MichaelWoolcockInternational Development: Navigating Humanity's Greatest Challenge Polity, 2023, 200 p. $64.95.

We have inherited a large house, a great world house in which we . . . must learn somehow to live with each other in peace. The title of Michael Woolcock's latest book makes a provocative assertion: that international development is humanity's greatest challenge. At first glance, one could likely think of any number of alternative challenges that are more vexing and fundamental to the human condition than international development. And in spite of its broad possible impacts on a significant portion of the human population, formal international development is a small field practiced by an almost imperceptibly small fraction of the human population today, and only for about the past 100 years. How can something so narrow and recent be considered humanity's greatest challenge? If you ask a philosopher, historian, theologian, or other intellectual who has pondered the human condition from its inception, the ultimate human challenge is likely to be summarized as something like: How do we live together as humans? Think of what is contained in most religious texts, epic poems, mythologies, or stories from ancient oral traditions: At their core are stories or rules on how individuals should live their lives in relation to others. The tension between the title's seemingly narrow description of humanity's greatest challenge, and the reader's loftier understanding of the human condition, is precisely the genius behind Woolcock's book. Even just after reading a few pages of the prelude, it becomes clear that the title is actually a clever sleight of hand—in fact, the true question underlying "International Development: Navigating Humanity's Greatest Challenge" is actually the title's converse: How will navigating humanity's greatest challenge—learning to live together—be affected by international development? With this greater framing, the book reveals itself as a guidebook for how development practitioners can best embark upon the "epic adventure" (p. xv) of development by focusing on building systems and processes rather than one-size-fits-all solutions. Systems, Woolcock argues, can be used to solve development challenges, but also the challenges to human societies that those very solutions will cause. In other words, Woolcock aims to reorient the focus of development away from asking what are the most effective policies, toward asking what systems we need to optimize policy making. There is a strong appeal in linking Woolcock's vision of international development and the fundamental challenge of human society with the ancient stories that first attempted to teach people how to live together in peace. For example, in many modern religious traditions, gods are usually envisioned as embodiments of goodness. It is therefore easy for modern readers to look at the deliberately flawed gods of ancient mythology with confusion. How could stories of philandering, vengeful, and capricious deities possibly teach us how to live together in peace? The answer is that they actually do, but our focus is misplaced: It is the interactions between the gods that embody virtue and provoke introspection, not the gods themselves. Similarly, Woolcock warns us that too much of the development literature and practice has been focused on providing technical expertise and "best practices"—which is missing the point. He cautions us that if we are looking to the Gods of Development (the World Bank, UN, national development commissions, etc.) to give us the right policy lessons, our focus is misplaced. Rather, we should be more concerned with how they interact with each other and stakeholders, and the process by which they find the best solution—not the solution itself. Just as the Ten Commandments cannot elucidate the correct course of action for every moral dilemma that arises, a list of policy "best practices" is inferior to appropriate structures of decision-making that can handle problems which are "inevitable yet unforeseen". To illustrate this point, the book opens by describing the recent discovery of a peat bog in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that would release "20 years of US fossil fuel emissions" if it were to dry up. However, deforestation from local villagers—who depend on timber sales for their livelihood—would change the ecosystem and dry the bog. Complicating the situation is that many of the locals view the bog as the "sacred resting site of their venerated ancestors," as well as the fact that there is disagreement between adjacent villages as to who owns the rights to the bog. What should be done in this case? How is the correct policy determined? Even if everyone involved agrees that "development" is the goal, what even is the specific development problem to be solved in this situation? Woolcock's main assertion is that since it is impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all solution to every development issue like this, it is more important to create meta-structures for how these issues will be resolved. Key to his theory of development is the idea of the "social contract," or the way in which the state, civil society, and firms engage one another generally. In whatever system is created, a main concern will be "process legitimacy," or the buy-in of all parties that—win or lose—the process is agreed upon as fair and binding to everyone. It is clear that Woolcock is more concerned with high-level ideas and processes. This is in stark contrast with much of the research conducted on development today. For example, the majority of academic development research is done by economists, who have strong publishing incentives to ensure strict causal identification in their research designs. To this end, most of this research relies on randomized control trials (RCTs). While Woolcock openly admits that RCTs are invaluable in discovering the "right" answer for many questions, he laments the hyper-focus on such a narrow epistemological tool in the greater development space. This is particularly true as RCTs—and other methods for strict causal inference—are best suited to answer very narrow, highly stylized questions. Unfortunately, this sprint to the small and micro leaves weightier questions unexplored. This view is reminiscent of a small but prominent group of economists—most notably Lant Pritchett and Nobel laurate Angus Deaton—who argue that solving poverty will require large changes of national and multinational systems, not narrow answers to small questions. For example, it is hard to imagine that Sierra Leone will ascend to the ranks of high-income countries because an RCT asked whether improving nutrition is better achieved by giving chickens or eggs to the food insecure. Woolcock clearly approaches his book through this perspective—in fact, Woolcock and Pritchett have been close collaborators for many years, and Pritchett is one of the most-cited researchers in Woolcock's book. The book struck me in three ways. First, the book frequently appeals to shared prosocial or moral feelings within its readership. Beyond framing the journey of humanity as learning to live together in peace, the author frequently refers to development practitioners as people who mostly "want to make the world a better place". Even the Epilogue is entitled "Putting your Time, Talents, and Treasure to Work (For Others)". Second, there is a strong focus on lofty ideas and theories at the expense of practical advice on how to implement those theories. Typologies are common—be they of "developments" (big, small, and national), or "orders" (vernacular, official, and academic). Big concepts (the social contract, legitimacies, theories of change, epistemologies, etc.) are introduced and referred to often. Unless one pays careful attention, it is easy to get lost in the clouds of theory and forget the practical points the book is trying to make. Finally, the language can become difficult to read and understand. The author is prone to making long exhaustive lists and definitions, all crammed into a single sentence. As one example of an unfortunate pattern, the first sentence of chapter two takes up over one-third of an entire page, and contains eleven commas, three semicolons, and four sets of parentheses. I often had to re-read and parse sentences multiple times just to understand their meaning. One possible critique is that the book lacks concrete positive examples of how development practitioners might apply its theories to actual development work. Of all its discussion of the importance of systems, processes, legitimacy, and so on, there was little guidance on how to create those systems or legitimacies. Going back to the problem of the peat bog, Woolcock did a masterful job of pointing out the problems—but never discussed what a solution might look like. Only once in the book was there even a passing mention of a process by which policy makers could implement an inclusive solutions system and only for one paragraph in the last chapter of the book. It is easy to point out problems with existing systems, but much more difficult to provide solutions. I can therefore see how a development practitioner might read this book, feel inspired to create a more inclusive decision space, but then ask "But now what?". As such, this short book seeks not to offer a list of proven solutions to global poverty, to promote rigorous research methods to identify them, or grand plans to ensure global peace—plenty of others have done this. Rather, it extends an invitation to "see" and regard development as being akin to an epic adventure, to recognize that all of humanity is now on such a shared journey whether we know it or not . . . (p. xvii) This is surely a noble goal. And it is difficult to argue with Woolcock's greater argument: while a policy may solve one aspect of a specific development problem for one group, a development structure has the potential to navigate any number of challenges, both current, future, and unforeseen. But I worry that the lack of practical guidance on how one creates these meta-systems means that the important lessons of this book will die—unheeded—on the pages upon it was written; which would be a tragedy indeed.