PDF (108 kB, 13 pages)PRB 07-37E
Tonina Simeone
Political and Social Affairs Division
15 November 2007
PDF (108 kB, 13 pages)
The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development(1) has become increasingly familiar in Canada over the past decade, particularly among government policy-makers and Aboriginal leaders. However, despite their significant political and policy implications, the Project’s findings and their assumed applicability to the Canadian context have received little scrutiny. In view of the growing influence of the Harvard Project on government policy, some consideration of its findings seems timely. This document outlines the Project’s key findings and identifies some of the limitations and main criticisms advanced in relation to the Harvard studies. The intent is not to discredit the Harvard Project, but to present a more balanced view of this body of research, given its wide and almost uncritical acceptance to date.
The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development was founded in 1987 by Professors Stephen Cornell and Joseph. P. Kalt. Based at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Project operates in association with the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona’s Udall Center.
The Harvard Project’s stated aim is to understand and foster the conditions under which sustained, self-determined, social and economic development is achieved among American Indian nations. At the heart of the Project are three key questions: What works? Where does it work? Why does it work? In other words, what accounts for the economic success of some Indian nations, while others continue to struggle?
The answers to those questions have resulted in the Project’s now well-known formulation of key determinants of economic success: “Sovereignty Matters,” “Institutions Matter” and “Culture Matters.” These findings are described as follows:(2)
Sovereignty Matters. When Native nations make their own decisions about what development approaches to take, they consistently out-perform external decision makers – on matters as diverse as governmental form, natural resource management, economic development, health care, and social service provision.
Institutions Matter. For development to take hold, assertions of sovereignty must be backed by capable institutions of governance. Nations do this as they adopt stable decision rules, establish fair and independent mechanisms for dispute resolution, and separate politics from day-to-day business and program management.
Culture Matters. Successful economies stand on the shoulders of legitimate, culturally grounded institutions of self-government. Indigenous societies are diverse; each nation must equip itself with a governing structure, economic system, policies, and procedures that fit its own contemporary culture.
Along with these three key determinants of tribal economic success, the authors have added two others: “Leadership” and “Strategic Thinking.”
Leadership. Nation building requires leaders who introduce new knowledge and experiences, challenge assumptions, and propose change. Such leaders, whether elected, community, or spiritual, convince people that things can be different and inspire them to take action.
Strategic Thinking. The Indian nation has moved away from crisis management and opportunistic, quick-fix responses to development dilemmas and toward long-term decision-making that incorporates community priorities, concerns, circumstances, and assets.
According to the authors of the Harvard Project, these five criteria do not guarantee success, but they do increase the possibility of obtaining it more frequently.(3) Cornell and Kalt suggest that where those key determinants are in place, “other assets such as education, natural resources, access to capital and location begin to pay off. Where those things are not in place, those assets are likely to be wasted.”(4) However, as discussed below, precisely what the authors meant to suggest by these findings is much less well-known or understood.
The first point the Harvard studies stress is that “sovereignty matters.” According to the authors, sovereignty is attained when tribes make their own decisions about government design, resource allocations, development strategy, organization of internal affairs and other related matters.(5) They reasonably suggest that when Indian nations have decision-making control over activities that take place on their lands, and some control over the benefits of those activities, they are apt to make much better decisions concerning those activities.
Sovereignty, in this sense, is understood to mean sound, local decision-making capacity (self-governance). The Harvard Project authors are far less concerned with the idea of sovereignty as expressed by political rights and by control over lands and resources (self government),(6) and in this regard depart from most development theorists, who view the ownership of resources with commercial value as crucial to development.(7) Their position appears, moreover, to run counter to the views expressed by the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples(8) and by the United Nations,(9) both of which have called for the transfer and control of natural resources to Aboriginal peoples.
The Harvard Project emphasizes that economic success requires that sovereignty be operationalized through institutions that can “effectively solve core governance problems.” In practice, this would entail stable political institutions and policies, independent court system or other dispute-resolution mechanisms, a capable bureaucracy and the separation of politics from day-to-day business management.(10) What the Harvard theorists conclude from their research is that businesses that are protected from political interference are far more likely to be profitable and to succeed than those that are not.
Rather than being novel, as some have suggested, this finding is a key component of standard management practices.(11) In Canada, there is a considerable body of literature concerning the importance of supporting institutions and sound institutional practices as a link to successful Aboriginal economic development. The Institute on Governance, as well as the Office of the Auditor General of Canada and the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples, among others, have dealt with the issue of institutional development.
The Harvard Project authors suggest that, not only are good governance processes required for development, but governance processes must also “match” or “fit” with the culture of the community. By this view, the notion of a “cultural match” does not concern “cultural appropriateness” or traditional forms of governance but, rather, refers to a type of “resonance” between formal institutions and what people view as appropriate for them: more specifically, it concerns the legitimacy of the institutions. In other words, the authors are not suggesting that traditional forms of activity should be imported into modern organizations, particularly if these cultural or traditional practices are inimical to economic development.(12)
The idea of a cultural match has been widely understood in Canada and elsewhere to mean that development processes should or need to follow culture. This, however, appears to be a misreading of the Harvard study authors, who argue for the implementation of legislation to “invent governments that are capable of operating effectively in the contemporary world.”(13) In other words, the Harvard theorists never quite address the issue of what happens if the culture in question is fundamentally inimical to development or the values of a liberal society. Some have suggested that where governance is understood to be simply effective organizational management rather than a series of political processes designed to guarantee a group’s well-being, then “blatantly authoritarian and gender-based institutions [may] pass without critical scrutiny.”(14)
One Canadian commentator, Christina Dowling, has suggested that the Harvard theorists fail to account for some of the more complex issues that arise with respect to contemporary First Nations cultures, including their diverse systems of social organization; these systems may not be easily reconciled with Western economic notions of development and leadership models, which are centred largely on the individual. She writes:(15)
Traditional First Nations societies (particularly hunter-gatherers) are essentially opposed to the very conditions of industrial development: the accumulation of wealth, growth and westernized notions of progress. Acceptability of these ideals, intrinsic to westernized economic success, does not dovetail with First Nations way of life. Furthermore, the myopic view of the world that a society must take in order that these conditions take hold (acceptance of the use of natural resources for economic gain, the resulting environmental degradation and stratification of society, to name a few) is not congruent with their cultures.
Dowling’s concern that the Harvard theorists fail to recognize other legitimate positions regarding development – in particular, those that are circumspect about economic growth and the impact on environmental sustainability and culture – is also taken up by some Australian researchers. Martin Mowbray, for example, is concerned that the important debate within Aboriginal communities about the implications of economic development on culture is completely overlooked. In this sense, the political expression of complex cultural processes is absent from the Harvard analyses.
The Harvard findings are, by themselves, largely unexceptional in that local decision-making capacity, good governance and properly functioning institutions have long been understood as important determinants of economic success; indeed, these conclusions extend well beyond the field of Aboriginal policy and are widely accepted in general management literature.(16) The concern, as Mowbray and others suggest, appears to be the manner in which these economic determinants are cast.(17)
Criticisms of the Harvard Project centre mainly on the study’s key finding that, apart from effective self-government, nothing else has worked to alleviate the conditions of poverty experienced by Indian nations. The implication is that government policies and expenditures aimed at improving the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal people, apart from localized sovereignty, are essentially misplaced. In his paper, Mowbray suggests that the proclivity of the Harvard theorists to neo-liberal economic policy and “faith in free market forces” has led them to dismiss “the relative efficacy of factors contingent on much more substantial state investment, such as in education and health.”(18) Mowbray goes on to argue that they essentially discount government expenditure as a necessary factor in development, even though state intervention – for example, in underwriting major resource developments – is prevalent elsewhere.
Sullivan and Mowbray, in particular, are also highly critical of the defects in the evidence that form the basis of the Harvard Project’s key findings. Among the flaws cited are the use of old data, gaps in data, subjective and limited sample sizes, conflation of concepts such as correlation and causation, and failure to include other analytic frameworks such as gender, state, class or race. Mowbray writes:(19)
The defects in the evidence that underpins the Harvard Project findings and recommendations are serious. They give rise to a number of problems of omission. One of these is that the Harvard Project researchers do not control (or test) for numerous other potentially important causal variables. Some of these are as fundamental as the possible effect of settlement size on economic prospects, the proximity of large cities, or the potential effect of significant and heavily targeted federal or state funded infrastructure or services.
Like Mowbray, Canadian scholar Alan Cairns finds that the authors of the Harvard Project have advanced their findings without testing, or accounting, for other causal variables, such as population size, proximity and access to markets, and government investments in infrastructure and other services. For example, American Indian nations, such as the Navajo and Cherokee nations, have populations upward of 250,000. In Canada, two thirds of First Nations have on-reserve populations of fewer than 500 people and many are isolated and remote.
In contrast to the authors of the Harvard Project, Cairns argues that self-government, as a result of the complex realities facing many First Nations communities, may well fall short of the goals of its most passionate supporters. He writes:(20)
The small size of First Nations and the limitations on governing capacities that necessarily involves mean that many policies, regulations and services will continue to come from the federal and provincial governments. Self-government, no matter how ambitious and successful, is not enough. Virtually all the great affairs of the state will continue to be handled by the federal and provincial governments. Further, the needs and desires of 60 percent of the Aboriginal population that is mainly urban, which is heterogeneous and lacks a land base, requires sympathetic policies from federal, provincial and municipal governments. We need to think of the total constitutional order, not just the limited escape from its functioning offered by self-government for small populations.Cairns is concerned that, from a public policy perspective, policy-makers may be doing a disservice to the cause of self-government by failing to account for those realities, such as the limited local capacity, small population size and geographic remoteness of many communities.
Although research examining the Harvard Project’s assumptions and findings have been largely absent in the Canadian context, the prescriptions of the Harvard model have been making their way into current thinking about Aboriginal health policy. In Canada, the findings of the Harvard Project have been linked to a seminal study by Chandler and Lalonde, who found that First Nations communities in British Columbia with greater control over their affairs experienced substantially lower rates of suicide.(21)
The study identified six protective factors and analyzed them in relation to communities and to a continuum of suicide rates as a possible explanation for the variance. They found a direct correlation between the presence of these “cultural continuity factors” and rates of suicide. Communities in which some, or all, protective factors were present experienced substantially lower suicide rates. Those factors are: land claims, self-government, educational services, police and fire services, health services and cultural facilities.
Chandler and Lalonde suggest that more research is required to clarify the implications of their study. The absence of research linking self-determination to improved health outcomes, or, conversely, the identification of other causal variables, has been highlighted by some health researchers and practitioners. Kue Young and his colleagues found that:(22)
Whether self-determination has led to any significant changes in health status is another matter, one that the lack of data prevents us from addressing. While the issues of control over health care and improved health status are intertwined in the discourse, they are somewhat separate in practice. The issue of control is within the realm of the political, and represents the legitimate aspirations of Aboriginal people to have control over the delivery of health services within their communities, and control over the research that informs health policy … [B]ut it is assumed that improved health status will logically flow from such control. We believe the issue is more complex than that.Commenting on the work of Chandler and Lalonde, Young and colleagues suggest that where a community has protective factors in place, it is likely that there will be more employment and initiatives carried out by local people rather than non-residents. “Even still,” they argue, “it is possible that the real explanation for these positive results lies in the relative strength and social cohesion of the communities prior to engaging in the self-determination process.”(23)
On this point, in a recent examination of self-determination and culture on health outcomes in northern Ontario, the results appear to be mixed. The authors looked at the suicide rates of young people in northern Ontario and found that after a long period of intervention under exclusively First Nations control, the rates continued to be elevated. The authors of that study concluded that there is no single-note response to such complex issues, stating that while “few would question that self-determination is a necessary condition for the continuing improvement of Aboriginal people’s health … actualizing this ideal in real situations is a complex process, and it may not play out as expected.”(24) Based on the uneven results of recent research, it would seem that the question of whether there is a causal connection between self-determination and suicide, and health outcomes generally, or whether other causal variables are equally important, requires additional research.
The findings of the Harvard Project on American Indian Development have been widely disseminated, and favourably received, in Canada and elsewhere. Their claim that sovereignty matters, for instance, coincides with long-standing and legitimate appeals by Aboriginal people for control over their own lives. However, it is not at all clear that the Harvard theorists are calling for “sovereignty” in the sense of possessing political rights and ownership over lands and resources, as much as calling for better organizational management and governance structures, in a manner compatible with modern economic frameworks. The concern for some is that their findings may be attractive to those who wish to transfer responsibility to Aboriginal governments, rather than broader rights to lands and resources.
Given the wide acceptance of the prescriptions of the Harvard Project, the absence of any substantive Canadian analysis is puzzling. Despite the claim by Cornell and Kalt that “there is no reason to believe that the findings of our work in the United States are inapplicable or irrelevant”(25) in Canada, there are important differences in the legal and political history of indigenous peoples within the two countries, as well as significant differences in geography and population size that must be taken into account in the application of these findings. Moreover, a closer reading of the Project’s key findings suggests that “Indigenous leaders and others also need to be cautious about the way in which endorsement of the Harvard Project findings may be used to legitimate the idea of governments transferring responsibility for solving problems to unprepared Indigenous communities.”(26)