Jan 19, 2009

Questioning the Value of Holistic Approaches

by Laura Starita

When it comes to poverty alleviation, it seems inarguable that strong connections exist between many of the challenges faced by the world’s poor: low income leads to poor health, leads to poor work and school attendance and performance, leads to low incomes, and so on. For that reason, perhaps, holistic initiatives in poverty alleviation are exceedingly popular of late. Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages projects attempt to promote income generation, mostly through increased agricultural production, at the same time that they offer vaccination, de-worming, and school lunch—all in a “big push” effort to leverage people out of poverty. Likewise, numerous NGOs with microfinance programs have attempted to integrate health education or political empowerment training into the weekly repayment meetings. These efforts and others like them seem to make good sense, though little evidence exists of their effectiveness. And it is worth asking whether linking two social causes always serves both as well as keeping them separate.

A recent New Yorker article profiling Van Jones raises exactly that question. Jones is an environmental activist whose aim is to bring the environmentalist movement—traditionally the domain of the white middle class—to the urban lower class. One of Jones’ prime efforts, operated through his Green for All nonprofit, is to link ‘green’ initiatives with urban unemployment, to the end of getting high school drop-outs jobs manufacturing photovoltaic cells, for example, or installing wind turbines.

There is little question that the poor are disproportionately affected by environmental pollution and global climate change. Coal burning plants and sewage processors are more likely to be located in poor neighborhoods than in wealthy ones, resulting in more cases of lung illness and asthma. Environmental degradation is likewise having a larger impact in the developing world, evident in expanding desertification and decreasing fresh water supplies. It is also important to note that the poor are not innocent in regards to environmental destruction—those living in poverty have little incentive to act as responsible stewards of the land, especially if they can gain income from its destruction. This is evident in deforestation, as well as in the declining animal populations in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where gorillas are slaughtered solely for their hands. So the poor are both affected by environmental degradation as well as active contributors to it. Where those two dynamics meet, incentive efforts to promote environmental protection may make a lot of sense.

It is not clear that Van Jones programs meet those criteria. The article, belatedly, points out that many of the people Jones aims to employ are no- or low-skilled workers, whereas the work required is mostly for laborers with some skills. Likewise, the number of jobs that may be supplied by the alternative fuels market, for example, will likely not replace the number of coal miners that could be put on the dole with the possible decrease in fossil fuel use. In short, sometimes an attempt at holism does little more than add complexity to the detriment of all. If in fact “details matter infinitely,“ as suggested by Abhijeet Bannerjee in our recent interview, then uni-focused programs that sweat the details are more likely to yield the best results.