Not too long ago I finished When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert. If you aren’t familiar – it’s an exploration of how various missions or relief efforts done by wealthy or more powerful countries can actually do more long term damage than good – particularly when there is significant material poverty involved. The book shows the way various assumptions or common attitudes ultimately end up to be more self serving as opposed to truly making a difference for a community that may be in need.
I chose to read this book because it was recommended highly and because I was told it expounds on the dynamic of paternalism in a number of ways. And instead of doing an overall review here, I wanted to highlight some of the categories of paternalism that they identify and illustrate through many case studies and accounts. The book or something like it is needed reading for anyone who is involved in short-term missions especially (primarily if those trips are focused on service in poorer locations domestically or internationally).
In a section the authors highlight as “The Poison of Paternalism” they boil it down to a simple truth – don’t do things for people that they can do for themselves. You likely are doing damage to them, yourself, or both if you do. But here’s ways you can possibly identify the poison of paternalism at work. These are all clues that we need to take a step back and repent of our assumptions and seek a renewed perspective.
Resource Paternalism
When wealthy entities or organizations with large resources view the solutions as requiring merely the addition of new financial or material resources while the real solutions require helping a community steward their own resources.
Spiritual Paternalism
When missionaries aim to go “do” missions “to” people, assuming that they are the experts and failing to recognize that people in poverty often have great spiritual depth. There’s much to listen to and learn from.
Knowledge Paternalism
When we think we have all the best ideas about how to do things. We assume we know best. It never occurs to us to ask people who are likely the best experts of their own communities what we can learn from them. Brief note – this is rampant everywhere in the missions and business world.
Labor Paternalism
Doing work that people could and should do for themselves. Doing work for people that they should be doing themselves robs them of ownership, participation, dignity, and other important things important to development and healthy community.
Managerial Paternalism
Basically when entities or organizations of power enter into a different context or community with less power and take over. Integrated with some of the above elements, it’s when people of power just take over, control, and end up being in charge of various works or decisions or projects that affect another community as if they are the experts.
The book is primarily targeted towards international relief missions. However, there’s substantial content also about affluent majority culture churches partnering with urban poorer churches. So there’s helpful challenges about how to think about a variety of ministry partnering.
When I look at the above five types of paternalism, I’ve seen all of them and all of them in my own organization among many others. And you know what – I’ve exhibited every one of the five at one point or another! So this is an important book about how to partner with people and serve without hijacking dignity and doing damage long-term for the sake of short-term good feelings.
My last thought is that in the last chapter they highlight what maybe the most important ingredient to “healthy helping” that contributes to dignity. That ingredient is “repentance” or internal change to go a different direction. Paternalism continues in different forms because of blind spots as well as a failure to learn and especially to repent of the ways that our best of intentions are hurting others or doing damage. We have to repent when we learn we are doing damage to people, otherwise a new future is not possible. I thought that was an important point of the book because I don’t see many leaders who are faced with the feedback of paternalism respond with repentance. I think many choose to shoot the messenger instead. But paternalism is something we have to aggressively look for as we seek to empower others because it probably is the number one reason why efforts may fail over the long haul.
