International Development

A Global Perspective on Theory and Practice

Paul Battersby, Ravi Roy, Paul Battersby, Ravi Roy

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526421715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can we lay the foundation for a more just and peaceful world? How can we prevent communications from fracturing and societies from tearing themselves apart? How should we prioritise economic, social and cultural demands for resources and opportunities?

This book answers these questions, and presents a view of development 'in practice'. Written by experts in the field, the book covers a range of contemporary developments, as well as providing coverage of the theory and practice of international development.

The book:

· Covers a range of contemporary topics such as global security, new technologies, ethics and learning and participation

· Has chapters on Global Health and Development in Practice, Environmentally Sustainable Development in Practice and Corruption and Development

· Features learning objectives, summaries, reading lists and questions for discussion

· Works as a practice-driven text packed with case studies

Global in perspective and full of everything you need to know, this is your go-to book for your studies in International Development.

1 Globalization and Global Development Practice

Paul Battersby

Ravi K. Roy

Introduction

How can we create new models of practice that will help us to build a more just and peaceful global world? In a time of rapid and unpredictable change, how can we prevent communities from fracturing and societies from tearing themselves apart? How should we prioritize economic, social and cultural demands for resources and opportunities? Innovatively, this book explores responses to these questions by adopting practice-oriented and practitioner-first perspective. ‘Development’ remains a fiercely contested idea and yet development, as a professional endeavour, is dynamic and expanding in scope. Distinctively, this book conceives ‘global development’ holistically as something constituted by the myriad aspirations, social circumstances, happenings, and daily routines of people grappling with the consequences of globalization in localities across the globe. It does not presume a single model of practice; rather, it envisages interconnected fields of social action evidencing complementary, competing and contradictory priorities. This ‘globality’ we argue demands a new mindset – new ‘mental models’ – and a new set of ‘global’ thinking skills. Globalization is thus employed as the principal connecting idea, and framework for analysis and action, because it is sufficiently broad to capture the cross-sectoral and trans-disciplinary qualities of ‘development practice’.

Modern development challenges are increasingly framed in global terms, with globalization cited as the imperative for intervention (Annan, 2000; Ki-moon, 2014). These challenges are multifaceted, multi-level and multi-sector, and hence today’s development professional must assimilate to a lengthening list of issues and agendas that span multiple knowledge domains, regardless of organizational role or geographical location. Importantly, development practitioners are also agents of globalization as they are actors caught in a world of rapid and unpredictable change. As bearers of ideas and values, development workers can influence in subtle ways the private and public norms that govern the strategies and means by which organizational priorities are pursued. As humanitarian advocates, they play a part in defining, through practice and debate, international rules governing aid allocations, armed humanitarian interventions, the treatment of refugees, and the management of liberal globalization. As educators and mediators, they can shift the ways in which development work is perceived and approached to, in terms of ‘best’ or ‘sustainable practice’, include the voices of intended beneficiaries. This highly diverse field of social action both generates and diffuses global norms, pertaining to social and economic progress, justice, human rights and the rule of law. As the contributors to this collection make explicit, sensitivity to the normative context of practice is essential if development is to be sustainable, anywhere.

Globalization and Development

Globalization is a multidimensional phenomenon that encompasses, writes Roland Robertson, the material ‘compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (1992: 8). Indeed, the increasing range and frequency of development interventions reflects as much the globalization of public concern for human welfare (subject to periodic ‘compassion fatigue’) as it does the proliferation of interventionist state, intergovernmental and non-state development actors. Conceived as a set of dynamic and interrelated processes of social, economic, technological and cultural change, globalization is most commonly associated with instantaneous communication, shrinking travel times to distant destinations, rising trade interconnectedness, footloose capital and global consumer markets. Globalization both accentuates the connections between peoples and states in the developed and the developing world and accelerates the global impact of local events from natural disasters to financial meltdowns. We are living in a world of intensifying ‘disjuncture’, where structured linear explanations of change are no longer adequate, if they ever were, because this multiplicity renders organized social action more complex, both in terms of the range of motivations, alternatives, and possible aberrant consequences that could arise from a single step (Appadurai, 1990, 1996). Few can escape or evade the implications of these transformations for thought and practice.

Development, in its contemporary sense, is conceived as something that is ‘done to’ people in need of improvement or benevolent assistance. Conventionally, development work is imagined to occur at the margins of globalization, where peoples are presumed to desire, but have not yet secured, the means to prosper in a market society. Indeed, popular notions of development crystallize around images of assistance rendered to those living in conditions of poverty, or in conflict zones, or to those affected by environmental catastrophe. Outcomes are demonstrably unequal, which leads critical scholars and practitioners to seek to ‘empower’ the voiceless, by exposing and then challenging existing global power structures. Prescriptions range from the wholesale reordering of global society through a resurgence of popular democratic politics, to the more incremental development of human capacities through education, economic opportunity. Post-colonial and feminist critiques of global order stress the dominance of Western and ‘masculinist’ discourses in the upper echelons of global (and still) largely male executive authority (Enloe, 1990, 2007). The unequal and resilient disposition of power and wealth in the global system, however, means that aspirations for universal justice remain largely unrealized.

A global approach enables us to navigate between the many different and distant grid reference points that define this terrain of contested development, from the power centres of the ‘global North’ to the remote edges of the ‘global South’.¹ Global history brings to the foreground the long trajectories of change that shape present dispositions. The institutional and ideological foundations of official development were laid in the aftermath of the Second World War. The United Nations System, which includes the Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (after 1994, the World Trade Organization or WTO), offered a blueprint for international order. ‘Social progress and better standards of life’ were bound conceptually to ‘international peace and security’ in the wording of the UN Charter, 1945. The authorship of this current phase of development as broad-ranging technical assistance to an ‘underdeveloped’ and decolonizing world is widely attributed to US President Harry S. Truman (Truman, 1949; Schafer et al., 2009: 5). Yet, Truman’s prescriptions were a logical extension of aspirations shared by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose last, if ‘undelivered’ address, stressed the urgent need for a new ‘science of human relationships’ to put an end to ‘the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed’ that led to the cataclysm of war (Roosevelt, 1945).

¹ These political-geographical terms appear with varying forms of capitalisation, as global North and global South or without any capitalization. The terms global North and global South are used throughout for consistency to distinguish between industrially developed and affluent societies, largely in Western Europe, North America and industrialized Asia, and developing societies in Asia and Africa.

The institutionalization of international development undoubtedly complemented the aims of US post-war foreign policy, which included the geographic and economic expansion in capitalist-oriented as opposed to socialist-style development. While the most senior positions within the United Nations have been held by professional diplomats from Africa, Asia and Latin America, northern dominance persists in the ways in which power is structured and exercised within the UN system, which includes the Bretton Woods Institutions, albeit with some recalibrations in the latter to accommodate the rise of the so-called BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Official interventions are planned with a mixture of social altruism and strategic and commercial self-interest. Foreign aid budgets are, after all, instruments of state foreign policy, justified to taxpayers as being vital to the pursuit of national interests abroad. At the intersections of policy and practice, however, individual agents of official development can accord a higher priority to their social role as opposed to their overarching organizational mission.

The development ‘profession’ accommodates policy and programme officials from the development ‘establishment’ – the United Nations, the World Bank and associated regional multilateral banks, and regional institutions such as the European Union, and government officials working for state-level institutions. Development assistance is widely perceived as a central function of governments and intergovernmental agencies. Yet, there are significant limits to the willingness of governments and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) to fund global welfare gaps, and to listen and learn. The category ‘development practitioner’ thus necessarily encompasses those who work in and for the myriad non-governmental organizations (NGOs), orientated to development, humanitarian assistance or both, and which continue to grow in number. It is the non-state sector that has historically led the way in providing aid to people that governments choose to ignore or who are afflicted by natural and human-made disasters, especially conflict. Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, World Vision, are global actors and frequently among the international ‘first responders’ when a humanitarian crisis erupts. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which is neither a state nor a non-state actor but a hybrid global humanitarian entity, pre-dates the UN by nearly a century in providing humanitarian care to those caught up in the horror of war. Bridging the differences in organizational forms, norms and missions between state and non-state actors often requires careful diplomacy. Managing, or more precisely, negotiating assistance efforts where, in an ideal case, national government bodies, intergovernmental agencies and local communities seek a broad collaborative approach, is a complex task requiring sophisticated professional skills.

New generations of development workers grew up in newly independent countries created through successive waves of decolonization in Asia and Africa. Their professional training was informed by developmentalist ideas received through domestic or international educational experiences in an era where education and technical assistance formed the substance of human development programming. Working with international aid agencies, or starting local NGOs in cooperation with developed country donors, partners and benefactors, global South NGOs today vastly outnumber their Northern counterparts. The microfinance pioneer, the Grameen Bank, is one of the better-known southern development transnationals that applies principles of market finance to enable the disadvantaged. This expansive pattern of inclusion extends, at the micro-level, to the involvement of local community leaders recruited by the development establishment to help translate social development policies and multiply social gains from welfare spending. Movements for social and political change draw upon th...