In this week’s episode, we talk to Jonathan Glennie, co-founder of Global Nation, about the insufficiency of global aid as a response to current global affairs.
Jonathan introduces the idea of ‘global public investment’ in order to address aid reliance through a new form of accountability. We also talk about circular cooperation as a system in which all entities involved respond to the possibility of learning from each other.
Jonathan speaks about the importance of dignity, listening, and ownership in aid projects, which are often overlooked in favour of material impact and development indicators. He advocates for “development with dignity”.
Jonathan Glennie is a writer, researcher, campaigner and consultant on sustainable development, inequality and poverty. He recently co-founded a new thinktank, Global Nation, which recently published a report on global solidarity. His work examines the changing nature of international cooperation, as dominant paradigms and global economic relationships evolve.
Jonathan has held senior positions in several international organisations, including Ipsos, Save the Children, ODI and Christian Aid and helped set up The Guardian‘s Global Development website, for which he was a regular columnist. As a consultant, he has worked with governments, international agencies and civil society organisations as they renew their strategies for a new era. Jonathan’s latest book, The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment, was published by Routledge in 2021. He lives with his family in Colombia.
If you’re interested to find out more about Jonathan’s work, take a look here:
Recent work:
Relevant links:
In this week’s episode, we talk to Jonathan Glennie, co-founder of Global Nation, about the insufficiency of global aid as a response to current global affairs.
Jonathan introduces the idea of ‘global public investment’ in order to address aid reliance through a new form of accountability. We also talk about circular cooperation as a system in which all entities involved respond to the possibility of learning from each other.
Jonathan speaks about the importance of dignity, listening, and ownership in aid projects, which are often overlooked in favour of material impact and development indicators. He advocates for “development with dignity”.
Jonathan Glennie is a writer, researcher, campaigner and consultant on sustainable development, inequality and poverty. He recently co-founded a new thinktank, Global Nation, which recently published a report on global solidarity. His work examines the changing nature of international cooperation, as dominant paradigms and global economic relationships evolve.
Jonathan has held senior positions in several international organisations, including Ipsos, Save the Children, ODI and Christian Aid and helped set up The Guardian‘s Global Development website, for which he was a regular columnist. As a consultant, he has worked with governments, international agencies and civil society organisations as they renew their strategies for a new era. Jonathan’s latest book, The Future of Aid: Global Public Investment, was published by Routledge in 2021. He lives with his family in Colombia.
If you’re interested to find out more about Jonathan’s work, take a look here:
Recent work:
Relevant links:
How do you build a situation where you are transferring money across the world to spend on global public goods, global commons, but also to support development and progress in countries which need it, but with a totally different accountability system. And that's where this whole idea of global public investment comes in.
Kate:Hello, welcome to this week's episode of the podcast, The Power Shift Decolonizing Development. This week we're talking to Jonathan Glennie, co founder of Global Nation, and we talk about global public investment, circular cooperation, and learning from each other. Listen on for more. Welcome to the Power Shift Decolonising Development, the podcast series seeking to bring together thinkers, practitioners, activists to share ideas, inspire change, and identify tools for practical action. I'm Professor Kate Bird, a socio economist and director of the Development Hub. Today's co host is Nompilo Ndlovu. Over to you, Nompilo.
Nompilo:Greetings. I am Dr. Nompilo Ndlovu. I am a Zimbabwean living and working in South Africa. I'm an oral historian, who applies gender frameworks to my book with communities in Africa. Recent work has included involvement in a mixed method study on poverty dynamics in Zimbabwe, where I did the work on gender and marginalisation. My PhD focused on mass violence, memory, and local transitional justice in post colonial Zimbabwe. Back to you, Kate.
Kate:Thanks Nompilo. Today, we're very excited to be talking to Jonathan Glennie. Jonathan is a writer, researcher, campaigner and consultant on sustainable development, inequality and poverty. He recently co founded a new think tank, Global Nation. His work looks in particular at the changing nature of international cooperation as a dominant paradigm and global economic relationships as they evolve. He's held senior positions in international organisations, including Ipsos, Save the Children, ODI, and Christian Aid, and helped set up the Guardian's global development website, for which he was a regular columnist. As a consultant, he's worked with governments, international agencies, and civil society organisations as they renew their strategies for a new era. His latest book, The Future of Aid, Global Public Investment was published by Routledge in 2021. He lives with his family in Colombia. For more on Jonathan and the work that he does, please click on the show notes below this episode. Now we're going to go into questions, Jonathan. You are the founder of Global Nation. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to found Global Nation?
Jonathan:Yeah, co founder with Hassan Damluji and, wow, I don't know where to start. We started it two years ago. I was a writer consultant and doing research. And, you know, sometimes it gets a bit lonely. And I was talking to Hassan. He was really interested in the work I would do on global public investment, which we might talk about later. He was at the Gates Foundation at the time. He's really a strategy consultant. And he wanted to find a way to develop his writing and kind of be more of a thinker. So we got together and we thought our perspectives were very similar. But our kind of skills were quite different and our experiences were quite different. So we thought it'd be interesting putting them together. And the phrase Global Nation actually comes from a brilliant book that Hassan wrote called The Responsible Globalist. And I'd been looking for some time for a story or a narrative or a way of framing my thinking about internationalism and global cooperation. And this book was a really good way of doing it and he came up with this phrase Global Nation, which is basically to say, there are lessons from the last 200 years of the building of nation states, most nation states have been built in the last 200 years, even the last hundred years. All in very different ways, and they're all processes under construction, some more successfully than others. And there are lessons for what we're trying to do as humanity at the global level from those nation states themselves. It's not a perfect analogy, of course it isn't. But there are really important things we can learn, and I think the concept of thinking of our world as one nation, and then what we need to achieve stability, progress and human, basically, happiness, comes from that. So that's the overall framing. And at Global Nation, we do strategic consultancy with major kind of international cooperation organisations. We do a lot of think tanking, new ideas. We do a lot of kind of coordinating and networking, and we're building out our comms work as well. Because we don't want to be those people that write reports and they never get read. So we're kind of working on that as well. We published a report last year called the Global Solidarity Report, where we try to measure the state of global solidarity, which we argue is absolutely crucial for global cooperation and global progress. And we're going to do that on an annual basis. So that's our kind of major annual outing. But yeah, the work we do is on health, climate, finance.
Kate:Thank you. Yeah, I had a look at that report that you've just mentioned, and I thought it was very clever. You know, the ideas that it was bringing together were really nice, and the graphics were very appealing too, and I do like a good graphic.
Jonathan:I'm pleased. I'll get you one of those kind of a paper version. Hassan insisted that he wanted it to last a year with people putting their coffee cups on it. That was his kind of description of the quality. And so we've probably got a few left over. I'll send you one if you liked it.
Kate:Oh yeah, no, I do like something to put my coffee cup on. That's always very important. But I like the feeling of a paper product and, you know, very rarely get to have one of those in my hands these days. So talking about paper products, you're also the author of two books on global cooperation, The Trouble with Aid and The Future of Aid. Can you tell our audience a little bit more about those books, the headline arguments that you present in each book and the impact that you were hoping to have with them?
Jonathan:Yeah, I mean, they're both about power. Fundamentally, I think everything I've ever written really is about power and the Trouble with Aid, it was published in 2008, and I'd been working a lot in Christian Aid, and we were coming out of this thing called the Make Poverty History campaign. Which was 2005, the Gleneagles G7, it was one of the last major kind of people out on the streets campaigning for development campaigns. And it's really interesting, just in parenthesis, to reflect on how that has changed over the last 20 years. But it was a major campaign and I think a lot of us were frustrated. We were very proud of what we did achieve. We were very frustrated that once again, the wealthy nations of the world had kind of discovered increasing aid as the main response to global inequality and poverty. And indeed, you know, climate change was of course a growing concern. And our point was, no, it's not about aid. You know, aid is great. You know, money is helpful, but the fundamentals here are so much more profound than that. This is perfectly obvious to everyone. It's not like I'm saying anything that your listeners won't have heard before, but nevertheless, the politics of wealthy nations was still let's, you know, solve this problem by putting money on the table. And the book The Trouble with Aid, which was actually the subtitle of that was Why Less Could Mean More for Africa. So it was focused on Africa and it was arguing that not only was aid totally insufficient as a response to the current global problems, but actually it could sometimes do more harm than good. And one had to have a balanced analysis of the pros and cons of these transfers. In fact, the original title that I suggested was something like, it sounds incredibly negative, like the Trouble with Aid. What I suggested was Aid Making It Better or something like that. And the publishers went, you do want people to read this book, don't you? I mean, that sounds basically, that sounds boring. So they forced me to kind of have a slightly more provocative title. So the argument basically said, look, what African countries need to do, rather than the general narrative, which was kind of push for more money, more aid, was actually to set out a timeline over the next 10, 15 years to reduce aid. And that would be a demonstration of progress because aid has negative consequences. Why? Because of power. So the whole aid system is, especially since the 80s, is built, especially from the World Bank and IMF at the time, the money is not to build projects. It's to transform economies, the money was used and that's where conditionality comes in, the famous structural adjustment and those kind of reforms relatively small amounts of money were used to transform whole economies, according to what we now argue was a very limited understanding the economy, which we kind of know as neoliberalism. And so aid was used to influence that, and so that's basically what The Trouble With Aid was saying. I think the final line or the final paragraph was something like, next time wealthy leaders come out of a G7 summit and say here's some more money, send them back in to come out with policies that actually affect the lives of Africans and the economies and policies of African nations. That was the first book.
Kate:So you're talking there about power, but power in what way? Because power is quite a dynamic thing and we've got power over, power with, power to, and power within. So are you talking, and those are the various dimensions that we think about power as having. So are you talking there about power over? That the donor governments then have power over, in this case, African governments. Or are you talking about power between African governments and their people in terms of accountability lines, because one of the dangers of aid is accountability runs in the wrong direction, that recipient governments, in this case governments in Africa, are reporting to their donors, and they're reporting in that direction, perhaps more energetically than providing accountability mechanisms to their own citizens and their own taxpayers. And that's one of the arguments about aid is that that relationship breaks down the relationship between a government and their citizens, if money is coming externally and accountability is running in the wrong direction. Is that what you're talking about here?
Jonathan:Yeah, I hadn't heard the kind of four powers breakdown. I have to reflect on that. But both the things you said, I think is what the book was saying. So the opening framing is kind of, the 50s and 60s was a time of liberation. And the 60s and 70s was a time when African countries were exactly that,they were trying to build states that were both effective and accountable with differing success rates, of course, I mean, this is history, it's difficult. Anywhere in the world you go, especially coming out of the experience that most of those African states have had, and the kind of random lines on the map, and all that kind of thing. But both the things of what you just said. So, the power of countries to use money to force African countries to do what they asked effectively, so the book was about reducing aid dependence. and that's where we come on to the second book. I'm not against the concept of transferring money to countries that require it. Some of these countries were receiving 60 or 70 or more percent of their government spending from external entities and that is an immense power. So that's the one thing that you said power over. But then yes, exactly this development of a relationship of accountability between the state and its people was undermined. In other words, democracy or the building of the possibility of democracy was undermined because fundamentally accountability was being transferred to an external entity rather than to the people itself. So, yeah, I mean, these are complex things and you can't change them overnight, but definitely that gradual development of accountability and state building, going back to what I was saying earlier about the nation state, was being undermined by the aid relationship. And therefore, my argument was it has to be reduced over time. So that nation building could begin again. And what you found in the early 2000s, of course, was that it was doing fairly well, you know, the reliance on aid was reducing. And what I'm worried about now, of course, everyone's worried about is with this post COVID, with the huge debt crises that countries find themselves in, including Africa, is that that power relationship will deepen again, as countries find themselves dependent on external support and indeed, you know, paying huge amounts of debt service. So then you go to accountability, and how do you build, and this is where the second book comes in, how do you build a situation where you are transferring money across the world to spend on global public goods, global commons, but also to support development and progress in countries which need it, but with a totally different accountability system. And that's where this whole idea of global public investment comes in.
Kate:And I think one of the things that I reflect on with this and I love the name Global Nation and the way that you've outlined the thinking behind that is an idea of global citizenship and reciprocity and back in the 1980s when I was doing my undergraduate degree, I came across the idea of Gaia, which fits with the idea of sustainability and green politics and so on. And it's the idea that the Earth is a unitary whole. And that for me fitted with the idea of global citizenship and reciprocity, and in a nation, you would expect to see transfers between a richer part of the country and poorer parts of the country because you're all citizens and you're all in it together. And if we're thinking of global citizenship, surely there need to be transfers to create equity, to create fairness, but the problem with the current system is that we've got aid as a sticking plaster when transfers are going in the other direction through trade systems that don't really work terribly fairly and other systems that are extractive and unfair. So, I think that aid is a very complicated tool in thinking about this kind of reciprocal relationship, these sets of reciprocal relationships. That's my penny's worth on the subject, I probably ought to shut up and move on. Our next question. We had Nancy Kankam Kusi on the podcast telling our audiences about WACSI and Ringo Reimagining the INGO and their Decolonising Advisory Community, they're key players in the Shift the Power movement. And you're also part of the movement and your organisation Global Nation helped to organise the Shift the Power Global Summit in Bogota in December 2023. Could you tell us a little bit more about this and the experience that you had and where you see the Shift the Power movement going next?
Jonathan:Yeah, so, the time I got involved with the Shift the Power movement was there was a meeting in London. It's been going, I guess, for about, you know, seven or eight years. It kind of has evolved really organically. And I think it just recognises, in a way that a lot of people have, that something has to change in the way that we view international cooperation. And the fundamental analysis is that power is almost always in the wrong place. Well, I mean, money is power, right? So it's very, very hard to change these things. But what you have to do is build institutions and processes and incentives that somewhat mitigate the overbearing power of money and to some extent history and ultimately weapons and things like that, that back up international relationships. I was on the advisory board of the reimagining the INGO process and that's one part of it. And I think the bit that I find really positive about where we are in our ecosystem at the moment, is that this language of decolonising is everywhere. It's a commonplace now that this has to happen. That was miles away from being true only 15, 20 years ago, which is not to say that it hasn't been written about, especially by Southern academics and leaders for decades. Of course it has, but it's made it to the kind of, I guess, seats of power. And one of the great ironies of international development is that those seats of power are, of course, Paris, London, Washington, and all those places in the Global North that run international development thinking are very constrained by their own political context and their own educational constraints, and still see, I think particularly in the UK, but I'm not qualified enough about the US and Europe and let's say the other OECD countries to state this fully. But I think particularly in the UK, there's a very paternalistic understanding of international cooperation, and we're emerging from it, but the international cooperation system and the major NGOs and the think tanks were set up in the fifties and sixties, a time when especially the UK still had colonies and racist attitudes were very common. I'm not saying they're not common now, but certainly the narrative has shifted very significantly since then. And so I think the kind of original sin of international cooperation is an instinct that the West and the North has the money and the answers and others have to learn and come up to that standard. The whole language of developed and developing is deeply problematic and the idea of developed is the most annoying bit of all of that. I think the concept that countries are developing is quite sensible, but it should be implied to all countries. You know, the idea that some countries are past participle developed, job done, no further development required is absurd. And yet it's the framing that we've used, and still use despite everything. And it's not only the framing used in the North. The Global South countries often cling, and I understand why, for political reasons, to the language of, we are underdeveloped. We are the least developed countries, and they don't want to use that language because for historical reasons it's useful in UN processes and to access decent cash and those kind of things. But it is nevertheless a really insidious narrative and that's fundamentally what I think we are in the process of changing bit by bit. Because, and this I think is a fundamental learning that I've had and I think a lot of us have had over the last 20 years, you don't get policy change until you change the narrative and the story, or rather, it's much, much easier to get policy change if you have a narrative that fits. And the narrative of aid is not the narrative we need in the 21st century, the narrative that we can help you. Although, of course, there are aspects of that that are welcome. Generosity, kindness, empathy are not to be scoffed at, but nevertheless, they are patronising. And what we need is a world of horizontal debates and equality and that's the two main things that we're pushing at Global Nation, which is this global public investments approach to financial transfer and also this thing we're calling circular cooperation, which develops the idea of vertical cooperation, North, South, horizontal cooperation between countries of supposedly kind of similar levels of progress or development or complexity or whatever word you want to use. And I don't know if you've come across this idea of triangular cooperation, which was kind of the next step after South South cooperation, which kind of involved the Global North country and the Global South country, but still maintained this idea that basically the Global North has nothing to learn. That's the fundamental belief in the international cooperation system. So we developed a circular cooperatino, which basically says, if you're engaged in a cooperation relationship, then all countries engaged in that, or all entities should be learning. And then just to take it back to your question about the INGO. I first started to realise that when I started working in Colombia for Christian Aid. And a friend of mine came to visit me in Colombia who was not part of the kind of aid ecosystem, worked in something else. And he just said, you know, you guys come along to Colombia and you come and help the Colombians. But you know that you're learning a lot here. And that's an experience that every traveler has, you know, you go to other parts of the world and you know you're learning, you're growing, you're seeing different ways of doing things, different ways to solve problems, different ways of being a human and a society. And we do that as individuals, but when it comes to the institutions of cooperation, we've set them up top down, North South. There's nothing to learn from the South. And I'm exaggerating slightly, because of course there are plenty of experiences where that is the case. But fundamentally, the institutions don't respond to the idea that there's plenty to learn. All countries, one from another. And so I think the future of cooperation is circular. Um, and by the way, just in parenthesis, it's not just a North South thing. I live in the continent of Latin America, and without naming and shaming countries, there are some countries that wouldn't really consider other countries as developed as them. And don't consider that they can learn much from them. And even within countries, and we were talking a bit earlier about the situation in Zimbabwe, you can say the same thing about Colombia. There is arrogance especially within cities and especially within certain parts of the country whereby, you know, you don't think you can learn from other experiences. So this whole idea of circularity, really trying to institutionalise the insight that all communities and all countries need to be learning from each other. Not only because it's the dignified way to be a human, but also because that's actually how we're going to solve the complex challenges we face in the 21st century as a globe.
Kate:Thank you. And what I got from that is the importance of listening and openness and mutual learning and learning from each other what it means to be human, because I think so often that is part of the equation that's missed out in this hierarchical sector that we work in, where the Global North or minority world positions itself to be developed and laden with expertise, and often incapable of listening and pausing and reflecting and seeing what can be learned from a situation. So thank you for that. I'm going to pass over now to Nompilo to ask the next questions.
Nompilo:Okay. Thank you, Kate. And before I get there, I really want to say Jonathan, it's quite intriguing how we're starting to really get synergies in just the ways development is happening. You and Nancy both use the same type of phrasing when you said work on re imagining the INGO has been an organic growth. And also mentioned, I didn't realise it was seven to eight years of learning and relearning, but the use of the organically actually shows that across key players, there can be an idea or an action or a practicality to do something and it can happen. It's just that it takes time. So it's interesting to see you confirming and using words that are in concert with those from Nancy or WACSI. Anyways, as I move to the next question, I'm often interested about languaging, framing, discourse. And there's a whole idea of development as freedom from Amartya Sen. We've also had in our podcast, somebody who's spoken of development as healing, development as decolonisation. You are promoting the centrality of dignity and say that development is dignity or it is nothing. So, amongst all these ideas around what development can be, shouldn't be, could you tell us what you mean by development is dignity and why you think that dignity is so important?
Jonathan:Yeah, so I don't want to set it up as a competition with other framings. I think all those framings are really interesting. I hadn't heard that the healing one, which will make me think, and obviously Amartya Sen's framing was just huge in the way that it affected, I think, the way a lot of us have thought over the last decades. So I can't remember exactly when I started reading about dignity, but it struck me that it was a word that we use a lot. And I always say it's always in every single opening paragraph of any UN statement. And yet it's not a word we delve into. And I found that when we started to delve into what that word means, it was actually quite transformational. And interestingly that you mentioned listening, there's a great book that I always refer to. Actually was written by some USA consultants. I forget. I forget their names awfully right now, but I know the name of the book, so you can definitely look it up. It's called Time to Listen, and they went round. It's exactly the kind of research you'd love. I think they went round and talked to loads of communities around the world in many different contexts, from Bosnia, Ghana, Bolivia, every different context you can imagine that had been quote aid recipients or beneficiaries of aid projects. And the message that they received was really, really similar. And it was, kind of, thanks for caring, and thanks wanting to work with us to build projects. We don't want to kind of be ungrateful, but our experience has been one of lack of dignity. And so the material impacts are welcome often. I mean, sometimes, you know, it's fatal. I'm not saying that all aid projects work, but when they work, they work in terms of material impact, but very often, the experience of people on the receiving end is one of lack of dignity because there's no listening, because there's no ownership. And we know this from so much research. This is, again, you know, nothing I'm saying here is new to anyone. And yet, it's still a bit like kind of the insights of the kind of circularity that I was saying, they're not groundbreaking, but they're not institutionalised in the way we work. And I would say the same thing about this kind of listening and dignity. We kind of all know this. And if you look at the aid projects that are still going on in 2024, how many of them measure the process in profundity and how many of them measure the levels of dignity that people experience. And my instinct is that very few still. So that's why we thought that kind of trying to focus on this area was so important because yeah, I do think development without dignity is, I say nothing, I guess that's provocative, but, you know, poverty isn't the end of the world, I know this is a strange and terrible thing to say, but it's not, you can go to millions of communities which are living in poverty, have lived in poverty for centuries, I mean, poverty has been the kind of natural state of most humans for most of our existence, it doesn't mean a lack of dignity, at all, and we know that as well, there's great lack of dignity in rich countries, and there's great dignity in poor communities, so this concept of dignity, I found really challenging, and then, you know, I'll give you one other example, and I don't know the exact answer, but in conflict situations, or in situations of great corruption, you know, there's this idea, I think dignity is used wrongly when it's implied that it's, again, something that can be given to people. If we work with your community, your community might end up more dignified. That's nonsense because actually the lack of dignity is very often on the side of the oppressor. So, there's a great story I heard once from a survivor of a massacre in Colombia, tragically over the last 20 years, there've been displacements and massacres. And she said, there was a young man pointing a gun at me and I looked at him. And I felt pity for him, and in that context, and she survived, and this was a paramilitary organisation and the young people had been brainwashed and forced into doing terrible things or persuaded to be important. And the point is the dignity there was with the oppressed person. And so I just find that this word dignity and I know I'm probably beginning to border on to the kind of spiritual, but there's something about the concept of human dignity that does what I think we need to do, which is turns the tables. You know, the rich are undignified and the poor are dignified in many situations. It's undignified to continue in a world of such great inequality. So, for me, it's a kind of an equalising thing as well. And it positions, again, the traditional concept of development, positions the problem as poverty. And therefore, the solution, the location of poverty is in the Global South. And the solutions are for those, are from those people who are maybe not poor. But when the problem is lack of dignity. And again, we are all involved in responding to that collective problem. And, you know, Martin Luther King used to write about this as well. And I think that's a really profound and transformational framing of this. But just talking, I feel like I'm rambling and it feels to me like I need to spend more time working on this and kind of really building it into a coherent framing.
Nompilo:I don't think you're rambling. I think you're passionate and that's perfectly fine. I do also like that you were quite clear to say, you know what? Dignity and development doesn't have to be pitted with other things, right? Gender, freedom, it's an aspect of. So I think that really clarified that from the beginning. And maybe just to help you as you're thinking about the future of how to use this terminology. I hope that your organisation, as you've gotten to a place where you're measuring global solidarity, that you can get to a place where you can measure dignity in development or else where the dignity can be institutionalised. And I think with that kind of research over time, we would be able to actually be able to see the importance of when it's used versus when it's not. We know, of course, ultimately that dignity is everything. I wonder how it can be measured and what that would tell us as we get ready.
Jonathan:There's a group of ID Insight led by Tom Wein that is doing that. That's kind of said, look, you know, we know that dignity is important, but how do we get it into projects, and the answer is measurements. That's how we force it into people's heads. If there's one impact measurement, which is, it's difficult to do, but maybe it's just a question of, have you felt dignified by this process? You know, not only by the way in terms of quotes, recipients or beneficiaries, but actually the practitioners of the project, you know, whenever you're doing, the amount of work we probably all done in research projects or in quotes development projects. When you're kind of questioning how dignified it is exactly the way that you're doing the work or the pressures and incentives that you're under? So actually asking that question of everyone involved in a project, you know, has this been a dignity promoting experience? The answer is going to be pretty hard to measure, it's qualitative analysis par excellence. But, it will produce real insights and real challenges to the basically Bean County approach that has been dominant over the last 20 years. How many needles have you managed to stick in kids arms? It's not unimportant, it's clearly incredibly important, it's a matter of life and death. But it's not the only way that we should judge how successful a project is.
Nompilo:Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, let's move to our last question. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us today. To finish up, can you identify a practical first step that our listeners and viewers can take to support decolonisation and shifting power, whether they are members of the engaged general public or work in the development sector?
Jonathan:So I saw this question and I've been thinking about it. It's a really hard question to answer because everyone's so different and everyone's doing different things and contributing in different ways and at different stages. But I get, mate, is this a cop out? But I thought, you know, basically it's educate yourself or make the effort to educate yourself. I certainly got involved in this work. You know, when I think about my trajectory and when one understands, I guess, now how profoundly colonial the whole thing is, that wasn't always the case in my life. I always say I learned nothing about imperialism at school. This sounds incredibly kind of naff, I guess, but everything I learned about racism and empire, I learned from martin Luther King and listening to reggae. And that was in my youth. And then I started to read about it and understand it, but those seeds were sown because I was a massive reggae fan. You could hardly avoid that kind of perspective, but I learned nothing about it in school. And that's true of most people in the UK. And I know, again, I can't talk for the rest of Europe and the US and other parts, but my instinct is that that's true. I mean, everything I knew about slavery was that the UK had heroically banned it. Well, we didn't know anything about the fact that we started it 200 years earlier and all that stuff. So, for me, it's about gradually educating oneself. In my case, you know, given my background, which was, for those that are listening to this, I'm a white man, I was brought up in London, and it wasn't obvious to me any of this stuff, you know, what was obvious and this is why I don't discount empathy and compassion, you know, why I started this is because I had empathy and compassion and that isn't to be scoffed at, you know, wherever you're from and however much you understand politics and empire, that's a powerful source of humane relationships, but nevertheless, that's only the beginning. And one has to continue to educate oneself about political realities. And so that would be my main encouragement to people, because we are very limited in the education that we receive in Northern countries and incredibly constrained. And this stuff about colony and power and empire and dignity does not come easy to most people in the Global North in my experience, certainly white people. It's clearly a different instinct and understandings depending on the way that you're brought up. So I guess that was my thing, but a bit of a cop out, you know, read more, listen more. Oh, listen as well. I became a better writer when I started to listen, that's what I always say. And that's what you were saying earlier as well it's just a question of understanding and listening and shutting up. I had to learn that
Nompilo:Right, very interesting insights. Thank you, Jonathan. On my end, I actually have also been challenged similarly and in what practical steps I should be taking in my own journey and like you seeking knowledge over and about education, sharing ideas, or what we call in our Skill Share Programme, personal transformation has actually become a practical first step for me. So it's just interesting to see how, for most people, just thinking about the ideas is always a good place to start. There's nothing more from my end. Kate, I want to hand over to you.
Kate:Thank you Nompilo, and thank you Jonathan. I think it's been a great conversation and I've enjoyed it very thoroughly and I found it very thought provoking actually. And I look forward to talking to you again, Jonathan, about taking these ideas forwards and this idea of dignity. And for me, it's got a big link with power, because you can't feel that you have dignity if you're simultaneously feeling disempowered. So I think that relationship is a really interesting one to explore. And power in terms of power within, so the power that I have within, but also the power that I have to my agency. And I think that's one of the tricky things when we're looking at donor funded projects and development and how those can be decolonised in terms of the way that they're managed, the way they're funded, the way they're implemented. And one of the things The Development Hub is seeking to do is to take this beyond conversation into some practical case studies and practical how tos. And that's going to be our next step. So watch this space, but thank you very much, Jonathan, for your thought provoking inputs in our conversation.
Jonathan:Well, thanks for inviting me.
Kate:I hope you found this podcast episode interesting and inspiring. I'd like to invite you to subscribe by hitting the subscribe button below and go through to our website and sign up to receive our carefully curated practical resources on decolonising and anti racist action. Hope to see you again soon. Bye for now.