In 2023, our 1818 colleague, Ellen Goldstein, published “DAMNED IF YOU DO—foreign aid and my struggle to do right in Myanmar” dedicated to “…the many courageous people fighting for human rights, rule of law, and true democracy in Myanmar.” The book is an anguished call for help to anyone who will listen. You can find the ebook version on Kindle.
I didn’t come across this book until it was added to the 1818 Book Repository quite recently. So that’s my excuse for being three years late to submit a review. However, we 1818ers really should read it, hence my review. Hopefully not just us 1818 insiders, but also the larger foreign aid community.
Ellen wrote the book to recount her experiences as WB Country Director for Myanmar from 2017 to 2019. Her tenure coincided with an ongoing genocide in Myanmar with no end in sight. In the final chapters, she also briefly recounts her post-Myanmar separation from the Bank and the beginnings of her retirement life back in Washington.
The book is delightfully frank, with no holds barred. Ellen went to great lengths to get a clear non-objection to her book from the Bank…but it never materialized. So while she quotes only from public documents, the book has a pleasantly uncensored feel to it. As is the custom, Ellen did alter many/most of the names of the protagonists. With one major exception: Dr Kim, who was WB president at that time. Dr Kim gets the very explicit treatment that he deserves. You all recall the circumstances surrounding his departure and the fact that he fired the three most senior women in the Bank just before he left. No tears to be shed here.
One of the many remarkable things about Ellen’s book is her self-awareness. She is fully aware of her own strengths and weaknesses and how they play into her stressful role as director in a difficult country at a difficult time. Ellen is also consistently principled, despite some of the “collaborator” innuendo thrown her way by people who should have known better. As she notes in one of the early chapters, when it comes to genocide, it certainly helps one’s lifetime moral compass to be brought up in a Jewish family in the shadows of the Holocaust.
There is no doubt in my mind that Ellen was dealt an impossible hand (in card-playing parlance) in Myanmar. One could say that it’s an extreme example of the basic dilemma of working in aid/development. Namely, what does one do when the sovereign client doesn’t want to “do good” (as we see it) or at least “do better”? At the top of the doing bad pyramid, there’s genocide. And at the bottom, there are countless countries where, for example, the government only wants to borrow for building power plants, whereas the real impediment to living better is an impossibly corrupt and incompetent education system. We 1818ers have all been there.
We all do our best to do good. Well, most of us. Sometimes we succeed in doing good and we’re happy. Sometimes we fail and we’re deeply miserable. Again, most of us can live with these miserable outcomes for a while, provided there’s a modicum of solidarity from all of the WB management chain above us. But if the managerial solidarity starts to evaporate, as it eventually did in Ellen’s case, it can become unbearable. The remarkable thing is that Ellen didn’t become miserable. She had strategies for continuing to do good, to do the morally right thing. But that’s her story to tell. On that note, I heartily encourage you to read Ellen’s courageous book.
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* Ellen Goldstein is a former Country Director in Europe and Asia who writes, teaches, and coaches on foreign aid policy and leadership in development.
** David Craig worked at the World Bank from 1984 to 2012, including three terms as Country Director in West Africa, Egypt and West Bank & Gaza. After the Bank he was advisor on the Green Climate Fund and worked on regional refugee issues in Central Africa. He is retired and lives in France.
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