Integral Development

Realising the Transformative Potential of Individuals, Organisations and Societies

Alexander Schieffer, Ronnie Lessem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317115625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Alexander Schieffer and Ronnie Lessem introduce a groundbreaking development framework and process to address the most burning issues that humanity faces. While conventional top-down, outside-in development has reached a cul-de-sac, a new, integral form of development is emerging around the world. Integral Development uniquely articulates this emergent approach, and invites us to fully participate in this process. The integral approach has been researched and framed over decades of in-depth experience in transformative development education and practice all over the world. It uniquely combines four mutually reinforcing perspectives: nature and community; culture and spirituality; science, systems and technology; and enterprise and economics. Conventional development theory and practice has prioritized the latter two perspectives, neglecting the former two. This has caused massive imbalances in today's world. The four interconnected perspectives allow for a transformative and integrated engagement with core development issues in a way that is locally relevant and globally resonant. Throughout, the practical impact of Integral Development is brought to life through highly innovative cases from around the globe, drawing on the authors` first-hand experience. This makes the book a living demonstration of the power of this pioneering approach. Integral Development shows how individual, organizational and societal developments need to be interconnected to release a society's full potential. It shifts the responsibility for large-scale development from often-distant experts and organizations to each individual, community, enterprise and institution within the society. It is essential reading - and a call to action - for everyone concerned with the current state of local and global development.

PART I
Divided World: The Need for Renewing Human Development

CHAPTER 1 Development – Quo Vadis?: Turning Point in Human Development

Guiding Question: Why is there a need to fundamentally renew Human Development and what is the direction to take?

1.1 Orientation: What Integral Development is About

IS DEVELOPMENT DEAD?

Is development dead? Many renowned commentators from within the development field have claimed that development has reached a ‘dead end’, declaring that over five decades of development have been ‘lost’. As a consequence they have requested an end to all ‘authoritarian engineering’ into other people’s lives and societies. Despite the occasionally successful project or initiative here and there, for these critics development is bankrupt and any attempts to revive it should be abandoned.

We shall explore later (

2) in more detail the nature of these critiques. For now, we want to give our preliminary response to the question ‘Is development dead?’: ‘Yes and No’. We reply ‘yes’ because we think that the conventional approach towards development is ultimately futile, and does not serve us well any longer. We reply ‘no’, because we shall propose in this book an alternative, fundamentally new and (for us) more authentic approach to development.

We call it Integral Development.

INTEGRAL DEVELOPMENT

This book is about Integral Development. It is about its theory, and it is about its practice. It builds on our lifelong research, educational and practical experiences, and it is an evolution of the body of integral theory¹ that we presented over the past years and that we shall later introduce in some more detail (

4).

Integral Development aspires to make development fully relevant to human life – to your life, my life, our lives. To live up to this goal, it is concerned with all aspects of human life and hence looks at development, in holistic fashion, from multiple perspectives. That makes our approach integral, as you will see.

This book is about ‘you’ and your society. It brings development to your doorstep, takes it out of the closet of mere academic theory, or of sheer socioeconomic policy – both, all too often too alien, too distant from the person on the ground eager to develop him- or herself and the surrounding context. This book is not about ‘foreign development aid’, nor is it about a simple set of success factors. It is about a journey that empowers you to bring development, in a holistic and sustainable manner, right into your own context. It is a journey that integrates your personal development, with the development of your organisation and community and from there with the development of your society. That is the other reason why this approach is integral.

But it is not just an integral approach to development that we propose in this book. It is also a ‘human’ approach that we offer. It anchors both the freedom and the responsibility to develop within human beings – as individuals, and as members of organisations, communities and societies. It takes development out of the exclusive hands of national, regional and international, often self-declared development agencies, and invites every individual, organisation or community to become an agent for conscious development – or, in our terms, an Integral Developer. The book shows you possible paths to actualise Integral Development. It accompanies you, and your organisation and society – step by step. These are the reasons that make this approach human – it is lodged in and related to ‘human life’, your particular life.

Furthermore, Integral Development allows you to choose your own path, in relation to your development issues at hand, as well as your own particular gifts and capacities, in relation to your context. Whether you are working in the so-called ‘development field’, say for example in community development in Southern Africa, or whether you are active in organisational development in North America – this approach supports you in becoming – together with your organisation – an agent for Integral Development. It invites you to reflect and act, as you – together with others – move forward, coming up with a development approach, that authentically mirrors your individual and collective journeys. This is what makes our orientation not only ‘human’, but also ‘humane’. Such ‘humaneness’ however, requires each of us to start the development journey with ourselves, understanding and engaging with our true development needs, desires and tasks. Integral Development works ‘inside-out’, not – as most of conventional development does – ‘outside-in’.

Let us start by examining the question: Why is Integral Development needed?

RESPONDING TO THE CIVILISATIONAL CRISIS OF OUR TIME

Integral Development addresses the profound civilisational crisis humanity is facing at this time, and shows new pathways of development that enable us to build sustainable futures, collectively.

This crisis affects many scientific disciplines in theory and almost all countries in practice. It is a universal crisis with many facets. The most visible and dramatic facets are economic, political, environmental, social, cultural and spiritual in nature.

It is not only the sheer scale of the crisis that makes us argue that we are living through a major civilisational moment that cries out for transformation. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the deep-rooted assumptions underlying the very understanding of ourselves, our societies, and humanity as a whole have become increasingly dysfunctional. We literally need a new foundation to co-engage with each other – economically, politically, culturally, environmentally.

We have come to the conclusion that if we do not fundamentally renew these underlying assumptions, we will not be able to respond adequately to the crisis at hand. In other words, we won’t be able to renew the very foundations on which we are standing. If we are unable to do that, we have no chance to face a sustainable future.

Conventional development is in the midst of this civilisational crisis. As an interdisciplinary field it is not only, simultaneously, affected by all the crises alluded to above, it also deals with a large percentage of the world’s population. Furthermore, given that quite a number of so-called developed economies in Western Europe – from Greece to Ireland, from Portugal to Spain – seem to be (at the time of writing) at the brink of economic collapse while the USA has again faced a so-called fiscal cliff, development, as we conventionally know it, now reaches across the proverbial north–south divide. It concerns all of us.

You might be surprised by our statement that the civilisational crisis we are facing, is also a crisis of the university as we know it. Indeed, universities are even vitally concerned, given that much of the development theories that have been adopted until now have been conceived of by university scholars. In dealing with the crisis, humanity will be required to critically revisit its approaches to learning, research and education. Our collective capacity to renew these key developmental functions is, in our view, one of the crucial factors for a positive, collective future. It is for that reason that Integral Development is primarily an understanding-learning-research-and-education journey, resulting in action. It requires you to continuously reflect and act. And in the process, as you will see, we shall develop new developmental-educational spaces that become authentic catalysts for the sustainable development of individuals, organisations and society. Such spaces (we shall call them Uni-Versities) have little to do with the conventional educational experiences most of us underwent at university. If that sounds too tall an order, be surprised by the practical cases that we introduce in this book. They show us the way.

We begin our examination with a critical appraisal of the academic field of development – and hence with related development theory and practice. But ultimately, this book seeks to transcend the disciplinary perspective by liberating it from its relatively narrowly defined box with its predominant focus on socioeconomic development.

Where do we start?

BUILDING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR THE INTEGRAL DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY

In this book we are not concerned with tweaking existing development theories and models. Yes, we will revisit the existing theory and practice, as conventionally defined – because we are keen to learn from the past. But, ultimately, we shall offer a dramatically new perspective that builds on the best that humanity’s development knowledge and practice has to offer, from all around the world.

We shall present an approach to human development that enables you and your organisation to engage with this knowledge and practice in a systematic manner, thereby addressing the development issues you are dealing with within your particular context – in theory and action. Integral Development does not offer ready-made formulae for the particular development issue you are concerned with. What it offers, though, is a ‘software’ that can guide and accompany you in shaping your own solutions. It is comprised of thought-provoking content, inspiring practice and a catalytic development process – that supports you in your journey towards finding locally adequate and authentic solutions to your particular issue.

Having set the overall scene for Integral Development, the next question we are going to explore is whether the overall failure of development is just a failure of a particular set of theories and practices. Or, is its failure a symptom of a much larger phenomenon?

1.2 Global, Outer Shift: Dealing with the Profound Civilisational Crisis of Our Time

THE CRISIS OF OUR TIME

We are living in a time of confusion. Many of the social and economic systems of our time seem to be either dysfunctional or ripe for transformation.

We therefore ask the question whether our very understanding of how we design and develop our lives, our organisations and our societies requires a fundamentally new perspective. The answer is yes. Clear as it may look, this is not an easy answer. We need to explore deeper, with the help of leading thinkers, what this crisis is about. We begin with Immanuel Wallerstein, seen as one of the world’s most eminent sociologists and particularly well-known for his approach to World Systems Analysis.²

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

Wallerstein, whose work also contributed immensely to modern development theory (

17), argues that the modern-world system has entered a terminal crisis and is unlikely to survive the next 50 years. That includes, first and foremost, the current economic system that, for Wallerstein, will be overturned in the years to come by a new economic system.

In his book entitled The End of the World as We Know It, he makes the point that ‘we do not know whether the resulting system will be better or worse than the one we are living in, but we do know that the period of transition will be a time of terrible troubles, since the stakes of the transition are so high, the outcome so uncertain, and the ability of small inputs to affect the outcome so great’.³

It is widely believed that the collapse of Communism in 1989 marks a great triumph of liberalism. However, Wallerstein sees the event rather as marking the definitive collapse of liberalism as the defining geo-culture of our world system. For him, liberalism essentially promised that gradual reform would ameliorate the inequalities of the world system and reduce acute polarisation. It apparently did not. The collapse of Communism, along with the disintegration of the national liberation movements in the Third World, and the collapse of the faith in the Keynesian model in the Western world were all simultaneous reflections of popular disillusionment with the validity and reality of the reformist movements each had propagated. But this disillusionment, however merited, challenges the popular legitimacy of the states and undoes any reasons why their populations should tolerate the continuous and increasing polarisation of the world system. The world, for Wallerstein, has not morally advanced in the last several thousand years, but it could. We could move in the direction of what Max Weber called ‘substantive rationality’, that is rational values and ends, arrived at collectively and intelligently.

Another conclusion Wallerstein arrives at is that the belief in certainties, a fundamental premise of modernity, is blinding and crippling us. Modern science (read: Cartesian-Newtonian science) has been based in the ‘certainty of certainty’. The basic assumption is that there exist objective universal laws governing all natural phenomena, that these laws can be ascertained by scientific inquiry, and that once such laws are known, we can, starting from any set of initial conditions, predict perfectly the future and the past. Furthermore, the belief in certainty is increasingly under severe attack within natural science itself, prominent examples being Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s book on La Fin des Certitudes⁴ and American complexity scientist Sally Goerner’s work on a New Science of Sustainability.⁵ These new views are called the science of complexity, partly because they argue that Newtonian certitudes hold true only in very constrained, simple systems, but also because, they maintain, the universe manifests the evolutionary development of complexity, and the majority of situations cannot be explained by assumptions of linear equilibria and time-reversibility.

Wallerstein sees humanity wrestling with the current transition for many more years. For him, the human social systems are the most complex systems in the universe, therefore the hardest to analyse. Hence, the struggle for the good society is a continuing one. He argues that despite these difficulties it is precisely in periods of transition from one historical system to another one – whose nature we cannot know in advance – that human struggle takes on most meaning. Or to put it another way, it is only in such times...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Divided World: The Need for Renewing Human Development
• Part II Integral Worlds: A New Integral Perspective on Human Development
• Part III The Southern Realm of Integral Development: Restoring Life in Nature and Community
• Part IV The Eastern Realm of Integral Development: Regenerating Meaning via Culture and Spirituality
• Part V The Northern Realm of Integral Development: Reframing Knowledge via Science, Systems and Technology
• Part VI The Western Realm of Integral Development: Rebuilding Infrastructure and Institutions via Enterprise and Economics
• Part VII Unity in Diversity: Fully actualising Integral Development via the Integral University
• Index