I started my career working for NGOs (unpaid, most of the time). I spent a lot of that time learning how to blog, connecting with the people in the development community all over the world, and having lots of heated debates about whether or not we were really achieving anything.

This week I went back to my roots and interviewed returning guest Martin Kirk, of The Rules. We got him on to talk about Labour’s latest policy document on aid, which was released in March, and he told us how cutting edge this document is — even if he doesn’t think it quite goes far enough.

For those of you who haven’t spent time working in the third sector, it might seem like an odd topic for debate. Who could object to charity around the world? Helping poor people should be simple.

I used to hear stuff like that a lot.

How much we give, the motives behind it, who it goes to, how it’s used, the consequences of aid on societies, and the very narrative of ‘charity’ as the generosity of the ‘developed’ world are topics constantly being debated.

Changing how we think about poverty

International development as a sector has long been dominated by economists. Many of the models that the world works towards — spearheaded by the UN and its Sustainable Development Goals — are fundamentally based on mainstream economic thought. And, for Martin Kirk, that means they are doomed to failure.

“You cannot grow your way out of poverty anymore. It is just a logical fallacy, and it is a logical fallacy of a very simplistic sort.”

Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for International Development Kate Osamor set out an alternative, (if flawed) vision for International Development, with a paper called “A World For The Many, Not The Few”. It sets out five key political priorities:

Fairer economy — cracking down on tax avoidance, and encouraging alternative models of ownership such as co-operatives. Increasing the proportion of aid spending on public health and education services, and ending the UK ’s involvement in public-private partnerships. Greater focus on feminism, with more support for women’s organisation and government’s that prioritize gender. Greater focus on peace and stability, with more spending on crisis prevention over response, and trying out new models of humanitarian assistance such as cash transfers. Greater focus on climate justice, ensuring no spending goes to fossil fuels, and more money goes to renewable infrastructure.

What’s interesting about those five priorities is that it reframes ‘international development’ as being an arena for climate and gender and justice issues, not just economics. Instead of exclusively talking about supplying goods, services or knowledge to the less fortunate, it’s talking about the systems that create poverty. As Martin puts it,

“Poverty, inequality and climate change — it’s very important that we see the linkage between those three issues, because they all share the same root causes.”

If you listened to our episode with Kate Raworth, this line of reasoning will be familiar to you. If we think about systems that combine the study of economics (or finance, essentially, which is mostly how we speak about economics) with ecology and social needs, then it becomes obvious that the global challenges facing the world are inherently interlinked.

We can’t solve those sorts of interlinked challenges by sitting in the paradigm we’ve found ourselves in.

Most people when faced with climate change news feel a sense of hopelessness. All those conferences, all that new technology, all the social changes that we’ve introduced in the last few years — from separating our rubbish to banning plastic bags in supermarkets — how can that add up to so little? We’re still coming up against all the same blockages and banalities of politics despite it all, the requisite rate of carbon reduction slipping out sight.

We’re not overturning patterns of poverty either, as the Labour paper reminds us. Unless you only count the most extreme forms of poverty, more than half the planet currently live below the poverty line. That’s better than it was 30 or 40 years ago, but that’s not because the top-down system of international development has cracked the code; it’s because of the rapid economic advances of places like China, a country which burns more coal than the rest of the planet combined.

Poverty is being pushed back by an engine of growth built on the exploitation of ever dwindling natural resources.

This is, of course, progress. Totally understandable and admirable progress that has improved millions of lives. There is no denying it. But it also shows us that solving one problem at a time won’t get us anywhere.

The first step to solving the most pressing and complex issues — the kinds of issues that international development seeks to solve — must be to focus on root causes of those issues and the systems that pin them together.

As with economics and the obsession with GDP, international development becomes a whole lot less simple once you start measuring what’s real rather than how much effort you’re putting into it.

The good news is that thinkers like Martin Kirk, Kate Raworth and many others are changing politicians’ minds. And I know from personal experience that the next generation of development economists are ready to shift the paradigm. Now let’s see how quickly we can make it come around.

Coming soon

The last ever cohort of British MEPs have less than a year left in the European Parliament.

What are they up to? We’ve spent the last few weeks speaking with British MEPs about their experiences working in the European Parliament in a truly unique political period. Watch this space.

You know the drill:

Follow us on FB – www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/

– www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/ Follow us on Twitter – twitter.com/CandDPodcast

– twitter.com/CandDPodcast Subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes – itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/