First it was sustainability. Then it was scale. Now it’s smart. My frustration with over-loved and under-defined S-words in development reached a new low today. Just this week I have read a smart lesson on private water operators, a UK government report calling for smart international development, a BBC article about smart slums, and had a look at a website for smart meters. Smart is everywhere!
But is that a good thing? One of the better slides at an otherwise unremarkable water conference several years ago started with a slide simply titled Sustainability. But it was followed by a refreshingly frank insight: Sustainability: it’s just like teenagers and sex, many are talking about it, but few are actually doing it. Is smart development in smart cities with smart infrastructure destined for the same? Lots of smart talk, but little smart action? A bit of “smartwashing” without any concrete differences?
This is not to say that there should be a singular definition of smart. In fact, as an American living in the UK, I enjoy the nuances between when a Brit says “don’t you look smaaaaht today, Kate,” and when my American father-in-law compliments my intelligence, not my clothes, when he says I look smarter than my husband. What this simply shows is that context matters – a smartphone is not the same thing as smart development. A smart toilet – which will raise the toilet seat when it senses you nearing, angle the bidet to your preferred anal cleansing height, and oh so much more – is not the same as smart slums. It’s back to basics, but a first step towards actually smartening up development would be to define what smart development is and how to go about it.
Perhaps the reason smart development is sitting so poorly with me on this late Friday afternoon is the overemphasis on what it is or isn’t, rather than how to do it. By “smartwashing” development, one assumes that we just need a bit more technological innovation. That we are on the cusp of the next technology that will finally be the answer to the difficult social, economic, and political problems that perpetuate poverty. Technological innovations have had and will continue to have an impact on inclusive growth, but they are rarely the magic bullet to lift millions out of poverty, no matter how smart they are.
Calling for smarter development without doing anything differently is meaningless. How to do it is arguably more important than what it is. Just because Trump says he has the best words, doesn’t make it so. The same goes for smartening development up. Just because you say it’s smart, doesn’t mean that it is. Doing development differently requires more than adding another word that begins with s. There is a worrying absence of a discussion of the role of smart people in all of this buzz. Doing smart development surely has to include learning from what has been done before and not repeating mistakes. But as simple as that sounds, it’s incredibly hard for smart people to do that. I’ve visited underperforming water systems on six continents and it’s a near-universal truth that infrastructure-led approaches to water poverty, no matter how smart the technology is, are not going to solve the problem. Yet well-meaning and most likely smart people keep doing this without changing course. Doesn’t sound very smart now, does it?
Right, lest I leave you with the impression that I am a technological Luddite advocating for dumber development, I’m off to try out my new smart watch that will keep me from getting lost in the clag in the Lake District while continuing to ponder how to actually do development smarter, not just talk about it.