What does it mean to respect a culture you have been sent to change?
International development has a settled answer to the question of how outsiders should behave. It is called local ownership, and it has been the orthodoxy of the sector for a generation. Reform must be owned by the government that enacts it or it will not survive the end of the funding. The foreign expert advises; the sovereign decides. Adaptation is the professional virtue, imposition the professional sin.
The trouble is that the sector is also, unavoidably, in the business of changing things. Gender-responsive budgeting, procurement reform, public financial management, board diversity—none of these are neutral technical upgrades. Each is a proposition about how a society should allocate authority. An institution cannot simultaneously hold that local practice deserves deference and that local practice is what it has been funded to alter. Somewhere in the working day, that contradiction has to be resolved by a person in a room.
My guest this week has spent a career resolving it. Pamela Wyatt began in Australian retail banking, running a branch business as a local chief executive, before establishing ANZ’s offshore operations hub in Manila—a program that moved more than 1,200 roles in eighteen months. She then spent close to a decade at the Asian Development Bank, six years of it negotiating governance reform with Pacific governments as a principal specialist in the Pacific Department, alongside private sector work in Tajikistan, Armenia and Kazakhstan. She also led the Bank’s Gender Task Force, examining her own employer’s record and reporting to its president and vice-presidents. She is now Head of Business Transformation for Asia-Pacific at DT Global, which places her on the delivery side of the same industry she once financed.
What follows are the ideas from the conversation I have continued to turn over since.
The Licence of the Outsider
Asked what the most useful thing about being the outsider in a room is, Wyatt did not hesitate: it gives you permission to ask the dumb questions. Not the clever ones. The basic ones. And sometimes, she said, a basic question is where you have to get back to before a different answer becomes available.
