The Violence of Temporary Solutions

Image generated with the assistance of AI for illustrative purposes and curated by the author.

Innovation is rarely described as extractive. It is framed as generous, curious, and necessary.

A pilot, test, or trial run.

Something temporary, designed to learn.

But there is a question I keep returning to this week, one that sits quietly beneath the language of progress: What does innovation extract when it refuses permanence?

There are places in the world where permanence is assumed. And places where everything arrives as an experiment.

In these places, communities are not so much partnered with as tested. Needs are mapped. Behaviours observed, data collected, and reports written as projects arrive with energy and exit quietly while the community remains.

Pilot projects rarely name the full scope of what they take. They extract time, trust, attention, emotional labor, and local knowledge. People are asked to adapt, to participate, to remain available to uncertainty, often with no guarantee of continuity.

When the project ends, the learning travels upward. The consequences stay put.

Temporary solutions are effective at producing insight and are far less committed to producing stability. What is learned from communities is often translated into frameworks, toolkits, and strategies, assets that move institutions forward while conditions on the ground remain largely unchanged. The asymmetry is subtle, but persistent. Communities become sources of evidence rather than sites of investment. Their lives provide proof of concept, but not proof of commitment.

This is how experimentation begins to resemble extraction, with temporary solutions also having an afterlife. Or a digital service introduced, then later withdrawn, and a program normalized, then removed. All these are a form of access opened, then quietly closed. Meanwhile, people reorganize their lives around what is introduced, shift expectations, and form new dependencies. When projects end without transition or accountability, the loss is treated as unfortunate rather than harmful. But loss is still loss, even when it arrives politely. Afterall, harm does not always announce itself as damage; sometimes it arrives as instability repeated over time.

Temporary solutions ask people to live in anticipation rather than security. To adjust continuously and plan without assurance. Over time, this trains people not to expect durability at all.

The harm is cumulative, shows up as fatigue, lowered demands, and as futures imagined more narrowly than they should be. When experimentation becomes a permanent condition for the same populations, it stops being neutral. It becomes a governing logic, one that privileges learning over responsibility.

This week, I am less interested in innovation that moves quickly.

I am thinking about innovation that focuses on repairing as much as it studies. Innovation that recognizes that learning carries obligation.

Not all pilots are wrong, but experimentation without accountability is not neutral.

This is not a technical problem; it’s an ethical one. And it is asking to be named.

Tuesdays with Afrodiva is a weekly series examining power, care, governance, and the quiet architectures that shape whose lives are excluded. This week turns toward the culture of innovation, asking what is extracted and who bears the cost when experimentation replaces commitment.