"Training as against Doing": Teaching the Language of Development at the Saudi Institute of Public Administration

Abstract

This report observes the activities of the Ford Foundation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (1962 to 1972), which officially proceeded under the auspices of "administrative reform," and the contract logics by which it delivered such assistance. The Ford Foundation's efforts to reorganize and staff the newly established Saudi bureaucracy were considered a preliminary step within a larger endeavor to raise the capacity of the Kingdom's human resources - simultaneously understood to be both the targets and means of national development. At this time, economic development in the Middle East was bundled with programming across public administration, education, and agricultural projects, and emphasized training as a primary investment in the capacity to modernize both national economies and individual subjectivities. The nationals of countries classified as "less developed" were thus the focal subjects -- and objects -- of development assistance, which affirmed a conceit held by Ford Foundation experts that the implementation of development plans must be undertaken by a client government's own manpower, also developing as it were. In the interest of cultivating the government employee base necessary to bring about administrative reform in Saudi Arabia, the Ford Foundation proposed (in 1964) and helped to coordinate (beginning in 1965) an English Language Program designed for Saudi civil servants from within the Kingdom's Institute of Public Administration. It carefully supervised the recruitment and staffing of this program, which was executed through an "unusually complex" arrangement of subcontracts with other non-Saudi organizations. Correspondences and reports related to this program populate the records filed under the Ford Foundation grant 06290135 and they indicate the Foundation's considerable focus on training, amid its concurrent, far-reaching advisory efforts in Saudi Arabia