An essay on development, climate, and the architecture of lasting change.
By Ina Walter, with commentary by Peter Block

I thought I understood what walls were when I escaped East Germany in a small plastic car called a Trabant. At the time, I believed that crossing the border would mean leaving all barriers behind for good.

Thirty years later, while working across Sub-Saharan Africa, I realized the walls had only moved. Now, they appear in terms like “beneficiaries” and “capacity building.” Often, the strongest walls are the ones we cannot see.

The Wrong Variable

For years, I managed a large agricultural program in Tanzania, supporting thousands of coffee farmers. We tracked every detail and had solutions for every problem. By the usual standards, it was a success.

But when I began visiting families, I saw something different. Children were still out of school, roofs still leaked, and nutrition had not improved. Every metric we tracked focused on coffee, not on whether families’ lives had really changed. We measured the crop, not the household.

We had been focusing on the wrong variable.

The problem was built into the system, and this pattern repeats everywhere. In development, climate, and agriculture, we design projects around outputs, yields, adoption rates, and participation. But what really makes change last is whether people shaped what they are later asked to sustain. In most projects, that decision is made before communities are even involved. Donors set the goals, project developers create the models, implementers decide how things are done, and communities are invited to join something that has already been decided.

Communities often need resources, money, technical knowledge, market access, and infrastructure. These needs are real and urgent. But how these resources are delivered matters just as much as whether they arrive. If people have no role in shaping the design, the help can feel like another kind of control.

Helping as Defense

Many people have talked about an idea that most of us in development, philanthropy, or climate work rarely admit: we believe we have something others need. We use words like partnership, engagement, and co-creation to soften this, but the setup stays the same. One side designs, the other carries. The way we usually help creates roles, the capable and the needy, and this imbalance lets us care without giving up control. We keep our distance by being generous.

I didn’t see this for a long time. I was too busy being helpful.

The shift began in a classroom near Mount Kilimanjaro. During a training session with coffee farming families, a man stood up, upset that his wife and children were secretly selling coffee cherries. A woman replied that they did all the farm work, picking, carrying, sorting, but when the harvest ended, her husband took the money and left, sometimes for a month. They were left with nothing. What he saw as theft, she saw as survival.

The gap between what we had designed and what this family was actually living was so wide that our whole program could have fallen through it. We could have improved yields again, raised income again, and nothing fundamental would have changed, because the system was never shaped by the people living in it.

When a system is built without the people inside it, they learn to comply on the surface but disconnect underneath. I know this from more than just fieldwork. I grew up in East Germany, where the state decided your future, the school you’d attend, the job you’d have, and whether you could travel. The STASI, the secret police, were everywhere, and you never knew who to trust. So, I learned to nod, smile, and say what was expected. The system saw agreement, but we were secretly planning our escape. I have seen farmers do the same throughout my career. They attend training, agree, and follow instructions, but then go home and change nothing. When people have no say in what affects them, they do not resist openly, they just disengage.

Why Listening Is Not Enough

After that session in Kilimanjaro, we stopped giving presentations and started listening. We were not trying to collect better data, but to hear what families already knew, wanted, and were working to build.

Couples started talking openly about how decisions were made, who controlled the money, and what they wanted for their families. One man, who first said men should control all the money, later became a strong supporter of sharing decisions.

Listening mattered. But listening alone was not enough.

In many systems today, listening is already part of the process. There are workshops, voices are gathered, and consultations are recorded. Still, much of what is built does not last, because listening often happens after the structure is set. The questions are already chosen, the incentives decided, and the model designed. People are heard, but they do not shape what they join.

Listening helps improve delivery, but it does not create authorship.

Real change happens earlier, before models are set and roles are assigned, when people help shape the question itself. This is the difference between participation and chosen accountability: people need to choose what they are responsible for, instead of having someone else decide for them.

When people feel safe enough to share what they know before any teaching takes place, they can contribute, which builds agency. Agency leads to authorship. And what people have authored, they sustain. Without this progression, participation depends on outside pressure and falls apart when that pressure is gone.

This is hard for many of us. We built our careers on having answers, and our funding depends on proving we know what is needed. Accepting that our role might be to support what communities are already building, rather than deliver our own designs, takes a kind of professional humility that most systems are not designed for. But facing that discomfort is where real partnership begins.

Why This Matters Now

We are in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis, and the interventions designed to address it, carbon markets and nature-based solutions, all depend on sustained human behavior over time. So do the agricultural supply chains being reformed to meet sustainability and compliance standards. Billions are being invested in these systems with the assumption that they will last. But real permanence follows from authorship, from whether the people expected to keep things going had a real role in shaping them.

Today, most risk frameworks consider fire, drought, and political instability. They do not consider the moment when people decide to stop. Yet that is where real permanence is decided. Forests grow back when the people living nearby have a reason to care. Supply chains last when the farmers sustaining them share in the decisions. Carbon projects continue when the people doing the daily work also help shape the design and share in the benefits.

The Question That Remains

I thought I understood walls when I left East Germany. I believed freedom meant crossing them. But I learned that walls do not disappear when they fall. They move into our systems, our assumptions, and our language. We rebuild these walls every time we define a solution before the people who will carry it have shaped it. And every wall we build between people also becomes a wall between us and the land, between our systems and the earth systems on which everything depends.

For decades, we have asked how to improve development, and this has led to better tools and methods, but often within the same underlying logic. The question now is different. Who gets to shape what is being built, before they are asked to sustain it?

That is where permanence is decided. At the beginning, not the end.

The future is not found in better programs or bigger budgets. It is waiting in the space between us, in conversations we have not dared to have yet. Under mango trees. In classrooms where farmers speak truths no planning document expected. In rooms where couples redesign their household because someone finally asked, “What is it you want to build?”

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Reflection by Peter Block

Ina offers a compelling insight that what we label as development, even though it meets its goals, does not deliver on a larger promise. She speaks from being an executive of large-scale efforts to improve the conditions of vulnerable people. Her voice is part of a growing movement to transform our forms of development and philanthropy. “Toxic Charity,” “Decolonizing Philanthropy,” and “The Future of Development” are just three.

What strikes me in this essay is the clear distinction between managing programs versus improving people’s lives. The programmatic mindsets of aid and philanthropists are most often not fully aware of the real nature of people’s lives and what improves their well-being. Recipients of aid learn to act grateful, but that is too small a role. The alternative is to consider those we care about to be co-producers of their own well-being. Ina shines a much-needed light on that possibility.

•  •  •

Ina Walter is the founder of EcoImpact Africa, working across Sub-Saharan Africa on community-led development and climate initiatives. Trained in neuroscience and psychology at King’s College London, she previously held senior roles at Starbucks Coffee Trading Company and Rabobank. She fled East Germany as a child and has spent her career understanding why well-designed interventions fail to last, and what changes when the people expected to sustain them have a role in shaping them. She delivered the TEDx talk “Stop Helping, Start Listening” at TEDx KLU Hamburg in 2026.

Peter Block is the author of “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and “Confronting Our Freedom.” He has worked for five decades with communities on chosen accountability and the power of conversation.