This is one of the most useful framings I’ve encountered for a tension I’ve felt but struggled to articulate clearly. James Ferguson’s argument that development interventions systematically depoliticize the problems they claim to solve maps directly onto what I observed in the field. The machine produces outputs, but the underlying power structures remain untouched. Your point about EA working around the local knowledge problem rather than through it is sharp, and I think largely correct. Vaccines and cash transfers are genuinely brilliant precisely because they minimize the surface area for implementation failure. But I’d push back slightly on the implication that this is sufficient as a long-term strategy. The interventions that are currently “not saturated” as you put it are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster in exactly the domains where local context, political economy, and institutional relationships matter most: primary healthcare systems, land governance, nutrition policy, climate adaptation. At some point, EA will have to engage with the messiness it has been successfully avoiding. That’s not a critique it’s what I think the next frontier looks like. And it’s part of why I think people with field experience in these contexts have something genuinely useful to contribute to the conversation, rather than just being recipients of well-designed interventions.
This is one of the most useful framings I’ve encountered for a tension I’ve felt but struggled to articulate clearly. James Ferguson’s argument that development interventions systematically depoliticize the problems they claim to solve maps directly onto what I observed in the field. The machine produces outputs, but the underlying power structures remain untouched.
Your point about EA working around the local knowledge problem rather than through it is sharp, and I think largely correct. Vaccines and cash transfers are genuinely brilliant precisely because they minimize the surface area for implementation failure. But I’d push back slightly on the implication that this is sufficient as a long-term strategy. The interventions that are currently “not saturated” as you put it are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster in exactly the domains where local context, political economy, and institutional relationships matter most: primary healthcare systems, land governance, nutrition policy, climate adaptation. At some point, EA will have to engage with the messiness it has been successfully avoiding.
That’s not a critique it’s what I think the next frontier looks like. And it’s part of why I think people with field experience in these contexts have something genuinely useful to contribute to the conversation, rather than just being recipients of well-designed interventions.