The Routledge Handbook of Religions and Global Development

Emma Tomalin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135045708
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

This Handbook provides a cutting-edge survey of the state of research on religions and global development. Part one highlights critical debates that have emerged within research on religions and development, particularly with respect to theoretical, conceptual and methodological considerations, from the perspective of development studies and its associated disciplines. Parts two to six look at different regional and national development contexts and the place of religion within these. These parts integrate and examine the critical debates raised in part one within empirical case studies from a range of religions and regions. Different religions are situated within actual locations and case studies thus allowing a detailed and contextual understanding of their relationships to development to emerge. Part seven examines the links between some important areas within development policy and practice where religion is now being considered, including:

• Faith-Based Organisations and Development
• Public Health, Religion and Development
• Human rights, Religion and Development
• Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Religion
• Global Institutions and Religious Engagement in Development
• Economic Development and Religion
• Religion, Development and Fragile States
• Development and Faith-Based Education
  

Taking a global approach, the Handbook covers Africa, Latin America, South Asia, East and South-East Asia, and the Middle East. It is essential reading for students and researchers in development studies and religious studies, and is highly relevant to those working in area studies, as well as a range of disciplines, from theology, anthropology and economics to geography, international relations, politics and sociology.

1
Introduction

Emma Tomalin

Introduction: why ‘religions and global development’?

Significant research on the topic of ‘religions and global development’ has begun to emerge only relatively recently. Over the past decade or so there has been a noticeable shift within some areas of international development policy, practice and research to include religion as a relevant factor. For instance, the views of religious leaders have been invited on key initiatives such as the implementation of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, development partners such as DFID and USAID seem more open to engaging with and funding faith-based organizations (FBOs), development studies journals are witnessing an upturn in the publication of research articles that deal with the relationships between religions and international development, and a good number of monographs and edited volumes on the topic have been published (e.g. Tyndale 2006; Haynes 2007; Clarke and Jennings 2008; Deneulin 2009; ter Haar 2011; Barnett and Stein 2012; Carbonnier 2013; Tomalin 2013). However, this interest needs a broader context. Beyond examining how western development organizations have engaged with religion, research on ‘religions and global development’ needs to take into account how governments of nations in the Global South as well as communities within those nations engage with the nexus between religion and development in ways that reflect their own socio-political context. It is important not to view ‘development’ purely in the light of conceptions advanced by the ‘global aid business’.

While religious actors have made significant contributions to various sorts of ‘development’ work in practice, until very recently this was largely ignored by major international development players, as well as by the academic disciplines that contribute to development studies. This can be partially explained by the assumption held by many that religion is largely opposed to economic development and that, as societies modernize, they will become less religious (and thus religion will deserve less priority). However, such simplistic theories of modernization and secularization have been critiqued and indeed thoroughly debunked. Rather than disappearing or completely diminishing in significance, it is now widely recognized that the significant and continuing role of religion in public life (as well as in people’s private lives), whether it is increasing or simply recognized, demands that the relationship between religion and society, even if it is both complex and controversial, needs to be taken seriously. It must be recognized from the outset that the relationships are both positive and negative: although religious traditions have contributed greatly to humanitarian, relief and development work for many centuries, they are also implicated in sustaining different sorts of injustice, from violence to gender discrimination. Whichever the case they are vitally important.

The first major global initiative in this area – bringing together development actors, faith groups and academics – was an initiative by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn and former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton. They organized a series of conferences of senior development institution executives and faith leaders (in London in 1998, Washington, DC in 1999, Canterbury, England in 2002, and Dublin in 2005) (Clarke 2008: 2). Wolfensohn and Carey created a dedicated organization to support the effort, the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD), in 1998, which was to respond to ‘the opportunities and concerns of many faith leaders and development practitioners who saw untapped potential for partnerships’ (Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics, n.d.). After both had retired, a further meeting was held in Accra in 2009, but the high-level support for the effort faltered thereafter. In the early 2000s WFDD was a UK charity but was reorganized as a US non-governmental organization in 2006, and currently operates in Washington, DC, based at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. In the early years WFDD worked closely with a World Bank unit, the (now defunct) Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics (DDVE), which led both policy analysis and research from within the World Bank (publications include Marshall and Marsh 2003; Marshall and Keough 2004; Marshall and Van Saanen 2007; Osorio and Wodon 2014; Wodon 2014).

Several other international organizations have also drawn attention to the importance of understanding religion and engaging with religious actors around development goals. The UNFPA, for instance, now has decades of experience working with faith-based organizations and in 2009 produced ‘Guidelines for Engaging Faith-Based Organizations as Cultural Agents of Change’. Beyond this, it has a number of publications that explore the role of religion and culture in its work (2005, 2007, 2008). The UNFPA also organized a network of faith organizations and a UN inter-agency working group. More recently, a Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities aims to bring together academics, development practitioners and faith groups around the goal of working to ‘increase the quality and quantity of robust, practical evidence on the pervasive, but poorly understood and uncharted, role of local faith communities (LFCs) in community health and development’ (Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities, n.d.).

A good number of chapters in this Handbook examine the engagement at the level of governments with religion and development. Laliberté, for instance, in Chapter 16, looks at religion and development in China, where, contrary to the earlier avoidance of religion, a policy and legal ‘opinion’ was issued in February 2012, ‘by a number of Party and state organs, about the desirability for religious organizations to deliver social services and serve the public interest’ (p. 239). At the level of Northern governments the engagement between religion and development has also attracted interest. In the USA, as well as a number of European settings, the role of religion in ‘development cooperation’ is beginning to be taken more seriously. In the US the rise of the ‘religious right’ since the 1980s and reactions after 9/11 have both contributed to a greater focus on the role of ‘faith’ in society, including increased funding for FBOs. In 2001 the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (CFBCI) was established at USAID ‘to create a level playing field for faith and community based organizations to compete for USAID programs’ (USAID, n.d.; see the treatment of this in Stambach, Chapter 29). In Europe also, a shift towards taking religion more seriously in government agendas as well as academic research is noticeable. Over the past decade development partners have increasingly chosen to support the work of FBOs. The USA has gone furthest, with George W. Bush, during his presidency, almost doubling funding to ‘faith-based’ groups, from 10.5 per cent of aid in 2001 to 19.9 per cent in 2005 (James 2009: 5). In the UK, the Department for International Development (DFID)’s 2009 White Paper promised to double funding to FBOs (2009: 5), reflecting ‘recognition’ of the ‘unique contribution that they can make in both delivering development on the ground, and connecting with communities here and abroad’ (DFID 2009: 134). More recently, DFID has launched a new ‘Principles Paper’ to guide its collaboration with faith groups, underscoring the key principles of the partnership between faith groups and DFID as transparency, mutual respect and understanding (DFID 2012; Williams 2012).

While many in the global development community are more likely these days to think about religion as a topic that is relevant to their work, reflecting broader social, cultural and political shifts that have thrust religion back into the public sphere, decades (even centuries) of neglect of religion in public life in policy arenas, coupled with a fear of and even negative feelings about religion, have meant that many development policy makers and practitioners are poorly equipped to deal with religion when they encounter it. Certainly levels of religious literacy are low, both in terms of knowledge about the beliefs and practices embodied within different religious traditions and also in terms of how ‘religion’ is manifested in different settings in ways that do not match the western Christianized view of what a religion should be (this is discussed below). Others have been critical that in bringing religion and development together there is a pernicious instrumentalism, where development policy makers and agencies are guilty of picking and choosing which types of religion to engage with (Deneulin 2009). For instance, development donors are seen to be more likely to seek engagement with organizations that express their faith ‘passively’ than those that obviously combine their development work with activities that aim to gain converts (Clarke 2008).

Thus, while many welcome this ‘turn to religion’, others are more cautious, especially where engagement with religious leaders or organizations may risk undermining progressive development goals such as gender equality (Pearson and Tomalin 2008; Tadros 2011; Tomalin 2011). The ‘resurgence of religion’ in recent decades has had a marked impact on women’s rights globally, and this is something that the international development community needs to be acutely attuned to (Bayes and Tohidi 2001). So this is not only a new field of academic study but also one that deals with controversial and contested issues and debates.

In response to such shifts, a new and exciting teaching and research agenda has emerged in recent years, which is concerned with the interactions between ‘religions and global development’. This topic has attracted funding from major bodies (e.g. DFID in the UK and the Henry R. Luce Foundation in the USA). In the UK, between 2005 and 2010, DFID funded a large £3.5 million research programme based at the University of Birmingham (Religions and Development Research Programme n.d.; Stambach 2005; Clarke 2007). In Switzerland (Holenstein 2005), Scandinavia and the Netherlands, such reflection is also under way. In the Netherlands, for instance, The Knowledge Centre Religion and Development was established by the Oikos Foundation, Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation (ICCO) and Institute for Social Studies in the Hague, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also shown marked interest in faith and development (Knowledge Centre Religion and Development, n.d.).

The discussion so far has established that the topic of ‘religions and global development’ is of increasing salience for development studies, policy and practice. In the next section of this chapter I will also argue that this is an important and emerging area for the study of religion that builds on existing critical approaches and theories. I will introduce some important conceptual and theoretical debates relevant to this area of research, including those that examine the impact of modernization and globalization on religion in contemporary societies and the implications of the post-secular for how we view the relationships between religions and global development. In the final section I will give an outline of the book’s structure and an overview of the content of the individual sections and chapters.

From modernization to globalization: religion and development in a post-secular era

As Rakodi discusses in Chapter 2, modernization theory underpinned the ‘belief that development would (and should) take the form of a unilinear path towards a commonly accepted and desired future’ (p. 17) but also that secularization would occur as an inevitable part of the modernizing development processes that were set in place after the Second World War. The beginnings of this modern development project signalled a positive and some would say even evangelical spirit (see Fountain, Chapter 6) about the benefits that modernization could bring to the poor and marginalized across the world, as well as the central role that western governments would play in bringing this about. Truman’s famous Inaugural Address in 1949 expresses such a global vision, where ‘we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas’ (Rist 2002: 71). Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms Speech’ (the 1941 State of the Union Address) also captured this mood in proposing the four freedoms that everyone should enjoy: freedom of speech; freedom of worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. Subsequent reflections suggest that freedom of religion as Roosevelt saw it at the time, while an important principle, focused on the privatized religion that was compatible with the First Amendment to the Constitution, and not the public styles of religiosity found across the globe, which modernization theory suggested were likely to get in the way of progress and development.

This focus on secularization – as an inevitable part of the modernizing development process – has been critiqued not only for reflecting a western normative position but also for going against the evidence. Bompani, in Chapter 7, highlights two assumptions regarding the role of religion in people’s lives in Africa and other parts of the Global South: first, that ‘religion will wither and die as Africa develops’ and, second, that ‘religion is antithetical to development and progress’ (p. 101). However, rather than withering away, religion seems to be growing in strength in some parts of the globe, both rich and poor, and theories of secularization now appear to be simplistic and limited in their ability to account for the perseverance or even resurgence of religion. Nor can religion be so easily associated with forces that work against economic development. For example, as Freeman (Chapter 8) and Freston (Chapter 10) both point out, Pentecostalism and its prosperity gospel suggest a significant role for religion in Africa and Latin America in boosting economic success.

Debates about the ‘global resurgence of religion’ have been building momentum since the 1980s, if not earlier (Thomas 2005), and of particular interest for foreign policy and development actors has been the wave of religio-political movements that have sprung up, many apparently threatening secular liberal democratic values, including human rights. In the wake of the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979, the following decades have witnessed many examples of religiously inspired social and political action across the globe – from the rise of nationalist Hindu politics in India and of Islamic political parties in Pakistan (see Tomalin, Chapter 13) to the watershed event of 9/11 (Thomas 2005). However, in addition to such particularistic and conservative styles of religiously based politics, religious actors have also responded in ways that are ecumenical and liberal (Beyer 1994). These actors have formed or joined movements based on freedom, tolerance, individualism and other globalized values, such as gender, environmental or human rights. Examples in this volume include liberation theology (see Plant and Weiss, Chapter 4), rights-based approaches to development (see Juul Petersen, Chapter 24) and the modern environmental movement (see Bergmann, Chapter 26).

Thus, globalization has given rise to the emergence of diverse styles of religiosity that were not predicted by modernization theory. While classical modernization theory can be seen as unilinear and ethnocentric, Beyer (2007) suggests that we look to theories of globalization (‘both the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world’ (Robertson 1992: 8)) to describe and explain these contemporary religious expression...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1 Critical debates for religions and global development
• PART 2 Sub-Saharan Africa
• PART 3 Latin America
• PART 4 South Asia
• PART 5 East and South-East Asia
• PART 6 The Middle East and North Africa
• PART 7 Development policy and practice
• Index