October 25, 2011 Global South

Question: what does the term ‘development’ suggest to you?

“The Industrial Revolution made some countries richer and others poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor”

“The consequence of these advances was a growing gap between modern industrial countries and laggards, between rich and poor. In Europe in 1750, the difference between western Europe (excluding Britain) and eastern in income per head was perhaps 15 percent; in 1800, little more than 20. By 1860 it was up to 64 percent; by the 1900s, almost 80 percent”

“The same polarization, only much sharper, took place between Europe and those countries that later came to be defined as a Third World—in part because modern factory industries swallowed their old-fashioned rivals, at home and abroad”.

“All the ills that have hurt Latin America and the Middle East are exponentially compounded in sub-Saharan Africa: bad government, unexpected sovereignty, backward technology, inadequate education, bad climate, incompetent if not dishonest advice, poverty, hunger, disease, overpopulation—a plague of plagues”

“In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode or production -- the factory system. During these years, other branches of industry effected comparable advances, and all these together, mutually reinforcing one another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening front”.

Of all the so-called developing regions, Africa has done worst: gross domestic product per head increasing, maybe, by less that 1 percent a year; statistical tables sprinkled with minus signs; many countries with lower income today than before independence.

the substitution of machines -- rapid, regular, precise, tireless -- for human skill and effort;

the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power;

the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal substances. [David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 1969]

of natural or financial resources that the United Kingdom received from its many overseas colonies

profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean

the greater liberalisation of trade from

Protestant work ethicMass education

Economic growth

Technological capacity

Primary education

There are traditional societies and modern societies

Development is the transition from the traditional to the modern

Modernization is that processDevelopment is modernization

Modernization talks of ‘dams’ and ‘bridges’,

not human beings The concept of human development,

promoted by the UN, is considered an alternative.

Main proponents of the idea Amartya Sen and Mahbub ul Huq http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/

learnmore/title,10152,en.html

"The basic purpose of development is to enlarge people's choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and can change over time. People often value achievements that do not show up at all in income or growth figures: greater access to knowledge, better nutrition and health services, more secure livelihoods, security against crime and physical violence, satisfying leisure hours, political and cultural freedoms and sense of participation in community activities. The objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives.“

Mahbub ul Haq

Three critical concepts in this approach: Capability refers to what people are

actually able to do or be - unlike traditional development approaches which focus on how much resources they are able to command.

Functionings imply circumstances that allow people to achieve their capability

“capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve … the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)’’ Amartya K. Sen

How do we make that judgement? How do we compare one thing to

another? We need some criteriaFor comparing development

approaches, I suggest three criteria

JusticeDifferenceAgency

Justice: does the framework have a clear notion of justice? (think of modernization as an example. Is it just? Why or why not?

Difference: does the framework talk about inequality between different groups of people (divided by race, gender, caste, religious groups etc.?)

Agency: who is the agent of change? Who brings about development? (the state, individuals, international organizations, elites?)

Distributive paradigm of justice Enabling or transformative paradigm

of justice Distributive paradigm talks about how

to distribute rights and resources Enabling/transformative paradigm

goes deeper Looks at the institutions which

produce a certain distribution

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere.

Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way.

It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.

It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced (Frye, 1983:18).