Striking the Right Balance

Carol Lancaster has one wish she knows will never come true. The Georgetown University teacher and former State Department official would love to meet President Abraham Lincoln.

"He is the most extraordinary leader I have ever studied," she said. "He was absolutely unmovable in his basic vision. He saw and believed in the vision of this country and he had an immense human compassion. And using a mix of steel and velvet, he succeeded."

Lancaster uses her own mix to strike the right balance.

"The practitioner side of my brain usually rejects the scholarly side as being so conceptual as to be detached from reality; the scholarly side of my brain assails the practitioner side for being too mired in details to understand what has really happened," she wrote in the preface to her 2006 book "Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics."

For almost 40 years, Lancaster has worked to increase international aid effectiveness by improving national policy. While working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and other governmental organizations, she directly influenced aid policies. As a professor, she now develops theories on how to improve aid delivery.

Her dedication to this issue derives, she said, from "a sense that it's possible and - in an ethical sense - necessary for people like us who are so well-off to do something for those who are so poor. It is partly curiosity, partly a passion to address fundamental, ethical questions that confront us and partly a passion of learning."

Lancaster's became interested in international development in 1965, when her desire to see an unknown part of the world brought her to Bolivia. She spent a year as a Fulbright student at La Paz' Universidad de San Andrés.

"There were no books and classes were cancelled half the time," she remembered. "We had strikes and even a coup. And at the university everybody probably thought I was a CIA agent, because I was a gringa."

Bolivia turned out to be a life-changing experience.

"It was a real development challenge," Lancaster said. "You couldn't drink the water and there was only one paved road. That hit me in all kinds of different ways."

In a way it still does: After more than four decades, Lancaster still remembers "the magnificent scenery, the environment and unusual mixture of cafes, museums, shops."

"When I was traveling around I was not only wondering what century I was in," she said, "I even wondered about the millennium I was in."

The ‘most important challenge'

Soon after, Lancaster became immersed in studying Africa, a continent she now calls "the most important challenge that we all face."

"It`s a microcosmos of development challenges with a long way to go," she said. "The climate, diseases, the political environment, governance, ethnicity and decolonization - there are so many things wrapped up there. And, despite all the challenges, there is a palpable joy in life. That is reassuring."

After finishing a doctoral degree in international relations at the London Schools of Economics in 1972, Lancaster parlayed her passion for Africa into a 2-year stint at the State Department's Bureau of African Affairs, beginning in 1980. Even today, African artifacts and masks decorate her office.

Lancaster left government service in 1981 to become Georgetown University's director of African studies in Washington, D.C. She left the school in 1993 for a position as U.S. Agency for International Development deputy administrator, only to return to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in 1996.

Lancaster remains modest about her achievements. When asked about her impact on Africa's development, she fell silent and looked out of the window as Vivaldi's violin concerto "The Four Seasons" filled the room.

"I don't know if I can claim I have contributed anything to those changes," she said after a pause, carefully weighing her words. "All we can do in the academic community is help people to understand what is going on."

Lancaster has tried to do just that. She has written several articles and books on the challenges Africa faces, chaired USAID's advisory committee on voluntary foreign aid as well as the boards of directors of the Center for Economic Development and Population Activities and of the World Space Foundation. Today, she is a board member of Vital Voices, the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, World Education, Women in International Security, and a member of the U.N. Secretary General's Advisory Committee on the New Partnership for Africa's Development.

Keeping busy

A return to public office is always an option, Lancaster said, "as long as I felt I could make a contribution." But, she added, "There are other things to do, too."

Lancaster directs Georgetown University's Mortara Center for International Studies, a think tank that allows development professionals and scholars to discuss the effects politics, the economy and ideology have on international relations. She also serves as associate professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, and called it "fun to spend time with young, bright people."

"The students here are amazing," she said. "They bring a lot of experience to the table, so we can learn as well as teach."

Her love for writing may be the main reason keeping her from public service.

"You cannot write books and serve in government at the same time," she said. "There is no time. If you are working for the government, and you have the time to write a book, then you are not working very hard."

Though she called writing "a painful experience" and "not a sprint, but a marathon," she said it brings out the best in her. "It's like climbing a mountain. And when you are on the top if the mountain, you see it a way nobody else has, because it forced you into disciplined thinking," she explained.

Lancaster's latest book, "George Bush's Foreign Aid: Transformation or Chaos?", was only published this year, but she is already looking ahead.

"I am thinking to write my next book on evangelicals and world poverty," she said. A third generation Washingtonian, she also wants to write about the early days of the nation's capital.

Lancaster leaves her study regularly to visit Africa and to see the subjects of her books, lectures and articles in the flesh. She said she always asks herself, "Why am I doing this?" when boarding a plane, but that the answer tends to come easy. For Lancaster, it is the balance between her practical and scholarly work that counts.