Critical Reflections on Development

D. Kingsbury

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230389045
• eBook ISBN: 9780230389052
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Designed as a critique of the key failures of international development, this bookbrings together practitioners, policy-makers, researchers, activists, and academics inan attempt to work toward a shared conceptualisation of development by outlining and critically reflecting on their own understanding of development.

1

Reconceptualising Development: The Painful Job of Thinking

Andrew Hewett and Chris Roche

A changing world

There are a number of significant trends that need to inform any discussion on rethinking development. Some of these are the continuation of long-running changes that have been apparent for some time, others are either newer trends or factors that have become more important in recent years. There are clearly myriad possible issues that those interested in development might consider. The following observations are limited to those that seem to be most salient to development practitioners.

The first trend we note is the fact that the world has experienced more and bigger shocks and this is a trend that is liable to continue. The Global Financial Crisis and the consequent emergence of the G20; the large food price hikes of 2007–8; and the catastrophic events experienced in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the earthquake in Haiti and the flooding in Pakistan, affecting some two million, three million and 21 million people respectively, are all examples of these ‘mega-disasters’. The growing interconnectedness of our financial, communication and social systems means that shocks in one part of the world are rapidly transmitted through a diverse set of channels to other parts of the world. While this can lead to a growing sense of community and responsiveness, for example to the plight of victims of the Haiti earthquake, it can also lead to contagion, for example in financial markets, which can have dramatic knock-on effects on prices, jobs and, indeed, political stability. A number of observers note that this is also liable, sooner or later, to lead to the rapid spread of pandemic diseases such as Avian Flu or N1H1.

Climate change is clearly likely to exacerbate these tendencies, as well as produce a number of additional effects, some of which are relatively predictable, such as higher levels of drought in much of Sub-Saharan Africa and higher numbers of extreme weather events, and some which are not foreseeable. It is suggested, for example, that both the 2012 extreme summer temperatures in Russia and the super-soaked Pakistan monsoon were the result of an abnormal kink in the Jet Stream¹ which may have been caused by rises in sea temperature in the Atlantic.

As the financial crisis has developed, there has also been growing attention paid to issues of inequality in general and gender inequality in particular. Pickett and Wilkinson’s book ‘The Spirit Level’, despite some recent critique, has been enormously influential in bringing inequality, as a driver of social welfare outcomes, back into the mainstream of political debate. This has arguably had added resonance at a time when those earning large fortunes in the banking and finance sectors have been very much in the public eye. A number of authors see the failure to achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in many places, as a function of inequality (Van Der Moortele 2008).

There has also been greater attention, at least at a rhetorical level, to the issue of gender inequality and women’s rights. In recent years we have seen the establishment of UN Women, pledges at the 2010 UN Summit to greater resources to address maternal and child health and an enhanced focus on gender and women’s issues by a number of large international NGOs (such as Care), philanthropists (the Gates Foundation) and private sector companies (the Nike Foundation²). This perhaps suggests there is finally a growing recognition of the well-known fact that achieving gender equality is essential to the elimination of poverty, as well as the stark reality that in many parts of the world gender-related indicators are going backwards, and domestic violence is increasing.

As United Nations Development Fund for Women’s (UNIFEM) Progress of the World’s Women 2008–9 report notes, a lack of accountability to women in many cases explains more about the non-achievement of gender equality commitments than other factors (UNIFEM 2009). The authors go on to note that it is important that accountability to women be ‘mission critical’ to those agencies and institutions who seek to promote development and this will require ‘institutional reform to make gender equality one of the standards against which the performance of decision makers is assessed’ (UNIFEM 2009: 7). It remains to be seen if this newfound commitment to gender equality will be translated into some depth of institutional change.

The MDGs and aid effectiveness have been the subject of much publicity and debate in the sector over the last five years in particular. There have been a number of high-profile critiques of aid (Easterly 2006, Moyo 2008), as well as a number of suggestions for some significant changes to the sector (Barder 2009, Riddell 2007), which include some questioning about the willingness of those that are part of the aid ‘industry’ to overcome their vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo. International NGOs have attempted to steer a fine line between saying that aid can and does ‘work’, in order to ensure that the pressure on governments to meet the commitments they made at the G8 meeting in Gleneagles is not undermined, and also suggesting that the way that aid is delivered needs to evolve. It is debatable how much success they have had in doing so.

Australia’s commitment to move to an aid budget of 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) is likely to see a doubling of the aid budget by 2015 and AusAID becoming the fifth or sixth largest governmental department in terms of expenditure. This will mean that the public scrutiny on aid, how it is delivered and its overall effectiveness, is liable to increase. While this is liable to focus on official aid, it is probable that the general public will not necessarily make the distinction between official development assistance and NGO-delivered aid.

All of this is likely to heighten the focus on measurement and accountability for results. As then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made it clear in a speech to the Australian Council for International Development in 2010, in the Australian aid program there will be ‘a central emphasis on the measurement of real development outcomes against the MDG targets’ and strategies will be developed that are based on ‘evidenced-based decisions’ (Rudd 2010). There is some fear that despite some critiques (Eyben 2006, Natsios 2010) of the way this is done, this could further skew accountability of ‘recipient’ governments away from their own citizens, as well as undermine the flexibility and responsiveness of aid agencies to the people they seek to benefit. We are likely to see more innovations such as ‘Cash on Delivery’ aid, which seeks to provide increases in aid that are dependent on certain predetermined, mutually agreed outcomes (Birdsall and Savedoff 2010).

The number of ‘non-traditional’ donors, such as China, who are not part of the Paris and Accra agreements on aid effectiveness, is growing. The role of the G20 and shifts in global power balances offer new opportunities and threats. At the same time we are seeing an increasing linkage, for example, in the UK and the USA, between aid and security or defence issues.³ Some have argued that we are seeing an increasing ‘securitisation of development’ (Duffield 2007). These trends are also likely to change how success is measured, as well as the further engagement of new actors including private sector companies and the military in development and humanitarian operations.

There has been a continued emphasis on tackling governance and corruption issues, but also a growing recognition that attempts by donors to date have been overly focused on the ‘machinery of government’ and have largely ignored informal governance institutions (IDS 2010; Leftwich 2009) such as clan, religious or customary groups in the Pacific. In addition, moves to engage civil society in ‘demanding better governance’, while welcome, have in some places had a tendency to either technocratise what are political processes or left local civil society groups often feeling instrumentalised by donors, rather than supported to become active citizens (Hughes 2007).

An explosion of initiatives to enhance social accountability is also evident, including the use of social networking and crowdsourcing tools. Ushahidi, Twaweza and Frontline SMS are all examples of initiatives designed to improve flows of information and feedback in ways that strengthen collective action. Publish What You Pay (and more recently Publish What You Fund), and the Aid and Extractives Industry transparency initiatives, are other examples in the aid and natural resource arena designed to fight corruption and promote transparency and accountability.

In part as a result of the Global Financial crisis and the issue of Climate Change, and in part as a result of a long-running exchange on the nature of progress, there is arguably a growing debate on what might be termed post-material thinking. This has led to notions of ‘prosperity without growth’ (Jackson 2009); greater attention to ‘well-being’ and happiness, and other non-material measures of progress (Layard 2005, Sarkozy Commission 2009); and an emphasis on relationships (Eyben 2006), how we extend our empathic horizons (Rifkin 2009) or create an enlightenment for the twenty-first century, becoming entertained within some mainstream policy discussions, not just on the margins. This has been accompanied by a growing recognition that there is a desperate need for new forms of co-operation and much greater institutional imagination and innovation if we are to confront the global challenges we face as a planet (Camilleri and Falk 2009; Rodrik 2009), notwithstanding the emergence of the G20.

A growing understanding is emerging of the non-linear nature of development processes, and the uncertainty and complexity that results. The limitations of a simple linear cause-effect approach to promoting change, based on certainty, rationality and predictability, is being increasingly challenged. At the heart of this is the recognition that the development process is made up of a complex web of inter-relationships which cannot be ‘managed’ like a project, but which are sensitive to context, and when subject to interventions act in unpredictable ways. The rise of the G20 and BRICSAM powers and consequent shifts in geopolitics and the world’s economic centre of gravity, along with climate change and growing interdependence, make predicting the future a mugs’ game.

There is a linked, and emerging, understanding of how preconceptions of change influence how development agencies value, assess and interpret information (Eyben et al. 2008). This has lead to a greater accent being put on the importance of clarifying the implicit theories, models and drivers of change that guide agencies’ approaches to development (Eyben et al. 2008). These notions of uncertainty and complexity throw up some major challenges to how agencies approach development processes, but equally importantly how they develop systems and structures within their own organisations, and how success can be measured (Eyben 2005). They also offer significant opportunities in thinking through how disjunctures and moments of flux provide important possibilities for change.

Implications for thinking about development

One of the major implications that emerges is the importance of recognising that we are dealing with a world of growing uncertainty, interdependence and complexity. This means that most of the problems that development is normally concerned with (e.g., climate change, addressing poverty and inequality, the pursuit of pro-poor growth and trade policies, pursuing human security, etc) are ‘wicked’, not ‘tame’. Yet many of the policies and procedures and accountability mechanisms associated with the promotion of development are premised upon a high degree of linearity and predictability of cause-effect relations, and assume development can be ‘managed’.

The second major implication is that if power and politics are central to how change happens, and how they play out is highly contextual and linked to particular political cultures, then this begs a question as to what the role of ‘outside’ actors is, or can be, in promoting developmental change outside of their own societies. The non-recognition of endogenous and local ‘politics’ and institutions, when combined with a linear, engineering approach to ‘fixing’ things, generates a misplaced certainty about how change happens and the role of outsiders in that.

The third major implication is that the world’s growing interdependence means that local ‘political settlements’ are also linked to and determined by international political, economic, environmental and social linkages. This includes links with: transnational companies, particularly those involved in extractive industries and manufacturing; bi-lateral and multilateral relations and associated policy processes; stabilisation and security agendas, and transnational civil society, communication and other social connections. As some have observed, this interdependence makes the distinction between domestic and international policymaking less and less useful.

Fourth, it is clear that the complexity of these linkages means that no one perspective, or agency, can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Reconceptualising Development: The Painful Job of Thinking
• 2 The g7+ Group of Fragile States: Towards Better International Engagement and Accountability in Aid Delivery to Fragile Nations
• 3 After the Washington Consensus: Rethinking Dominant Paradigms and Questioning ‘One Size Fits All’ Orthodoxies
• 4 Development Aid, Civil War and the Containers of Capitalism
• 5 The Good Governance-Human Rights Nexus
• 6 Reconceptualising International Aid and Development NGOs
• 7 A Trojan Horse? International Development Agencies Embrace Business Practices and Mental Models
• 8 Seeing the Forest for the Carbon: Interrogating Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)
• 9 Reconceptualising Development: The Turn to Civil Society?
• 10 A Feminist Reflection on the Declarations of Paris and Dili: Towards Re-Imagining the Aid and Development Endeavour
• 11 Reproduction and Property in Rural China: Development and Discrimination
• Conclusion
• Index