November 2009

Social Wellbeing and Conflict: Themes from the work of Frances Stewart

John Toye*

World is crazier and more of it than we think,incorrigibly plural.

Louis MacNeice

I Early Years

Frances Stewart was born in Kendal in August 1940. She had a famous father, the economist Nicholas Kaldor, who in 1950 moved his family from London to a new home in west Cambridge. As a young woman, Frances came to feel that having a famous economist as a father was not wholly a blessing, if one was interested in economics oneself. She preferred not to discuss her opinions on economics with her father, because she feared he would say either “I have thought of that myself already” or “it is wrong”, and she was not anxious to hear either message. At the same time, her father repeatedly insisted that she was clever enough to think out problems for herself and this positive message was confidence-building and intellectually empowering for her.

Her mother was Clarissa Goldschmidt, the daughter of a stockbroker and a brilliant history graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, whom Kaldor had married in 1934. Her gift to Frances was her social and political commitment and her willingness to campaign publicly for what she believed in: she was a lifelong active supporter of the Labour Party. Even after Nicky had been elevated as Lord Kaldor, she was still Comrade Clarissa.

After doing well at Cambridgeshire High School for Girls, Frances came to Oxford to study PPE. Following her mother to Somerville, she had economics tuition from

* Oxford Department of International Development. This paper is based on a series of conversations with Frances Stewart, and has benefited in preparation from comments by Valpy FitzGerald, Judith Heyer, Julia Knight and Rosemary Thorp, to whom I am most grateful.

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Margaret Hall, a Fellow and a University Lecturer1, and Paul Streeten. She had philosophy tuition from Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot; for Frances philosophy was exciting and at one time she contemplated becoming a philosopher. Paul Streeten was asked by her father to discourage this enthusiasm, and eventually Frances concluded that philosophising all day and every day might be a rather too much of a good thing. She decided to stick with the economics option, won both Junior and Senior Webb Medley Prizes and was awarded a First Class in her Finals. Frances was offered a tutorial post at LMH while still in her third year, but she turned it down. A second academic offer was a studentship at Nuffield, but she decided that at that point she wanted to do something else than take more exams.

She joined the Economic Section of Treasury in 1961. Her motivation was clear, if over-ambitious: it was to change single-handed the economic policy of the then Conservative government of Harold Macmillan. Initially, she was assigned to work with Ralph Turvey on taxation issues, but she did not find him to be a good boss. She quickly realised that it was not easy for one person on her own to influence government policy. After an unsatisfactory four months she was recruited by Sir Donald MacDougall to work with him and two others at the National Economic Development Council. It was an eventful period when the NEDC was concerned with setting target growth rates for the UK economy and exploring possible strategies to raise the UK growth rate. She moved with MacDougall into the newly established Department of Economic Affairs after Labour’s election victory under Harold Wilson in 1964.

II Research in Kenya

There are many different ways in which a lifelong interest in development economics can be acquired. Women economists who have economist husbands sometimes find themselves living in a developing country on his account. That was what had happened to Joan Robinson, when Austin was resident tutor to the Maharajah of Gwalior in 1926-7. Something similar happened with Frances, who before 1967 had never worked on questions of economic development.

She had met and married Michael Stewart, an Economic Adviser in the Treasury, who was transferred into No. 10 Downing Street when Thomas Balogh moved there from the Cabinet Office.2 Michael had long advocated the devaluation of sterling, and by 1967 both he and Balogh had lost patience with Harold Wilson’s refusal to devalue, so Michael resigned. On the advice of Dudley Seers, he took a post as Economic

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Adviser to the Finance Minister of Kenya. Frances and their children went to Kenya with him as dependents. Michael did not know the Minister beforehand and in the event found that did not really get on with him.

Kenya was the place where Frances’ interest in the economics of development crystallised. She joined the University of East Africa (Nairobi) as a lecturer in the Economics Department. Judith Heyer, a friend from undergraduate days, was already there, and organised the appointment. Judith and Frances have been lifelong friends and associates. Judith introduced Frances to Philip Ndegwa and Dharam Ghai. There was a constant stream of interesting development economists who gave seminars at the University, such as the young Joseph Stiglitz, Gerry Helleiner, Richard Jolly and others. While in Nairobi she read Gunnar Myrdal’s mammoth Asian Drama (1968) and was greatly impressed by its perspectives. Frances now regretted that she had not embarked on a doctorate. She decided that it was something that should be tackled and began the task even without having a supervisor appointed.

Development economics was at a moment of change. The neo-classical growth model’s assumption of a single universally available technology and the paradigm of modernisation through industrialisation on the Western pattern were both losing their credibility with development economists. George McRobie, a great friend of Michael and best man at his and Frances’ wedding, was a disciple of E. F. Schumacher, and had enthusiastically discussed the idea of intermediate technology as a solution to the development problem with the Stewarts when they were still in London. So an important theme of the moment was the development potential of a technology that was intermediate between the modern technology imported from the West and the existing labour-intensive but low-productivity technology used by the traditional sector. Frances decided to investigate the validity of the ideas that George McRobie had advocated. She decided to undertake case studies of the cement brick industry and the maize grinding industry, and began to collect data on them that would be needed for her planned doctorate. She put forward her research plans at Nairobi seminars to gather reactions to what she was doing.

III Choice of technique

Returning to Britain, Frances registered for a D. Phil. at Oxford and embarked on a research project on technology and development funded by the Ministry of Overseas Development. Paul Streeten, himself a recent convert to the study of developing

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economies through his association with Gunnar Myrdal and Asian Drama, became her doctoral supervisor. Streeten, like Myrdal, was critical of many of the existing practices of development planning in poor countries, and of the intellectual narrowness of a purely economic approach to the study of development.

Frances herself was certainly critical of the neoclassical model and its implications for the theory of the choice of technique. Its assumption that the number of efficient techniques available is unlimited, permitting any combination of capital and labour, and thus (given flexible prices of these factors) the attainment of full employment, seemed to her quite unrealistic in the context of developing countries. Basing herself on the history of technological development, and on her industry case studies from Kenya, she argued that the vintage of machinery was important, because older machines were more labour intensive, and thus in older industries the choice of technique was greater. Yet later machines tended to be more productive because of scientific and technical advances. Since later machines were normally designed to produce a greater scale of output, earlier machines could sometimes remain efficient when the required scale of output was small. Thus she concluded that the range of efficient techniques available to developing countries was likely to be more restricted than the neoclassical model assumed, although less restricted than a technological determinist would assert – there was usually more than a single efficient method, the one currently installed in the West.

En passant, Frances made a number of important conceptual points about the choice of technique debate. She saw that the question of the choice of technique was rarely separable from the choice of product: different machines tended to produce somewhat different products. So the definition of “the product” mattered in the debate. If “product” was defined widely, say in terms of function or the ability to fulfil needs, such as shelter or food, the choice of technique might seem extensive (Stewart 1973: 117). If product was defined narrowly, say in terms of a precise physical specification, the choice of technique would seem very restricted.

The proposition that older machines were more labour-intensive was derived from the belief that most innovation takes place in developed countries, where labour is scarce relative to capital. It implies that transfer of current Western technology to developing countries may have adverse consequences for employment. This was not a novel proposition (see, for example, Henry Bruton1955: 322-36), but it meant that the theme of employment was already encompassed in Frances’s work on choice of technique. The policy objective of intermediate technology advocates was to create

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additional employment, but at the same time employment that was more productive, and therefore more remunerative, than possible with the traditional technology.

The1972 ILO Employment mission took her back to Kenya, with a team of economists led by Richard Jolly and Hans Singer, which included Dharam Ghai and Keith Griffin. Her contribution was relatively minor, as one would expect from a junior member of the team - a paper on Kenya’s tripartite mechanism – but she found the whole process, including the non-stop team discussions, most exciting.

IV Social Cost-Benefit Analysis

In 1972 Frances became a Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in Oxford, the appointing committee being Wilfrid Knapp, Thomas Balogh, David Fieldhouse and Ian Little. This appointment was followed by a non-stipendiary Fellowship at Somerville College in 1975, which meant that she was not on the treadmill of undergraduate economics teaching. The Oxford economics scene in the early 1970s was rather sharply divided politically. Streeten and Balogh were both on the left of the spectrum, while others like Walter Eltis, Maurice Scott and Ian Little were on the right. Ian Little and James Mirrlees had just produced for the OECD Development Centre their manual on industrial cost-benefit analysis for developing countries (1968). The manual acted as something of a lightning rod for Oxford’s ideological divisions, which were displayed in a Special Issue of BOUIES. Together with Streeten, Frances wrote an article that faulted the Little-Mirrlees method on a variety of grounds – its limited applicability, its assumption of full capacity working of capital equipment, its ignoring of externalities and so on (Stewart and Streeten 1972). Their critique of neoclassical applied welfare economics was taken badly by some of their economist colleagues in Oxford. Frances thought that colleagues’ displeasure was an obstacle to career progression, but other influences may have played a part. Her wish to live in London and to work half-time from 1976 to 1984 may have given the University an impression of semi-detachment. The rising tide of algebra and econometrics in economics also pushed political economists in Oxford, as elsewhere, towards the margins of the subject.

She followed up with another critical article on social cost-benefit analysis - or SCBA (Stewart 1975). Having contested some of the technical assumptions behind the recommended SCBA calculation procedure, Frances now went straight to its heart - the incoherent political rationale for SCBA. Starting from Kenneth Arrow’s theorem on the impossibility of aggregating diverse preferences while satisfying minimum

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democratic criteria, she noted that both Little-Mirrlees and the rival UNIDO manual relied on governments to establish the social valuations that are to be used to adjust cash flow calculations based on market prices. She then asked: if governments could enforce decisions made on the basis of their social valuations, why can they not adjust actual prices by fiscal and regulatory measures and thereby render social cost-benefit analysis redundant? Her answer was that they could not do the latter because they were constrained by a multitude of political pressures. However, if that was so, she concluded, they would be no more able to make Olympian social valuations stick in their project selection procedures, once the politically powerful had realised what the cost-benefit technicians were up to.

The significance of this paper in Frances’s thinking is its assertion that there is no realm above the political fray from whence decisions that maximize social welfare can be conjured. Such a radical view has consequences both for planners and for free market advocates. If SCBA is envisaged as the microeconomic extension of a system of aggregate planning, micro-planners are revealed as relying on a naïve assumption of omnipotent and benevolent governments. If that assumption is rejected in favour of the claim that markets maximize social welfare when allowed to operate freely, such a claim requires a prior social agreement that the current distribution of income is optimal – an agreement that rarely exists. Her rejection of the idea of benevolent governments thus gives no warrant for the theories and policies of neo-liberalism. Instead, it puts a premium on the economist acting as an advocate, consciously operating as part of the political fray, rather than trying to stand above it. This key insight informed the rest of Frances’s career.

V The Basic Needs Approach

When Frances was granted a sabbatical year in 1978-79, she chose to work with Paul Streeten who had left Oxford for the World Bank in 1976. At the Bank, the President, Robert McNamara, was again on the lookout for new ideas, and had picked up the ILO’s theme of basic needs. The Bank’s work on basic needs was not located in Hollis Chenery’s Research Department, but in the Policy Planning Division, run by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq. Paul Streeten had persuaded Mahbub ul Haq of the importance of the basic needs idea and suggested that Frances be involved in it.

This was the starting point for two important intellectual collaborations of Frances’s professional life. The first was with Mahbub ul Haq, with whose qualities she was

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quickly impressed. He was a powerful animator of teamwork, who picked up interesting developmental ideas, had a way of conveying their excitement to others and was able to synthesize the contributions that others made to developing them. He could draw others into energetic participation and yet maintain the overall organisation of the project intact. He always had some new, grand project on the horizon. Frances enjoyed working with him and continued to do so, even during the time he was President Zia’s Finance Minister in Pakistan, until his death in 1998.

On basic needs, Frances worked with Gus Ranis, John Fei and Norman Hicks. Ranis and Fei contributed to the macroeconomic and planning framework of the BN approach (Stewart 1985, chapters 2 and 3). This was the start of an enduring research partnership with Gus Ranis. Ranis might not have seemed the obvious lifetime professional collaborator for Frances, since he was more of a mainstream economist than she was. Nevertheless, they have a shared field of interests – in poverty reduction, inequality and redistribution and the human development paradigm. Further, successful collaboration is based as much on knowing how to collaborate and sharing an open mind about how exactly development takes place as on a pre-existing identity of views about development economics. There is no fixed pattern for their collaboration, both working on theoretical and empirical material as the task requires.

Initially, Dharam Ghai and the ILO had generated the idea of “basic needs”. The original idea had a strong Aristotelian flavour; it was specified as comprising all the components of a full life, including personal autonomy, as well as commodities. However, the application of this idea was, as befits a Policy Planning Department, aimed at getting the condition of the poor on to the international agenda. For this purpose the term “basic needs” sounded more urgent and more likely to get political attention than “basic desires” or “basic wants”.

At roughly the same time Amartya Sen started developing his notion of capabilities as a measure of positive freedom. He was critical of the basic needs strategy as a form of commodity fetishism, since different people converted commodities to functioning at different rates. Disabled people, for example, would need more commodities than able-bodied to achieve the same level of functioning, and there were other conditions that caused differences in individuals’ needs for commodities relative to achieved functioning (Sen 1984: 280). Sen argued that an increase in human capabilities was the true objective of development, and thus thought that the basic needs strategy was misconceived, because it focused on means rather than ends. Yet Sen parried

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requests from those convinced of the rightness of this view that he should develop the capabilities approach as an operational programme.

By contrast, the basic needs strategy was primarily a practical endeavour. Unlike Sen’s capabilities, it was intended to be made into an operational policy programme. The idea was to construct a meta-production function for the purposes of economic planning that would relate a set of specific inputs to a measure of welfare distinct from average income, setting up a series of basic needs to be remitted to government departments to explore further and formulate appropriate policies for meeting them. The intention was never essentially philosophical, as was Sen’s. It was an attempt to advise planners and government ministries on how to do something for the poor, rather than to change the way that people applied ethical principles to issues of distribution.

The dissonance between the basic needs approach and the capabilities discourse was thus, in part, caused by crossed purposes. That was not the whole of it, however. Even in relation to changing people’s thinking, Frances found something unresolved about Sen’s capability approach. She struggles with Sen’s concept of “capabilities that one has reason to value”, wondering whether it functions as a device to block off the possibility of people wanting to do crazy things and making ‘wrong’ choices in pursuit of the fully human life – similar in purpose to the device of the ghostly auctioneer in Walrasian general equilibrium theory. She also questions whether problems of power can be adequately dealt with by Sen’s appeal to the existence of “a democratic consensus”. In her view of politics, social consensuses hardly ever exist, and when they do they may or may not be democratic and they may or may not be ignored by those who currently hold power.

VI Adjustment with a Human Face

Around 1979, the international political tide that for decades had run in favour of social democracy suddenly turned. Political support for the type of planning approaches Frances had been promoting, and indeed for the whole development planning enterprise, began to ebb. The basic needs strategy lost impetus in the face of the election of Western governments of various mixes of liberalism and conservatism. Their response to the problems of developing countries was to insist on structural adjustment, meaning that developing countries should be told to adjust their economic policies and management to their macroeconomic circumstances in ways to be specified by the IMF and the World Bank.

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Poverty reduction as a subject dropped off the international research and advocacy agenda at this time, as economic growth was given priority over income and wealth redistribution. However, the welfare of children was still regarded as a legitimate topic, and this was very important because for the general public in Western countries the welfare of children was and remained highly salient politically. So research on the effect of structural adjustment on children was adopted by UNICEF as a way of indirectly questioning the validity of IMF/World Bank forms of structural adjustment itself.

During another sabbatical year in 1985-6, Frances went to UNICEF as a Special Adviser to work on structural adjustment. Jim Grant acted as the political protector of the work and rebuffed attacks on the group. Because Richard Jolly was too busy to do much of the writing, the main work was done by Andrea Cornia and Frances, with some assistance from collaborators such as Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Richard Longhurst and Gerry Helleiner. In fact, the group had different views about whether structural adjustment was desirable in principle, and the issue was never fully thrashed out internally. What united them was a tactical belief that, if they publicly attacked the principle of structural adjustment head-on, the rug would be pulled from underneath their project, Jim Grant’s protection notwithstanding. Their tactics were therefore to begin by conceding the necessity of structural adjustment at the macro level, as previous UN expert groups had done (e.g. UN 1965: 1–8). Then they argued that it should not be undertaken as a big bang – the liberalisation of everything, all at once - as had happened with bad social consequences in Bolivia. Rather, adjustment should be implemented in a phased manner that would reduce the costs of adjustment. Phasing would give people time enough to make their own adjustments to announced measures of liberalisation before the government policy changes came into effect.

Frances’s main conceptual contribution was the idea of the “meso level”, i.e. an intermediate domain of decision making that lay below macro policy but above micro policy. Questioning orthodox macroeconomic policy prescriptions might be off limits for the UNICEF team, but at the meso level, they could point to many types of policy-making that, if properly used, could improve the lives of vulnerable groups. Examples were changes to the composition of public expenditure and to regulatory policies that affect the distribution of incomes in the private sector.

Their proposals for the modification of the orthodox approach to structural adjustment were published as “Adjustment with a Human Face” (Cornia, Jolly and Stewart 1987).

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It was dedicated to the memory of Nicky Kaldor. While the book was careful not to claim that the declines in economic growth and welfare indicators in the 1980s were wholly attributable to the implementation of adjustment measures, the question of whether they would have been worse without the adjustment measures was not really explored. The book caught a growing public mood of disenchantment with the results of a decade of adjustment. In retrospect, its publication can be seen as the highest point of UNICEF’s international policy influence to date. It also changed the nature of the debate on structural adjustment, leading to the reinstatement of poverty reduction on the international agenda in the 1990s.3

Frances did further work on this topic with Gus Ranis and A. Ramirez. By examining the chains that link economic growth to human development and human development to economic growth in a process of mutual causation, and examining empirical data, they argued against the view that economic growth must occur before human development expenditure is undertaken. They concluded:

“Our findings do not deny the importance of economic reforms, but emphasize that a focus on human development must be included from the beginning in any reform programme” (Ranis, Stewart and Ramirez 2000: 213).

This challenged the neo-liberal wisdom of the 1980s that the sequence of reform had to be economic stabilisation and adjustment first and human development only later.

VII The Human Development Report

The North-South Roundtable was set up in the 1970s by Barbara Ward, and taken over first by Maurice Strong and then by the Haqs. Frances went to Pakistan in the early 1980s for a Roundtable on foreign debt. One Roundtable was also held on “Human Factors in Development” and this was an important stepping stone leading up to Mahbub ul Haq’s decision (1989) to persuade the Administrator of UNDP to launch the Human Development Report to publicize UNDP’s new vision of development – “human development”. The HDR project brought together the advocates of the capabilities approach and the basic needs strategy under the common banner of human development, defined as “a process of enlarging people’s choices” (UNDP 1990: 10). Amartya Sen contributed Chapter 1 and Frances contributed Chapter 2 to the first Report.

In fact, neither of them was in favour of including in the Report the statistical innovation of the Human Development Index, which combined measures of income

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per head with measures of life expectancy and literacy to create a composite indicator of human development. It was only Mahbub ul Haq who really championed its inclusion, though others, including Sen, worked on its construction. Mahbub ul Haq correctly foresaw that the Index would attract great media and political attention (even if most of the academic attention came from those who criticised its method of construction), and that it would give some additional leverage to NGOs’ advocacy in relation to the plight of the poor.

In subsequent research on the theme of human development, done with Gus Ranis and Emma Samman, Frances has moved beyond the confines of the Human Development Index, which they now describe as “a reductionist measure”, in favour of measures which include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self-respect (Ranis, Stewart and Samman 2005). This is not an attempt to provide a comprehensive specification of the components of the good life in the style of Aristotle and Martha Nussbaum (see Goodin 2000), but rather the use of a broader range of indicators to investigate whether, in countries or regions, good things go together, and if not , why not. Like Amartya Sen (1999: 286), the authors doubt that there can be an overall rule by which development outcomes can be unambiguously ranked.

VIII War and underdevelopment

Nevertheless, it was her work for the HDR that led Frances into her big project of the 1990s, on the topic of war and underdevelopment. Having drawn up a table of best performers and worst performers in terms of HDI relative to GNP, i.e. the difference between a country’s GNP and HDI position, she noticed that the worst performers were mainly countries at war. Although the HDR did not follow up this result, Frances thought that there was much more to be said about this particular correlation. At this point, Frances became the Director of Queen Elizabeth House. The research project on war and underdevelopment was designed as the academic centrepiece for the re-launching of QEH, an institution that rather badly needed to improve its intellectual standing. Frances’s collaborator in this enterprise was Valpy FitzGerald,

1 Margaret Hall was at that time the wife of Sir Robert Hall, and was later to become the wife of Sir Donald MacDougall. In 1965, she and Ursula Hicks became the first women members of the Oxford University Political Economy Club (MacDougall 1987: 236).2 Michael Stewart was the son of J. I. M. Stewart, the English Literature don at Christ Church who also wrote detective novels pseudonymously. Michael became an academic at University College, London and is the author of several popular books on economics, including “Keynes and After” which expounded Keynesian economics and its implications for economic policy. 3 However, under the leadership of Carol Bellamy, UNICEF moved back to a more traditional strategy of child-centred medical and nutrition interventions, although in the years since 2005 UNICEF has begun to recruit socio-economists as advisors in its regional offices.

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who had recently joined QEH after being in charge of research at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

Heretofore war had not had a central place in development studies; it tended to be assumed that a poor country at war needed the international community to provide humanitarian relief, while only in peacetime did it need development aid. There had been little academic probing of whether that dichotomy was still valid in the 1990s. Research was beginning at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford on the economic incentives that led to outbreaks of civil war (Collier and Hoeffler 1998). That line of research did not seem likely to address the policy question of the role of development aid during wartime, a topic of interest to some bilateral aid donors, the Carnegie Endowment and to the UN, which was reappraising its modes of intervention after the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The research focus was placed not on the causes of war, but on its social and economic consequences and their implications for development aid.

Little systematic information existed on the indirect costs of war, in terms of declines in output, exports, investment, food production and social expenditures during conflicts. It was valuable in itself to assemble this data, but additionally the study demonstrated by a series of country case studies that country experience was quite varied. Where countries’ economies and social systems were being eroded by the costs of conflict, however, the study argued that development aid (although in altered form and with varied conditionality) still had a role to play in reducing these costs (Stewart, FitzGerald and Associates 2001). This was a major new insight which affected public opinion and government policy.

The war and underdevelopment project was significant as another watershed in Frances’s professional development. Up to this point, Frances could be clearly defined as an economist, engaging with central issues of development economics, although not from a mainstream position. Thereafter she moved more into cross-disciplinary areas of research. This was important in institutional terms, because it set up collective tasks on which a new generation of development researchers at QEH could cut their teeth. It also provided an opportunity for sociologists, political scientists and those with a philosophical and conceptual bent (like Sabina Alkire) to work with economists to provide insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. More generally, it facilitated the growing of a whole new generation of scholars, as the QEH-trained students have gone out to other universities, UN agencies and national governments. The war and underdevelopment project should thus be seen as

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part of a new chapter in which Frances’s intellectual broadening coincided with her guidance of the reform of QEH.

IX Reforming QEH

To be properly understood, Frances’s key role in reforming QEH requires a brief flashback to earlier events. When Frances arrived at QEH in 1972, Paul Streeten was by no means a conventional directorial figure. There were no plans for the future development of QEH, which operated as an institution where those in the University working on Commonwealth studies could meet visitors from the Commonwealth. When on sabbatical leave in 1973, Streeten arranged for Keith Griffin, a Fellow of Magdalen College, to deputise for him, but partly due to pressure from Griffin for a decision about his future and also for personal reasons, he decided to join the World Bank in 1976. During the Streeten era, there were only a few research officer posts at the ICS – occupied by, apart from Frances, Stanley Trapido working on South Africa and Neville Maxwell working on India and China. Colin Newbury, an economic historian of Commonwealth African states, and Tommy Balogh, recently returned from the Cabinet Office, also had offices at QEH. The main collective academic activities were the weekly QEH seminar in term time, plus a once a term staff meeting at which staff explained to each other their current work. The only students were those on the Foreign Service Programme and a programme for Visiting Fellows.4 QEH became a livelier place when Griffin took over as Warden/Director in 1977, and generated research project grants that brought in temporary research officers, but he quickly moved back to Magdalen as President in 1979.

The 1980s were a difficult period for QEH. There were weaknesses in its organisational structure, its financial control and its management. The Governing Body set up a Working Party for which Frances wrote a report on reforming QEH (Rainbird and Stewart 1984) The University decided to develop a centre for international studies, and merge QEH with the ICS and the IRAE, becoming a University department within the Social Studies Faculty. Robert Cassen was recruited from IDS, Sussex as the new Director, on the promise of a very substantial fund-raising drive. Much managerial responsibility was placed on the shoulders of the Pro-Director whom he brought in, Gowher Rizvi. Before very long the University’s Vice-Chancellor was again increasingly drawn into QEH affairs. In a new externally-funded unit a research report was not delivered to the sponsor because of an internal clash over claims to authorship. On investigation, it turned out that one 4 For a brief account of the Foreign Service Programme at Queen Elizabeth House, see Anthony Kirk-Greene (1994).

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of those involved was using the title Senior Fellow, although he was not an academic and was not employed by the University. He was also operating a QEH bank account independently of the University Chest. Perhaps these were minor misdemeanours, but, for the second time within a decade, QEH had attracted high-level University intervention.

In 1991, the University appointed a Committee under Colin Crouch to evaluate QEH and make suggestions for its future. The Crouch Report said that, if its recommendations were not implemented urgently, the ultimate option would be to close down QEH and disperse the staff to other Departments (paragraph 87-8 and112, pages 26 and 31-2). This option was stated to induce the “necessary commitments” to follow the Report’s central recommendation that a strong inter-disciplinary core of development studies should be built up. In the event, staff dispersal did not happen. However, QEH governance was effectively placed under “special measures”. Cassen was replaced by a triumvirate of which he was but one member; the V-C himself chaired the University Committee responsible for QEH. The Directorship was then advertised in a form that effectively restricted it to internal Oxford applicants.5

Up to this point Frances, although asked previously to put herself forward, had been clear that she did not want to take on any administrative functions because of her family commitments. By 1993, however, her family was grown up, Michael was in a position to act as house husband and she decided to apply and was appointed. Prompted by Rosemary Thorp to prepare an agenda, Frances identified three major elements of change before her interview. The most important was to raise academic standards, including by detaching from QEH the entities that were not strictly academic in nature. The second was to develop QEH as a multidisciplinary institution, firmly integrated into the University. The third was to create a taught University course in development studies, partly to facilitate interaction and integration of academics from different disciplines and importantly because it seemed probable that future finance would be linked to student numbers.

In terms of raising academic standards, Frances opened the door of QEH to staff who wanted to transfer from other related departments. Rosemary Thorp and Sanjaya Lall responded enthusiastically by transferring from the Institute of Economics and Statistics. Other faculty members who did not have the option of transfer became 5 Because Robert Cassen did not relinquish his professorial position, the Directorship as advertised no longer had a full salary attached to it, only an additional allowance. This change meant that external recruitment (as had happened with Cassen) was no longer possible, and that only those who already enjoyed Oxford University salaries were able to apply. There were four applicants from within Oxford, including Frances.

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associates, closely involved with Frances’s QEH. Judith Heyer was one of these. Apart from these distinguished incomers, critical early appointments of new staff were made. A system of Senior Research Associates successfully linked many Oxford academics working on development issues outside QEH with the institution. The appointment of outstanding younger scholars gave a signal that the next generation was being built up that would be capable of leading QEH in the future.

QEH had always been dependent on external fundraising, and some units in it were close to operating as consultancies and/or NGOs. One of these, the Food Studies Group had run up a deficit, and in July 1993 was forced by the University (some thought precipitately) to call in a guarantee of £173,723 that had been obtained from the Sainsbury family trust, the Gatsby Foundation. The detachment of the Food Studies Group was perhaps Frances’s most difficult act as Director. Walking into a meeting and telling colleagues that they were about to be cut adrift from the University was quite a challenge. Many in the FSG, however, were willing to go to gain release from the University’s restrictions on their freedom of action. The separation was eased by allowing the FSG to leave with its current research projects, plus £50,000 to defray its legal and other employment-related transfer costs.

Other loosely articulated units, dependent on external funding, were dealt with in a different way, including the Refugee Studies Centre was set up in 1983 by Barbara Harrell-Bond. Its outputs were primarily addressed the external world rather than to other University academics. Apart from not wanting another grand row, Frances saw the academic potential and importance of the subject and adopted a different approach. When Barbara Harrell-Bond retired in 1996, her successors were recruited to fulfil a more academically-oriented job specification. This option was pursued with the appointment first of David Turton and then Stephen Castles. The RSC offered a one year non-degree course, which was well attended especially by US students. As the University came to favour Master’s degrees more in the 1990s, this course was converted to an M. St. by David Turton, and subsequently to an M Sc. in Forced Migration by Stephen Castles.

An existing M Sc in Agricultural Economics (now defunct) was inherited from the IRAE, but new vehicles for the recruitment of Master’s students were needed. A Diploma in Development Economics had been started by Frances, Rosemary Thorp, Judith Heyer and John Knight in 1984. Up-graded to an M Sc. in Economics for Development, this degree was formally placed under the joint control of QEH and the Economics Department, and Christopher Adam joined QEH to teach the quantitative

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methods component. The most important development in teaching was a new two-year M Phil. in Development Studies that started life under the outstanding care and protection of Barbara Harriss-White. This required some careful attention to be paid to the concerns of the Oxford anthropologists and the politics and international relations faculty, who feared that the new degree might draw students away from their courses – fears that soon turned out to be groundless. The degree was intended to teach students in both a multi- and interdisciplinary way, basically incorporating the topics and disciplines that Frances and Barbara and others involved would have liked to have been able to learn, in a sort of PPE for grown-ups. The degree was outstandingly successful in attracting very high calibre students, as well as bringing QEH academics together on the project.

Whereas the top graduates of the Economic Development MSc. had a path of progression to doctoral studies in the Economics Department, this was not equally true of the graduates in Development Studies who were barred from most disciplinary doctorates by their multidisciplinary background. So a D Phil. in Development Studies was set up, and a large number of students were attracted into it, possibly a number that initially out-paced the capacity of the staff to ensure their timely progress to completion. The University’s agreement that QEH should have its own D Phil. programme marked the culmination of the task of institutional renewal.

With these changes completed, QEH began to look much more like a normal University Department than it had when it became one in 1986. It had a much stronger focus on teaching and research. The University was reassured by the reforms, and saw its policy of up-grading rather than closure and dispersal to be justified in the event. This was timely because University help would soon be needed. The 50-year lease on the QEH premises at 21 St Giles expired in 2005, and the owner, St John’s College, would not renew it. Where else to turn? Various alternatives were formulated and explored by Frances, Rosemary Thorp and Barbara Harriss-White together with Julia Knight, but were found wanting. Eventually through the good offices of Donald Hay, Head of the University’s new Social Sciences Division, the University offered the former Geography Building in Mansfield Road. The Department itself had already been re-titled as the Oxford Department of International Development.

X Groups, Horizontal Inequalities and Violent Conflict

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One of Frances’s moves to raise the academic profile of QEH was to re-launch the journal Oxford Agrarian Studies, inherited from the old IRAE, as Oxford Development Studies in 1996. Writing the first article for the new journal, she noted that, because of its emphasis on optimisation by individuals, neoclassical development economics had for many years relatively little to say about the role in development of groups and about economic conflicts between groups. As a matter of fact, pertinent questions had been raised by Peter Bauer in the 1950s, but throughout the Cold War years they hung in the air as so many conundrums (Bauer 1954: 580-5). Frances’s own insistence on the irreducibly conflictual nature of politics clearly implied the clash of groups and not just individuals, but in the 1970s the relevant groups appeared to be social classes. By the time of the 1996 article, the groups given prominence were the entities that appear in the national accounts – families or households, firms in the private sector, governments at different levels and community organisations. Among these, the good groups, in the sense of raising efficiency and distributing equitably, operated in a mode of trust and reciprocity, a norm that was orthogonal to the neoclassical motive of rational self-interest. If that motive were encouraged excessively, she warned, “groups will still emerge, but they will increasingly be more destructive than constructive” (Stewart 1996: 23).

In subsequent work on groups, done jointly with Judith Heyer and Rosemary Thorp, definitional emphasis shifted again - to local grass-roots groups. Examples included producer co-operatives, saving and credit associations, management groups for common resources, and groups formed to advance claims, self-empowerment and identity formation. The compilation of this wide range of case studies was used to show what collective action could do to improve the lot of the poor – from improving economic efficiency to a more many-sided self-realisation (Heyer, Stewart and Thorp 2002; Stewart 2005). Although the primary concern was not to tackle the analytical problem of specifying the conditions of successful and unsuccessful group formation by the poor, some of the factors that handicap the poor in forming groups were pointed out (Thorp, Stewart and Heyer 2005: 913-5).

The genocide in Rwanda in 1994, along with the humanitarian emergencies associated with civil wars in Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, gave a sudden powerful impetus towards serious investigation of conflict between groups defined by their ethnicity. While acknowledging the modelling work of Collier and Hoeffler (1998) in the neo-classical style on the economic causes of civil war, Frances embarked on a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary path. She incorporated into her analysis of group mobilisation the construction of group identities and their

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instrumental use in the pursuit of political ambitions by group leaders. She argued, however, that different group identities would not lead to conflict unless significant economic differences between groups were present, and these differences were not modulated by the exercise of political power. These group differences were labelled “horizontal inequalities” as distinct from the vertical inequalities in the incomes of an undifferentiated national population. They were seen as having four dimensions – not just incomes and employment, but also political participation, economic assets and social goods. Frances’s hypotheses were that group conflicts were not caused by ignorance, but by deliberate manipulation; that they testify to a preference for relative group advantage over absolute advantage; and that relative group advantage is believed to be achievable by means of a drive for political power. The policy implications of this analysis were that policies need to be framed in the light of understanding the nature and intensity of the horizontal inequalities existing in a country, with the aim of reducing them (Stewart 2000). She noted that the conditionality imposed by international aid donors usually did not include that aim.

This line of research continued, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation, with an examination of the role of diaspora and other international influences on the outbreak, prolongation and resolution of conflicts (FitzGerald, Stewart and Venugopal 2006). Frances then applied successfully for the resources to direct a DFID Development Research Centre specialising in inequality, human security and ethnicity. Given the acronym CRISE, the new Centre was set up in 2003 in the Oxford Department, but it works with an international network of scholars in Bolivia, Ghana, Guatemala, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Nigeria and Peru. Such an extensive network put Frances as its director in a relatively novel position – not directing an entire Department, with its congeries of semi-competitive interests, but animating a disparate team contributing to a common research objective. The experience of working with Mahbub ul Haq must have stood her in good stead. Like him, she has been able to motivate her team to give of their best, while exercising enough intellectual leadership to deliver a coherent account of the variegated segments of country research which have been undertaken under the CRISE umbrella.

That is demonstrated by Stewart (2008), an edited volume that brings together in an ordered form the contributions of various members of the CRISE team on the topic of horizontal inequalities and conflict. Groups are here further defined as cultural groups, mainly ethnic or religious groups. Accordingly, the discussion ranges more widely than just the developing countries, to include Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the black community in the US and the fate of the Jews under the Nazi regime. A

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chapter co-authored by Frances tackles the difficult issues of defining and measuring horizontal inequalities. Here one senses that finding an appropriate statistical measure for describing group inequality is more tractable than drawing appropriate boundaries around groups when ethnic identities are both objective and subjective, and both self-adopted and attributed by others. All the same, the statistical tests presented appear not to contradict Frances’s initial hypothesis that horizontal inequalities are conducive to violent conflict.

They also contribute the interesting finding that this effect may be stronger in societies with democratic political institutions. Democracy does not cause violent conflict, it is argued, but it does not automatically produce a democratic consensus either. In the presence of egregious inequalities, the democratic political fray may descend into violence.

XI Conclusion

Frances has been consistently dismissive of neoclassical versions of development economics. She regards comparative statics as a useless technique for analysing dynamic processes of development. The phenomena of economies of scale, technological gaps, externalities, and indivisibilities are crucial to our understanding of the real world and cannot be assumed away. However, her rejection of comparative statics did not lead also to rejection of microeconomics. It was an important part of her thesis and reappeared in her work on grass-roots groups.

Equally, her dismissal of neoclassical economic theory did not lead her reject out of hand economic policies that are often recommended on neoclassical grounds, such as trade and domestic economic liberalisation. She acknowledges that they could often be very effective in generating economic development. In many poor countries they succeeded because they reduced X-inefficiency, speeded up structural change, and helped to transfer technology and skills. All this had nothing to do with improving resource allocation in a static context.

Above all, the initial distribution of income in poor countries is unacceptable, so that market processes proceeding from it cannot produce optimal outcomes (1985a). In her recent important contributions, Frances has broadened the question of distribution beyond incomes and wealth to include other dimensions, and analysed distribution not just vertically, but also in terms of the horizontal inequalities that have the power to wreak social and political havoc.

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Her view of politics as inherently conflictual is consistent with viewing her own work as active partisanship for the poor. Several of her contributions e.g. to the basic needs strategy and to the campaign for “adjustment with a human face” had a marked tactical element in their design, building in features that would give them leverage in the political market place. This led to criticism from the more academically-minded that empirical descriptions do not somehow speak for themselves and that the interpretation of facts inevitably implies some kind of counter-factual scenario (however difficult that may be to define).

Frances’s writings are certainly notable for a strong empirical approach. Her early days as a government economist encouraged her interest on economic statistics. She found that the Blue Books provided her with an ever ready source of data, from which she could quickly get a sense of relative economic dimensions. In this she resembled her father, of whom someone said that he could (in the words of Trollope) “occupy himself with a blue book for hours together without wincing”.6 For her part, Frances has the impressive skill, when opening up a new research topic, of quickly assembling and laying out the relevant economic, social and political data.

Underlying all of her tireless efforts has been a personal commitment to understand poverty in developing countries and a will, not just to empathise, but to use the power of reason and advocacy to do something about it. Her career from the mid-1970s has been devoted to an activity labelled by two international relations scholars ‘norm entrepreneurship’, the promotion of a set of moral values as the basis for international development policy (Finnemore and Skikkink 1998). Her achievement in the wider world has been to move the international policy discourse forward on many fronts – towards meeting basic needs, more socially sensitive macroeconomic adjustment, humanising war and inequalities. She did this by producing simple ideas out of a sophisticated understanding, ideas that policy makers could then seize on and put to use.

Her long-standing engagement with the United Nations, including membership of important UN committees has helped to extend the influence of her research. She has been the UK member on the UN University Council and on the governing body of UN WIDER in Helsinki. After serving on the Council of UNRISD in Geneva, she became a member of the Committee on Development Policy at UN headquarters in

6 From Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn, the Irish Member Vol. I, Chap. XXXI, Lady Laura Kennedy’s Headache.

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New York in 2007. Outside the UN, she has been President of the DSA (1990-2) and is currently President of the Human Development and Capability Association. Organisations that have appointed her to important governance positions include IDS, Sussex, Brown University in Providence and IFPRI in Washington. Academic journals to which she has given her time include World Development, Journal of International Development, Journal of Human Development, Journal of Development Economics and Development and Change. In all of these forums, her research ideas have circulated.

Frances is after all an indefatigable communicator. Her stamina for producing and spreading ideas is amazing. Colleagues marvel at her cheerful willingness to go to yet another international gathering to expound the essence of her latest research, and do so in a way that makes yet another influential audience suddenly feel ‘yes, that’s it!’. It is fascinating to see it happening, and it is humbling to realise that it is done always with one over-riding aim, “to do something for the poor”.

Oxford University held off from recognising Frances’s achievements in the field of international development studies to the point when she began to contemplate moving elsewhere. Then, relatively late in her career, Frances turned to academic administration, and she proved to be so much more than just a good administrator. Right from the start she was an excellent academic institution builder, recruiting talent, managing change, gaining the confidence of those whose confidence was needed and inspiring all those involved with her in contributing to the collective enterprise. Her decade as Director witnessed a most remarkable improvement in the academic fortunes of Queen Elizabeth House. Her commitment to raising academic standards has continued since in the form of research team leadership, encouraging young researchers – a task on which she thrives, building an academic network dedicated to a central global issue and harvesting the fruit from the co-operative effort.

In 1995, Oxford University awarded her the personal distinction of professorial status, recognition that many of us felt was already by that time long overdue. Frances’s other distinctions now include being cited as an “outstanding leader” in 2003 by the journal Scientific American, receiving the 2009 Mahbub-ul Haq Award for Human Development from UNDP and being given an honorary degree by the University of Sussex in January 2010.

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Cornia, A., R. Jolly and F. Stewart, 1987, Adjustment with a Human Face, 2 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Finnemore, M. and K. Skikkink, 1998, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”, International Organization, 52 (4): 887-917.

FitzGerald, V., F. Stewart and R. Venugopal (editors) 2006, Globalization, Self-determination and Violent Conflict, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Goodin, R. E., 2000, Symposium on Martha Nussbaum’s Political Philosophy, Chicago, Chicago University Press.

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