International Development

Navigating Humanity's Greatest Challenge

Michael Woolcock

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781509545155, 9781509545148
• eBook ISBN: 9781509545162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Whether understood as a long-run historical process or an intentional political project, international development transforms not only societies and economies but also key ideas about how the world works and how problems should be solved.

In this compelling book, Michael Woolcock demonstrates that achieving peace and prosperity for all is supremely contingent and often contentious: the means and ends of development are often perceived as alien, unjust, and disruptive, its benefits and costs unequally borne. Many development challenges are not technical problems amenable to an expert's solution, but require extensive deliberation to find and fit context-specific responses. Woolcock insists that it is each generation's challenge to find shared, legitimate, and durable solutions to the moral imperative to reduce human suffering while simultaneously redressing the challenges that development success (let alone failure) inexorably brings.

This skillful guide will be essential reading for students and practitioners working in this complex field, and for anyone seeking to help "make the world a better place."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Boxes
• Summary
• Prelude: An Invitation…: …to see the development process as an “epic adventure” (Hirschman), replete with “challenge, drama, and grandeur” (because the broad material welfare gains it can yield are costly, their realization inherently fraught); to recognize that all of humanity is now on such a shared journey (whether we know it or not, like it or not); and to mindfully offer up one’s skills and resources – no matter how seemingly modest – for the betterment of everyone, especially those who suffer the most. We can only do what we do because others do what they do.
• 1 Navigating Our Diverging, Integrated World: The Three “Developments”: Whether undertaken by nation states (“national development”), large international development organizations (“big development”), or charities and advocacy groups (“small development”), efforts to eliminate global poverty are the embodiment of a quintessentially high-modern belief that human reason and resources can transform history itself. Achieving this requires a coherent social contract connecting citizens and the state, and states capable of implementing increasing complex tasks, at scale. It is national development that fundamentally drives broad improvements in human welfare.
• 2 Managing a Contentious World: Cooperation, Inclusion, Process Legitimacy: Twenty-first-century development as the leading edge of humanity’s 100,000-year journey (out of Africa), made possible by an array of unique social institutions. For most of this history, however, human welfare remained low and stagnant; this changed only when levels of productivity radically improved across society, a result of unwitting initiatives to routinize material “improvement,” constrain elite power, and provide universal support to society’s most vulnerable members. These initiatives, launched 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, put in motion contentious transformational processes that continue to this day.
• 3 Building a Better World: Why Some Problems Are So Much Harder than Others: The development process increases the scale and complexity of economic, social, political, and administrative life. Succeeding at these tasks merely creates the next round of more complex challenges; failing generates cynicism, frustration, and despair. The solutions to some of these problems are known or knowable, but many – such as building the rule of law – are not; the problems need to be resolved anew by each generation, in each context. Our prevailing aid architecture was not designed to address such problems, which will only intensify in the coming decades.
• 4 Engaging an Increasingly Complex World: From What We Have to What We Need: For all its inherent limits and numerous flaws, the liberal international order is a modern marvel, a legacy bequeathed to us that has yielded historically unrivaled peace and shared prosperity. Even so, we need to show the same bravery, courage, and commitment of our predecessors to forge new approaches harnessing twenty-first-century technologies and sensibilities for twenty-first-century problems. Discerning how to live together, despite all our differences, remains (as it has always been) humanity’s greatest challenge – and opportunity.
• Epilogue: Putting Your Time, Talents, and Treasure to Work (for Others): We live in an interdependent world; few of us grow our own food, make our own clothes, build our own houses, supply our own energy, or protect our own communities. Others do these things for us; in exchange, we offer up instead our particular skills and resources. Whether seeking a full-time career in the development business, or committing one’s spare time to causes of concern, or just seeking to be more informed about global affairs, it is recognition of our deep interdependence that should inspire us to give back, to offer up, to pay forward.
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement