Hiring Searchers over Planners: a Step toward Wildlife Conservation

By: Rebecca Kim

One of the most difficult aspects of trying to conserve the wildlife is the cultural clashes between developed countries and developing countries. For example, in developing countries, many of the constituents do not culturally understand the reasons why rhinos or elephants must be conserved when rhinos or elephants do not provide any direct source of food or land. On the other hand, many conservationists from developed countries advocate for wildlife conservation to preserve the world’s biodiversity. In order to diffuse the cultural gaps between developing countries and developed countries to effectively conserve wildlife, conservationists should adhere to William Easterly’s idea about hiring searchers instead of planners to carry out the conservation programs.  

In order to explain why some foreign aid programs fail to work, William Easterly identifies the two types of foreign aid workers in his The White Man’s Burden: the planners and the searchers. The planners are workers who approach development issues as a technical problem that can be solved by centrally-controlled campaigns and be backed up by cash. Unfortunately, planning lacks market feedback mechanisms, so there are no ways to effectively measure how well foreign aid programs are performing.  Due to the lack of ways to measure program’s performance level in planning, it will be harder to directly hold planners accountable, which increases the chances of program failures.

Given the shortcomings of planners, Easterly, thus, prefers searchers over planners to lead foreign aid programs. Searchers are the workers who work directly on site (i.e., in the developing countries), where they learn the efficiency of a proposed foreign aid program through series of trials and errors. Even though learning from market feedback mechanisms will not necessarily accomplish the ambitious goals set by planners, it will deliver practical results. More specifically, Easterly believes that evaluating foreign aid programs based on feedback from intended beneficiaries, rewarding successes, punishing failures, and encouraging many NGOs to share their failures and successes will result in a more efficient way to help developing countries develop.

Easterly’s approach to improve development programs could also be applied to wildlife conservation. Instead of simply organizing campaigns or giving money to programs that may not work, conservationists must reside in the developing countries to slowly build market feedback mechanisms; having conservationists become searchers is one of the many first steps that will help monitor any conservation plans’ effectiveness, which, in turn, will improve conservation plans in the long-run.

However, Easterly’s proposal addresses how foreigners could effectively execute programs, not directly how to diffuse cultural clashes. Therefore, while Easterly’s proposal to hire searchers should still be favored to ensure effective outcome, wildlife conservation initiatives (e.g., the UN, NGOs, interested states) must require searchers to open a dialogue with the citizens in developing countries. To explain, before evaluating conservation programs based on feedback from intended beneficiaries, rewarding successes, punishing failures, or encouraging many NGOs to share their failures and successes, searchers must also open a dialogue with the intended beneficiaries. The open dialogue gives searchers the opportunity to explain the logic and their intentions behind wildlife conservation programs. The dialogue also allows searchers to figure out any alternative methods that could achieve wildlife conservation without compromising any traditions or values of the citizens from developing countries.

Furthermore, the nature of searching holds searchers directly accountable. As part of the market feedback mechanisms, searchers are required to evaluate programs based on feedback from intended beneficiaries. Therefore, if the citizens from developing countries feel that their traditions are compromised from wildlife conservation programs that were previously explained by the searchers, they can immediately report to searcher. The negative feedback then should promote searchers to create a new proposal.