What if art were our development paradigm?

Drawing wisdom from artistic ways of being to reorient how we think about and do development

Art by author

I’ve witnessed numerous conversations over the last few years about what kinds of paradigm shifts are most urgently needed to render global development more transformational and what kinds of capabilities or tools might help development actors actually translate those ideas into reality. Inevitably, many of these conversations — whether among senior leaders in the UN or mixed groups of government, civil society, UN and other actors making decisions or developing policy on some complex development challenges — highlight that the predominant ways of thinking and working don’t align with the realities of how the world works and the nature of the challenges we face. They conclude in some way or another that the [mental and institutional] frameworks we most commonly rely on for processing reality, determining what needs to be done and how to do it, and managing and learning from the actions that proceed are premised on overly simplistic assumptions or utilitarian priorities, in contrast to a problem landscape that is complex, uncertain, and systemic.

As perhaps one effect of this widening divergence between what we’re doing and what the world is asking of us, I’ve noticed more pockets of openness emerge in policy spaces to integrate approaches that might bring more humanity back into the processes that are intended to serve humanity: e.g., more calls for playfulness to be featured in the spaces where bureaucrats develop projects and plans, or behavioral science to be leveraged as a way to better respond to the true complexity of why people do what they do, or the arts as a way to strengthen social cohesion and inform people’s visions of what might be possible in the future. Something I remain equally conscious of in observing the value of this increasing experimentation in ways of doing development, however, is whether the ways we bring the new into the old replicate the same mindsets and paradigms that created the original systems. How do we overcome the tendency for potentially transformative approaches to be subsumed into oppressive, inefficient, or inequitable structures and mental models that got us here?

I’ve particularly considered this tension when it comes to the role of art in development, and when and where it is leveraged as part of processes to transform systems. On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see all the ways art is playing a role in policymaking, from illustrating the message behind data in more creative ways, to helping people conceive of or visualize alternative possibilities for the future by making it something more tangible, to helping groups get out of their comfort zone within collective decision-making processes. Art, and collaboration with artists, has likewise long been a feature in local development interventions to advance social, economic and environmental progress, such as in efforts to help communities reconnect “to traditional culture” or to promote “health messages, healing and [recovery] from trauma and provision of new economic opportunities” (Ware and Dunphy, 2020).

While these examples are vital, as a whole, they also seem to suggest art’s predominant role in development as being an input to or potential activity/program for a specific development outcome targeting a certain population or sphere of impact (e.g., mental health, peacebuilding, youth empowerment, climate change awareness). Or, in the case of art featuring in high-level policy processes, a creative input into an existing framework (e.g., a data point to determine priorities, an exercise to expand the scope of the ideation process, a means of shaking up the typical conversations and thinking patterns of a group). While these can and do yield invaluable outcomes like more creative ideas, artistic artifacts representing the visions or priorities of a group, identification of unique opportunities for collaboration across stakeholders, or non-traditional data about the problem and potential solutions, they still often remain subject to the filters inherent to a larger policy or program design process that was not built to accommodate such outcomes. Otherwise put: processes that require people to try to mold/constrain/adapt the creative outcomes to fit pre-existing assumptions, priorities, and power dynamics — e.g., in the form of a limited set of key performance indicators, a specific format for structuring a theory of change, a set of standards that define what counts as legitimate and rigorous data for policymaking, a way of talking about development and its purpose, norms of engagement among different decision-makers, the language and format of policy documents themselves, donor reporting requirements, donor interests in general, the wider influence of capitalism and individualism on motives for collaboration, or viable resourcing strategies for initiatives.

So what would be the alternative? What might it mean to value and leverage art in society-transforming processes beyond its [important but not only] role as an issue-specific development intervention or experimental moment in an otherwise conventional planning process? One answer I’ve been thinking about lies in what it would mean to engage with art as not just input, but as the guiding frame and overarching basis for initiating and designing collaborative processes geared to systems transformation — basically of starting with the question:

What if art were our development paradigm?

That is, what if the societal capabilities we sought to cultivate to achieve the deep change required for systems transformation was in fact, the work of art: Of constantly building the tangible corollaries to the principles behind the creative process? Of shaping our institutions upon it, our ways of deciding, of building knowledge? Of not just elevating the work of the artist in a literal sense or merely bringing ‘the arts’ into development projects but discovering where each of our development efforts do/can/should operate more like art — even when we are shaping economic policies, doing budgeting for a development program, or negotiating environmental governance?

Here I don’t mean that we need art or the artistic process everywhere at all times, nor that we replace our technical skills and material outcomes-focused social and economic interventions for art, but that we reconsider its role whenever our work is driven by the big systems questions (e.g., less for: how do we ensure this group of people receives humanitarian assistance in the face of increasing floods and other shocks, more for: how do we construct policies and build cultures by which we can reimagine our entire economic systems so that they don’t perpetuate the drivers of climate change that create these conditions). For the big questions that can’t be resolved with any technical solution, I think it is impossible to get anywhere meaningful without art. And by ‘art’, I don’t just mean something that can be found in a museum, on a stage, or in a book (though that is part of it). I mean the reason any of us choose to create. I mean the choices we make that are guided by that animating force, and the willingness to reside in spaces motivated by questions that go beyond what the faculties of the intellect alone can hold.

What if we saw art as rigor, as analysis framework, as standard operating procedure, as success metric, as compass and guardrails for action, as prioritization for risk management, as principles for how we finance and procure? What could this look like to apply art as praxis to the elements of our development processes we tend to least associate with beauty, wonder or the creative spirit?

One place to start might be to deconstruct the transferable ways of seeing, understanding, and relating to the world that art enables, and consider where they speak to the blind spots we witness in development processes and outcomes. As someone always collecting seeds of wisdom from artists, I wanted to see what some of these might have to offer when viewed through the lens of development praxis — to treat these different articulations of the unique capacities of art as frames for reorienting how we think about and do development. Below are some themes and questions that arise for me when starting from this place of art as guide, whether pertaining to the ways we navigate internal culture shifts, collaborate with stakeholders, approach policy planning processes, understand the sources of development challenges, or construct knowledge:

1. The role and responsibility of “seeing” in the path to transform systems

“The vocation of the artist is to see thoroughly — to keep everything accountable.” — Ocean Vuong

• What are all the layers of perception needed to understand the full reality of a complex problem? i.e., Can thorough seeing be arrived at through facts alone? Through a singular model of research or definition of data?
• What kinds of skills- or culture-building initiatives are needed in development institutions to cultivate the capacity for a collective seeing that allows us to perceive our own blind spots? What is blocking our sight/what might we need to dismantle?
• If we accepted that it were impossible to see a certain situation thoroughly on our own, that we didn’t have all the answers, or that a fuller spectrum of vision may only arise through time and iterative learning, what would it mean for the accountability frameworks we designed to guide our processes?

“How do we witness? And how does how we’re witnessing make the world?” — Ross Gay

• How are we witnessing our colleagues? How does how we witness enable or constrain their capabilities or our joint possibility to create impact?
• What is the witnessing at play with those we label as “beneficiary” (whether explicitly or implicitly)? How do our labels shape our perceptions and categorizations of stakeholders? What are the effects on dignity given to and/or experienced by another?
• How are we bearing witness to the possible futures that live in others’ minds (i.e., hopes for society or themselves that have yet to materialize)? What does the work of bearing witness look like for something that does not yet exist but lives as unrealized potential?
• How can we develop our understanding of witnessing as something distinct from listening and far from passive? What are qualities of engagement that enable us to witness someone else (e.g., how do we make the space for them, ask expansive questions, reflect that they are heard, and see them even beyond what they see in themselves)?

“Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatsoever.” — James Baldwin

• What are the illusions we [as individual development actor or institution] buy into, whether by conscious or unconscious choice, as a fear response, or as an unavoidable cost of being part and parcel of wider systems (e.g., political, financial, donor, inter-governmental, epistemological, economic)?
• Is it possible to transform (i.e., in a sense, be “opposed to”) the very systems we depend on to sustain our existence, identities, or income source?
• Are we able to see beyond the limits drawn by our present system parameters? Do we really believe that alternative parameters or societal structures are possible? Do our daily decisions and actions — in our work and personal lives — reflect that belief?
• Can a development organization function without illusions of safety (e.g., among the manifestations of these illusions: linear theories of change, unchanging measures of progress or priorities, decision-making premised on past data/fixed predictions about future trends)? Which of these illusions are necessary to maintain for the sake of order? When and where do we need to acknowledge instability and uncertainty in our own processes?

2. Holding answers loosely to make space for truth

“[…] part of the job of poetry is to both entrance and, at the same time, break entrancement. […] what is often the most useful and usable truth is what answers the questions that cannot be solved by means of engineering or facts.” — Jane Hirshfield

• Where might our business-as-usual procedures function as channels of entrancement (i.e., safety zones of non-reflective, uninterrogated protocol) when what is really needed is discomfort, creativity or experimentation?
• When we recognize a complex problem that can’t be solved with existing ‘facts’ alone or traditional technical solutions, how do we make space for alternative ways of gathering/making sense of/communicating/moving closer to useful knowledge about the problem?
• What kinds of M&E frameworks allow and encourage us to keep engaging with the unanswerable questions intrinsic to long-term systems change, or to finance outcomes that take the form of more questions, or dislodged assumptions?

“Unacknowledged truth saps your energy.” — Anne Lamott

• What are the unacknowledged truths about the development sector, the impact of our individual or institutional interventions, our policy frameworks, the worldviews prioritized or marginalized in the ways we conceive of development, or our day-to-day processes and culture that sap energy from the work of world-building and transformation?
• What does sapped energy look and feel like in our own development ecosystems? Is it evenly distributed across actors? How do we learn to recognize it when it is what we are accustomed to? What would our workplaces look and feel like if truth-telling was a genuine priority or operating principle for achieving our mandates?
• What conditions encourage colleagues to regularly feel and act on their own unacknowledged truths within their work? How would this shift the contributions and potential impact of our collective work?

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” — James Baldwin

• What assumptions lie behind the development goals we set, or the solutions we prioritize, or the evidence we deem as most valid?
• What are the development questions urgently requiring our attention that we continually sideline because we [or our institutions] treat them as already answered or irrelevant? What/whose solutions have we already accepted as fact or reality, when they are only one of many possibilities?
• What would shift if we went from a problem-solving orientation to a question-unearthing one within development policy and program processes?

3. What drives us in our work and decision-making

“A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

• What compasses do we rely on to guide our decisions about what is a necessity (e.g., a necessary investment, intervention, policy decision, use of our time, priority for collaboration, etc.)?
• At the individual level, are we devoting at least some portion of our time to work that feels like it comes from a place of inner necessity (i.e., that which fuels us, that allows us to tap into our unique passions and capacities to contribute)? Do our institutions encourage/allow/enable this?
• How might we consider the type of necessity that Rilke alludes to with art within the institutional processes that shape our mandates or means by which we prioritize goals (policy, programmatic, organizational, or otherwise)? In the context of determining where as institutions or individuals we direct our energies, for example, we might look to what necessities arise from a sensemaking approach that welcomes both extrinsic and intrinsic knowing: e.g., what arises not from a solely ‘rational’ interpretation of ‘objective’ facts, data, or valuation frameworks, nor from some singular measure of ‘value’ for money, but rather, from a combination of knowing the ‘hard’ data about the problems we perceive, then feeling/listening to whatever we most experience as an affront to our humanity or sense of interconnectedness.

“What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful and what shall I do about it?” — Mary Oliver

• How might this question alter the way we approached our solution-making endeavors in mainstream development processes? How does it shift the lens of our focus — and the ways we see what is there or what we are called to do — when beauty is the compass for action?

“Art is about taking the risk of engaging in something somewhat ridiculous and irrational simply because you need to get a closer look at it, you simply need to break it open to see what’s inside.” — Teresita Fernández

• As part of revealing pathways for deep innovation (the kinds of innovations needed to tackle the big existential questions of our time), are we encouraging colleagues to follow what they feel drawn to look more deeply at, and to ask the questions that unravel and deconstruct?
• How might curiosity be a portal to generative risk-taking? How do we institutionally nurture that form of curiosity?

The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way — certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? — Adrienne Rich

• How often do we ask what is missing, not only at the beginning of a development process (e.g., a problem analysis or context assessment), but at every stage of the work (e.g., whose voices are breaking through/what silences are the loudest in the evaluation of the outcomes, in the determination of the timelines, in the ways that partnerships are structured)?
• What is standing in the way of certain silences being broken — by omission or by design — and what is the effect on the transformational capacity of the work? Do some of the silences serve a necessary purpose to the desired outcomes?

4. Understanding as an iterative and fluid process

“I think that there is something important about allowing that which needs to be expressed to take on so many different forms and appearances and intensities so that it can be heard and heard and registered and registered again and again.” — Tracey K. Smith

• Is there room to revisit what we thought we knew? Is there opportunity to hold the knowledge through different forms and with different intensities with each revisiting?
• Is there a way to embed this work of re-visiting/re-expressing/re-hearing into the design of the policy/program process, such that what comes of it can be systematically reintegrated into the approaches/budgeting/monitoring of the implementation? Or for the entire direction to shift, if that’s what the revisiting reveals is needed?

“We are experiencing the toxicity of being fully found, owned, categorized, fully in place.” — Bayo Akomolafe

• Where does this specific form of toxicity exist in our workplace cultures or development norms and procedures? What is the harm that arises from that? For whom?
• When do the categorizations we use (e.g., to understand reality, to define the purpose of development, to delineate the role and value of different stakeholders) become barriers to progress? How do they shape our conceptualization of ourselves, the systems we belong to, and our relationship to those systems?

“Because isn’t the point of beautiful art, again, like a person, like a life, that it is unfixable and unfixing? That it changes as we change, and that it unmoors us, calls into question what we thought we knew and who we thought we were? Don’t we often need and love, some of us anyway, that art asks us more than we can ever answer […]. And in so doing, unfixes those of us who encounter it.” — Ross Gay

• How can we hope to overhaul the current frames/structures/systems that shape our world (and perpetuate the outcomes nobody wants) if we don’t put in the rigorous work required to loosen their hold?
• How can we invest in building [individual and collective] capacities to unfix and disrupt, as part and parcel of fixing and [re]constructing?
• Are we equipped to hold space for the pain/fear/unsettledness/identity disruptions that might emerge from such processes of sustained unfixing? (e.g., whether pertaining to the longevity of an institution, someone’s identity as a protagonist of change, or shifts in people’s narratives of reality)

“What’s the bigness we turn to when we have no answers? [In reference to how poetry operates] we don’t have answers for what love is, but we have a river.” — Angel Nafis

• Is there a bigness we can turn to — as a systematic, normalized part of the process — when we have no singular or simple answers for a development challenge? For instance, are there forms of data, outlets for collective not knowing, channels for translating uncertainty into forms we can work with (including art), avenues for meaning-making amidst constraints we can turn to when our traditional sources of answers, or ability to articulate the answers, fall short?
• Would invitation of this bigness within our development processes compel us to likewise turn to (and invest our time/money in) bigger questions/challenges then we previously felt able to approach? To not prioritize what is easier/more measurable/more answerable over what might be more urgent/more harmful/more deeply entrenched?

5. The creation of sanctified spaces we can rest in

“[…] there is something cathedral-like about it: it’s a place where you can rest, contemplate, refuel and go out again knowing that it remains there for you. All art presents a sanctified space.” — Jeanette Winterson

• How do we create sanctified spaces of refuge for genuine contemplation, connection and rest within collective change efforts or a policy planning and implementation process?
• What are the measures by which we can gauge the sanctity of such a place? Or valorize its place within a development intervention?
• Is there a cathedral-like place [whether tangible or intangible, individual or collective] we can return to when a development solution fails, or our ideas about development prove wrong? This might be particularly important for challenges that require learning by doing — some solid core or source of grounded inspiration to sustain action in the face of unavoidable uncertainty, disruption, and failure.

“Sometimes, I write words that seem to vibrate with potential, even though I may not understand their exact meaning. That vibration is a promise. It promises that, in time, all will be revealed. I have learned to trust that intuition, because I know I am dealing with a metaphoric form that is essentially mystifying, and that a seemingly insignificant couple of lines have the capacity to reveal, in their smallness, in time, all of the world.” — Nick Cave

• Where are the places currently vibrating with potential that may not be on the radar of mainstream development? (e.g., the wisdom of certain marginalized groups, seeds of the future that can be seen in alternative ways of organizing society, or economic models already operating in different corners of the world)
• How can we learn to reside in/trust our intuition of that which feels worth investing in, even when we can’t know the exact outcomes it will lead to? What does this look like in government or multilateral institutions, where intuition-based knowing (or evidence that further reveals itself with time) will still need to contend with quantitative or historical data-oriented justification frameworks?

6. Sourcing avenues of imagination from the unknowns and unexplored

“Art requires imagination, and imagination is the key ingredient to empathy. That’s the power of art: it’s letting people see how you move through the world and what experiences you’ve endured and how that’s shaped who you are today.” — Chanel Miller

“[…]the aesthetic force gets us to examine our unknown unknowns, the things we don’t know we don’t know about the world. The world around us, the people around us. […] aesthetic force, the power of the arts, oftentimes are the only avenues that many have to meeting people, interacting with people other than themselves in this increasingly siloed world a lot of people live in.” — Dr. Sarah Lewis

• Especially in contexts where relatively small groups are tasked with co-designing policies on behalf of the many, or rely on relatively small segments of society to represent their [large and diverse] communities when providing inputs, is there scope for the aesthetic force or imagination to extend the reach of empathy that informs policy decisions?
• How might more imagination- and/or arts-based practices alter the nature of the relationships, ideas, or relationship between ideas that emerge from a co-design process?
• Where does empathy factor into our policy design principles?

“The job of an artist is to replenish imagination. Which is to say: there are ideas we haven’t considered yet. Feelings we haven’t encountered yet. Love we haven’t surrendered to yet.” — Alok

• What role do development institutions and governments have in replenishing social imagination? In tapping into existing imagination to inform policy?
• When we do make space for imagination in a policy design process, do we invite the full scope of what imagination can produce — i.e., not just alternative ideas, but also alternative ways to feel, to love, to perceive love, to exist in the world? How might this full spectrum of imagination inform our ideas about what is possible in the future, and of what we do with that possibility in the present?

Whether or not these kinds of questions offer anything in terms of immediate or ‘practical’ actions one can apply to a development process, it feels like there’s value in the exercise of sitting with the wisdom that artistic ways of knowing and relating to the world offer beyond the realm of art. Maybe what comes from sitting with questions like these — from even just considering where they may lead us or what we feel compelled to change as a result — doesn’t lead to externalized action at all for some, but simply a greater reckoning with the barriers blocking us from deep, generative systemic action. A fomenting of that which shifts consciousness, making room for actions we have yet to collectively conceive.

We can’t change the realities we take to be givens. We can’t operate differently if we don’t envision the possibility that there are other ways we could be operating in the first place. And we can’t remove barriers to progress if we mistake those barriers to be our fortresses of stability — if we value this perceived stability more than the pursuit of justice, or collective flourishing. I think that’s the ultimate bounty of art: it unsettles the edifices of certainty we fall back upon to feel control in a world of unknowns, often to our own/society’s detriment. No doubt, we have highly structured development processes and measurement frameworks and models of change for a reason, and scalable change does require some degree of simplification and order. But we also need frames that allow us to see beyond our own self-imposed constraints when the nature of the challenge calls for it, so that we can create worlds more beautiful than the ones we’ve inherited. Where better to look for wisdom on creating than art?