile money service in Kenya that serves as a mediator between individual economic experiences and national financial happenings. Kenya’s largest mobile network operator, Safaricom, formally launched M-PESA in March 2007. Users visit authorized M-PESA retail agents to deposit cash that is credited to their personal SIM card. This “e-float” is then transferable via SMS to any other mobile phone, whereby cash can then be received at another agent. Safaricom initially aimed this at the large domestic remittance market, and these peer-to-peer transfers remain its primary use, but with more than 70 percent of Kenyan households using it, it has subsequently expanded to a formal savings account and a payment application for services as varied as school fees and electricity bills. M-PESA is not the first mobile money application, but by scale and prominence, it is by far the most successful and the subject of widespread study and imitation.
Development practitioners are particularly excited about the opportunity M-PESA represents. There is a robust literature that formal financial inclusion, instead of informal lending and savings, can lead to accelerated growth and increased social protections and opportunities. Reducing transaction costs, facilitating remittances, increasing financial security, and accelerating money circulation are all tied to development. Even more basically, Safaricom is a profitable and innovative firm experiencing rapid growth.
The above is important and promising. The challenges facing developing countries are profound and difficult. Innovative solutions are a necessary component of success. But could there be reason to worry? Could mobile money such as M-PESA have drawbacks to the development process?
Development as Freedom + Network Power
For the purposes of this project, the admittedly amorphous, contested term ‘development’ will be defined in the tradition of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach. Sen conceptualizes of development as enhanced human freedom. As a substantive good unto itself, as well as a useful instrument, it is both the primary goal and means of development. Through expanding economic opportunities, providing additional protective securities, and enabling more effective social opportunities, M-PESA might seem, prima facie, to enhance human freedom.
Like other standards – TCP/IP or the English language – M-PESA facilitates the exchange of goods and ideas amongst users. Standards serve as a coordinating mechanism between disparate individuals and organizations. Further, through the phenomenon of network effects, standards become more valuable as they grow in membership. Grewal links this with the observation that as a given standard grows, it tends to progressively eliminate alternatives. After all, who today uses a fax machine, let alone telegraph?
He calls this “network power” and notes that it “pushes agents to converge on a single, dominant standard” such as the WTO trade rules or TCP/IP.[3] Although individuals may freely adopt a standard because it has inherent advantages (i.e. M-PESA is cheaper than alternative remittance services), once a network reaches a certain size, network power may induce people to give up an alternative standard and adopt the dominant one. For example, speakers of minority languages may choose to learn English, but if they do so because it is necessary for survival, they are not really choosing freely.
In addition to understanding the specific way M-PESA exhibits network power, my thesis will investigate how this promotes and hinders human freedom. As Grewal notes, countering network power is possible; specifically, he identifies three characteristics of a standard that are relevant:
- Compatibility: “acceptance of parallel or simultaneous standards to gain access to a given network.”
- Availability / Openness: “ease with which a network accepts new entrants desiring to adopt its standard.”
- Malleability: openness to piecemeal revision.
Depending on the goals of a network (and its users and operators), these three properties will be aligned and intersect in different manners at different times. As a commercial operation attempting to maximize profit, availability will likely be high (but only to the extent that marginal users are profitable). As a proprietary service that needs to be protective of privacy and security, malleability will likely be low. Compatibility will differ depending on the alternative standard: M-PESA needs to be compatible with cash, but what about competing mobile money services or financial institutions? Although at this stage it is not yet clear to what extent M-PESA exerts network power and its implications for development as freedom, it is possible that policy measures are warranted to ensure broad-based freedom in the networked society.
Different technologies, of course, have different relations with society. Understanding mobile money does not offer a holistic understanding of the role of ICTs in development; however, network power is a phenomenon present in many ICT4D interventions, and mobile money alone is an important trend, so lessons from this specific case will hopefully elucidate future work.
[1] Misa, Thomas. “Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological Determinism.” In Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 115-41.
[2] Brey, P. (2003). Theorizing modernity and technology. In T. Misa, et al. (Eds.), Modernity and technology (pp. 33–71). Cambridge: MIT Press.
[3] Grewal, David S. Network Power – The Social Dynamics of Globalization. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009
Regarding Power in the Network Society
Tim Wu, the prominent Columbia Law Professor, has a new book out entitled The Master Switch in which he retraces the history of American media industries, arguing that although new technologies can radically disrupt the marketplace, the tendency is towards concentration and, in the most extreme cases, monopoly. I haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, but Professor Wu has an essay in the Wall Street Journal making the case that is worth reading:
Today’s Internet borders will probably change eventually, especially as new markets appear. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in an age of large information monopolies. Could it be that the free market on the Internet actually tends toward monopolies? Could it even be that demand, of all things, is actually winnowing the online free market—that Americans, so diverse and individualistic, actually love these monopolies?
Internet industries develop pretty much like any other industry that depends on a network: A single firm can dominate the market if the product becomes more valuable to each user as the number of users rises. Such networks have a natural tendency to grow, and that growth leads to dominance.
Adam Thierer, who has been highly critical of the book, responds in turn questioning the use of the term “monopoly”:
But the problem with his argument that “we are living in an age of large information monopolies” begins with the fact that he speaks of “monopolies” in a plural sense and apparently misses the irony of that entirely. If so many “information monopolies” exist, then Wu’s thesis is undermined by the very fact that no one company dominates the Internet landscape. What Wu is really suggesting is that the Digital Economy landscape is littered with dominant firms in industry sectors that he has defined extremely narrowly.
In arguing over semantics, though, we miss the point. Wu is, in essence, arguing that information companies are able to amass significant scale in short periods of time. This scale exerts power upon users, and to Wu, this is very troubling – he cares about freedom both from undue government and corporate power. Thierer, a staunch libertarian, is far more focused on government power, as it is the ultimate arbiter of force.
What we need, though, is a theory of power that can describe the trend towards dominant positions that Wu targets, while making room for the dynamism that Thierer observes.
In his 2008 book of the name, David Singh Grewal outlines a theory of “network power” which marries two rather unobjectionable observations:
- As a standard – whether linguistic (e.g. English language), technological (e.g. TCP/IP) or otherwise (e.g. Facebook Connect) – scales, it grows in value (so-called network effects).
- As a standard grows, it “can lead to the progressive elimination of the alternatives” (e.g. TCP/IP has done a good job displacing the use of faxes).
Grewal notes that standards are inherently tension-filled because although they are necessary for communication, cooperation and, therefore, creativity, they also require acceptance of a given set of protocols by many people. That is, to enable some diversity, some uniformity is necessary. In this theory, standardization can arise through three means: reason, force, or chance.
- Reason can be implicit, meaning that the given standard simply works better, or explicit, such as when a standard is attractive for the size of the network it unites;
- Force can be direct, as when there are costs, such as physical harm, for not using the standard, or indirect, when there is an opportunity cost to not joining a given standard;
- And sometimes a standard may be adopted through mere serendipity.
So, standards arise not through force, at first, but after a certain threshold, they take on a life of their own. Network power occurs after this threshold through the marriage of explicit reason with indirect force. When network power is in play, a user adopts a standard because its size will allow them to reach more people and not doing so means they are progressively sidelined. So, the speakers of minority languages will be left behind if they do not join larger networks. Similarly, a teenager hoping to socialize may feel network power in choosing to sign up for Facebook.
The reason this worries people like Grewal is that a choice is not truly free unless one has the freedom to choose freely amongst viable alternatives. That is, although, yes, I could sign up for Orkut or MySpace it is not a viable alternative because no one I desire to communicate with is there; network power pushes me towards Facebook despite personal disagreement with many of its policies. Certainly, this is not the same type of force as the government can wield but it is a form of power that acts on people. Wu, though he does not refer to the theory, is touching on it closely, and I believe that both Thierer and Wu, as people who care deeply about personal liberty, could benefit from understanding Grewal’s theory of how power can arise in a network society.
Furthermore, as Grewal explores in the final chapters of the book, network power is not definitive: strategies for counterpower exist. In today’s world, these might be antitrust regulation or new inventions (forces prominent in Wu’s thinking), but they could also be more varied, such as increased data portability or interoperability. A middle-ground amongst those worried about digital liberties would be to advocate for appropriate counterpower strategies in the diverse, dynamic contexts in which network power exists.