INTRODUCTION: RE-FRAMINGDEVELOPMENT FOR THE 21ST

CENTURY

ALAN THOMAS1* and TIM ALLEN2

1Development Policy and Practice, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK2Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics, London, UK

The turn of the Millennium is of course just a date. For impoverished people it willnot, in itself, change anything. By and large, expensive celebrations have been aluxury of the a�uent, or at least of a�uent countries. Nevertheless, it is a date thatinvites re¯ection on what has gone, and what is to come. It has also been the focus ofthe remarkable Jubilee 2000 Coalition on developing country debt, and has beenmarked by protests and riots against genetically manipulated crops and globalcapitalism. Whatever views are held of these campaigns, they have certainlyhighlighted the fact that a legacy of the twentieth century has not been the end ofdeprivation.

`Health for all by the Year 2000', the goal proclaimed by the World HealthOrganisation and UNICEF in the late 1970s, seems as over-optimistic as PresidentKennedy's conviction that the problem of poverty would be solved during the 1960s.Five years after the 1995 United Nations World Summit on Social Development inCopenhagen, at which governments and inter-governmental organizations agreed theaim of reducing by half the proportion of people in extreme poverty by the year 2015,even this seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, the later years of the last century have witnessed plenty of examplesof large-scale social transformation, positive as well as negative. On the one hand,many countries in Latin America, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa havesustained very low or negative economic growth rates, and Africa in particular hasbeen plagued by civil war and in some cases the collapse of e�ective stateadministration. Here there is plenty of evidence of what David Korten calls the`global three-fold human crisis of deepening poverty, social disintegration andenvironmental destruction' (Korten, 1995, p. 21). But, on the other hand, the end ofthe Cold War, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the movement towardsindependence for East Timor are all examples of changes, almost universally viewedpositively, which were virtually unthinkable even a few years before. In economicterms there have also been extraordinary successes. For example, despite the setbacksof the Asian ®nancial crisis of late 1997, it remains the case that the four `Asian tigers'

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of International DevelopmentJ. Int. Dev. 12, 769±772 (2000)

* Correspondence to: Alan Thomas, Development Policy and Practice, Centre for Complexity and Change,Faculty of Technology, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. E-mail: a.r.thomas@open.ac.uk

(Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) have industrialized and joined theranks of the `high-income economies' in terms of the World Bank's classi®cation.Other countries in East and Southeast Asia look set to follow them. China, theworld's most populous country, has sustained an annual growth rate of over 10 percent for 20 years, with manufacturing now accounting for over 40 per cent of its grossdomestic product.

This issue of the Journal of International Development, with its rather grand title of`Re-framing development for the 21st century', has arisen from the process of editingthe new Open University text-book, Poverty and Development into the 21st Century(Allen and Thomas, 2000). This is a new edition of what was already an extremelywide-ranging book, Poverty and Development in the 1990s (Allen and Thomas, 1992).Like its predecessor, the new book has been designed to do three things: service OpenUniversity teaching on development, act as a core text for courses at otherinstitutions, and provide a relatively comprehensive and readable introduction to theissues for the general reader.

The work of revising, rewriting and expanding the book for the ®rst decade of thenew century was much more than a simple updating. The ®rst book was written inthose extraordinary years at the turn of the 1990s, when so many things werehappening so quickly. The authors were, and are, a diverse group of scholars, withquite di�erent interpretations of these events and processes. This was re¯ected in therange of topics covered in the book, and the interpretative tensions between chapters.The new book is longer and even more diverse in subject matter, but it is written withgreater con®dence in our pluralism, and, perhaps paradoxically, is more theoreticallyintegrated. We have more adequately broken free of the traditional models andsubject matter of development studies. It would, in fact, have been peculiar if we hadnot done so. The 1990s, with the huge changes in the world such as those noted above,was inevitably also a period of big changes in the study of development, and inconceptualizing what it is (or is not) all about. By the turn of the new century, theCold War had not just ended but receded into history. Many of the notions which hadonce largely been unquestioned, such as that of development as a post-World WarTwo phenomenon taking place in the `Third World' or the `South', were revealed asmanifestly limited views shaped by Cold War thinking. It also made much less senseto think of development planning in terms of competing neo-liberal and structuralistmodels. Capitalism, it seemed, was the only game in town.

For some this has provoked a crisis. Several analysts have discussed the `impasse' indevelopment theory (Schuurman, 1993), while the `post-development' school hasused postmodern discourse analysis to make sweeping criticisms of the whole conceptof development, both as theory and as practice. We are interested in, but notconvinced by, such arguments. The continuing awfulness of global poverty and thevital importance of the related problems which development addresses, combinedwith the existence of positive examples of social transformation from which to learn,convinces us that development studies has much to o�er. In our view, dwelling on an`impasse' re¯ects a nostalgia for old debates, and development requires re-framingrather than abandoning.

The demise of Soviet-style communism, together with the shift away from simpleneo-liberal ideologies in Western countries, has opened up alternative spaces fordiscussion and potential action. While liberal capitalism appears to be here to stay,even some of those who once vigorously promoted pure market-driven strategies are

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increasingly questioning them. There is new interest in possible roles for the state, and

a growing recognition of the importance of various non-governmental as well as inter-

governmental agencies, and of social movements, civil society, identity politics and

culture. All this makes development studies more interesting and dynamic than ever

before.

Contributions to this issue were initially sought by asking authors of chapters

in Poverty and Development into the 21st Century to discuss any aspect of the

ways in which conceptions of development are (or are not) changing, and

particularly to present new ideas on development which arose from work on

their book chapter. Five of the seven papers published here were then presented

at a workshop held by the Open University and the Development Studies

Institute of the London School of Economics in May 2000. Two additional

papers have been included as a result of the discussions held, one on meanings

of development and one on international debt, so that in each case we now have

a pair of papers, written from di�erent perspectives. There was no attempt to

force an overall coherence or to impose a uni®ed grand scheme, as the project of

re-framing development is seen as a process which should take place over several

years and is probably necessarily always un®nished.

Thus, two of the papers, by Thomas and by Brett, address in very di�erent ways the

question of what is meant by development now that liberal capitalism is so dominant

globally. Thomas suggests that a dominant trend is for development to be restricted in

meaning to refer to the practices of development agencies, especially the policies of

international agencies aimed at poverty reduction. He explores the dangers and

implications of such a limited view of development, particularly with respect to

accountability and trusteeship. Brett, by contrast, argues that although the

dominance of global capitalism has to be accepted, there is room within the varieties

of capitalism for emancipatory alternatives, which require the promotion of liberal

democratic institutions.

Chataway and Wield address the question of whether knowledge management

and new forms of knowledge have transformed development so that its end

result might now be seen as `knowledge society' rather than `modern industrial

society'. Allen and Styan take further the problem of trusteeship, looking at the

growth in international `humanitarian' intervention and analysing the contri-

bution of the French tradition of `le droit d'ingeÂrence' with its somewhat

ambiguous connotations (the `right to intervene' or the `legal obligation to

interfere'). Beall discusses urbanization, one of the massive trends of the late

twentieth century continuing into the next, but in terms of urban social

movements as development actors.

The ®nal pair of papers deal with the question of developing country debt and debt

cancellation as a possible millennial boost to development. Written from very

di�erent points of view, they share a desire to learn from the history of previous debt

cancellations and to bring some empirical evidence to bear on what has become a

highly emotive war of words. Allen and Weinhold ask whether debt cancellation is

likely to work in terms of being an e�ective way of releasing resources which would

actually be used for poverty alleviation. Hanlon asks how much debt cancellation can

be expected, either to match historical precedent or to allow su�cient ®nancial

resources to be released to meet the International Development Targets.

Introduction 771

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REFERENCES

Allen T, Thomas A (eds). 2000. Poverty and Development into the 21st Century. Oxford

University Press, Open University: Oxford, Milton Keynes.

Allen T, Thomas A (eds). 1992. Poverty and Development in the 1990s. Oxford University Press,

Open University: Oxford, Milton Keynes.

Korten D. 1995. When Corporations Rule the World. Kumarian Press, Berret-Koehler: West

Hartford CT, San Francisco.

Schuurman FJ. 1993. Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory. Zed Press:

London.

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Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 12, 769±772 (2000)