Helping
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by Marianne Gronemeyer
Gronemeyer's contribution to The Development Dictionary concerns the perceptions development professions (and many others!) have towards the notion of "helping." She writes that while help appears to be an innocent notion in modern times it has become "an instrument of the perfect - that is, elegant - exercise of power."
The essay asks the question of where our positive ideas around help come from and answers that they come largely from ancient stories. For example the good Samaritan binding up the wounds of the man who fell victim to robbers. She reminds us, however, that in these cases the relationship between the helper and the helped was vastly different to the notion as deployed within development discourse.
Help in ancient times was regarded as unconditional - given independently of who the person in need was, the context or even the probability of successful impact. In stark contrast to this, modern help is "deeply calculating" and if you think of all the analysis and data gathering that goes into the delivery of development solutions then there is something perverse about a notion of help that rests of analysis - hardly unconditional!
Gronemeyer traces the historical evolution of help as being unconditional and motivated by empathy for human suffering to a calculated delivery of power. More recently other authors such as Negri and Hardt (in "Empire") have also argued that help has been co-opted and is used as a mechanism for the delivery of power, which they refer to as part of the "arsenal of legitimate force for imperial intervention" which precedes armed intervention.
The question we are left with is who defines help? Is it the helper or the person who needs help?
The question is deeply relevant not just to development in the third world but also to interventions by the State in tackling issues such as poverty alleviation or educational disengagement. Who decides when help is needed?
News from Pioneers of Change - SEPTEMBER 2007
10 Year Pioneers of Change Anniversary
