‘Political will’ does not mean what you think

Lessons in humility from Nic van de Walle

My whole career I’ve been an analyst trying to understand countries that are not my own. Nigeria in particular is a place where I’m steadily reminded that the more I learn, the more I realize how little I really know. 

Humility as a virtue

Politicians everywhere are just people. They face a complex array of competing objectives, choices, and incentives. It can be easy to forget this when you watch a politician make a decision that seems so obviously mistaken. In the energy sector, a common example is setting electricity tariffs below the cost of production, which bankrupts the utility and scares away investment. So why does nearly every country do it? My former colleague Michael Clemens used to sternly object to the term ‘political will’ on the grounds that using it as an explanation merely revealed that you don’t understand the actual incentives the politician is facing. Yep.  

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the sad passing on July 15 of Nic van de Walle, the Cornell polisci prof who taught me so much. In the mid 1990s, I was a bright-eyed research assistant at the Overseas Development Council, a now-closed think tank whose lasting legacy is a diaspora of amazing people and friendships. Nic, then a young prof on leave from Michigan State, was at ODC writing a book on how the aid system itself was reinforcing some of the very problems it was trying to address. 

I learned so much from Nic during that period and in the many years we stayed in touch. Most of all, Nic was always kind, patient, and generous, even with a pipsqueak like me pestering him for advice. Kindness is karma. 

As someone at the time contemplating more grad school, Nic was very clear-eyed about why (and especially why not) to do a PhD, wisdom I still try to pass on to others. I’m not sure I ever told Nic that he was responsible for my PhD dissertation topic, but when I was fretting about two different issues – democracy and financial market development – he suggested offhandedly that I just merge them together. Voilà, I did just that. 

‘Political will’ is an admission of ignorance

The biggest lesson I learned from Nic was to be mindful of the incentives for reform. Arguably, the entire international aid system was supposed to be a set of inducements (or, ahem, bribes) for governments to behave differently. Nic’s Magnum Opus, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999, is IMHO the best single book on why all that aid of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t lead to all that much.

The basic premise: African officials, no different from politicians everywhere, will reform when it suits their interests and they will resist – or often, pretend – when necessary. So the entire aid-for-reform bargain was nothing more than performative theater. Except only one side knew what was real and what was fake. In hindsight, that seems kinda simple and obvious. At the time it was radically new.

Yet even today, I still hear officials talk naively about aid as leverage or investment as buying influence, as if foreign politicians don’t have their own complex balancing acts with their own goals. (Niger, anyone?) The thrust of the US approach to countering Chinese influence in Africa today is not much more subtle, and in some ways even cruder. Western climate diplomacy could also learn from Nic’s insights. 

Now that Nic is gone, I’m sorry I never talked with him directly about energy policy. But I suspect that many of his conclusions – about the agency of policymakers and the humility of outsiders – will apply as strongly here as anywhere. 

Thus Nic leaves me one final lesson: ask your mentors before it’s too late.

Source: Cornell