156 Poverty and Hunger
this is at local or central levels. They resent the short time that those in aid agen-
cies spend in one place. No sooner have they got to know and developed a work-
ing relationship with one person than they leave, another takes over and they have
to start all over again. Relationships are fractured and understandings are under-
mined. In the words (October 2003) of a developing country national about
USAID ‘When we negotiated there was a very good person. Then the boss
changed and was very bureaucratic and she left.’ Such discontinuities occur with
nationals working in INGOs as well as with foreigners. ActionAid’s community
development workers in The Gambia ‘have, on average, been moved every one or
two years, with the attendant need to familiarize themselves with a new area, to
build trust and sometimes even to learn a new language before they could start
to perform to a reasonable standard’ (Howes, 2002, p114). When some Action-
Aid staff in India were concerned that their local NGO partners would resent
their relatively high salaries, they were surprised that there was no objection as
long as they stayed in the same place for a decent length of time. Then they could
get to know one another and develop mutual understanding. Salaries were unim-
portant compared with continuity and longer-term relationships (Amar Jyoti,
pers. comm.).
In sum, the costs of lack of staff continuity are unseen, unaccounted for, incal-
culable and often unnecessary. At the same time, continuity is not a simple thing,
always to be maximized. From the point of view of a foreign agency, a danger is
perceived of out-posted staff ‘going native’, becoming personally, professionally
and emotionally too close and too attached to a country and people. When staff
fail it can be right to transfer them. When they move they learn new things. But
with the focus of aid on policy, it matters more than ever for aid agency staff to
understand local conditions.^23 The costs of lack of continuity, always high, have
risen further. Only three years in a post looks too low. The proximate costs of early
transfers are relationships broken, trust undermined, demotivation and learning
forgone. The wider effects are bad for poor people through errors of judgement
and what is then done and not done.
Responsible commitment and continuity can, then, be seen to matter now
more than ever. They are a moral imperative where poor people have been led to
invest their time and energy in expectation of support. They are a practical condi-
tion for constructive relationships, trust and learning. Understanding and opti-
mizing commitment, continuity and their synergies should be high on the agenda
for development in the 21st century.
Irreversibility
When a word lodges in the mind, it surfaces in different contexts. So it has been
for me with ‘irreversibility’ since writing my thesis.^24 What began with seeing how
commitment to settlement schemes could be irreversible, as with Perkerra, led to
thinking of and seeing irreversibility in other domains, including economic deci-
sion making and environmental change.