Open The Echo Chamber

A Blog About Development and Global Change

From Professor Ed Carr, NEC Core Advisory Team Member:

This blog takes its name from a metaphor I have long employed to explain/understand development policy and practice. As I argued in my book, development is plagued by an echo chamber of misunderstanding with regard to life and events in the developing world. We expect the world to work in a certain manner, and we assume that our interventions in the world will result in predictable, measurable outcomes. Therefore, we gather data to measure the expected workings of the world and analyze those data through frameworks founded on the very understandings of the world they are meant either to affirm or to challenge. In addition, by our choice of data, and our means of analysis, we end up affirming that the world does indeed work the way we thought it did. This handcuffs any effort to understand and improve the well-being of those living on what I call globalization’s shoreline.

We need to find a new way to learn about life and events on globalization’s shoreline to break out of this echo chamber.  This blog is but one contribution to this process . . . for more on the research, policy, and implementation work that I conduct to this end, please check out my homepage and the Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL).

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