Some questions to ponder:

What is development?

• A state? A process? Assistance? What does it try to do? Raise living standards? Push for equality? Empower the poor? Facilitate world trade? Is it economic, cultural, political, military, social, psychological, etc.?
• What values come with the term? Is the process unidirectional? Who are the role models?
• What are some of the assumptions that accompany development?

Why do we have development?

• To help the poor of the world?
• What were our motives?
  • Self interest? (world food aid is often designed to address agricultural overproduction that depresses prices for major cash crops produced in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. Also, these nations needed trading partners)
  • Geopolitical? (oil? Cold War and non-aligned states, and saving the world from communism or capitalism?)
  • Altruism? (the Marshall Plan? Did countries do this out of the goodness of their hearts? Certainly many committed individuals feel strongly about the altruistic dimension of development)
  • Guilt? (legacy of Colonialism)
  • Probably a mix of all of these (but not necessarily in the same individuals ....)

Is development designed to address global inequalities?

• Is it just the global analog of the welfare state (think of public assistance in the U.S., which is at least nominally designed to help the needy and economically distressed);
• Development is in many ways global welfare-a transfer of wealth from richer to poorer countries
  • Obviously it's more complicated than any country's welfare system, because the actors are countries
  • Who are the actors? nation-states, organizations (NGOs, or non-governmental organizations, PVOs or private volunteer organizations), bi- and multi-lateral (bi- is from one country to another, multi- implies several countries coordinating assistance), private/public/non-profit
• Keep in mind, however--that the popular definition of welfare as an enterprise to help the poor with wealth transfers masks the many ways in which wealthy groups receive transfers of public money (we often call this corporate welfare). On a global scale, who does free trade really benefit? The poor countries that get the factories, the wealthy nation consumers who get the cheap goods, or the corporations who get cheap labor, higher profits, and more markets?

Why is there global inequality?

• Individualist explanations-countries are responsible for their own lots--it's their own faults. We often use this same individualist ideology to explain poverty domestically--people are poor because of some character flaw, and people are wealthy because they've earned it. Reality is much much muddier, and more structural, as the discussions about colonialism and the Cold War hopefully have conveyed.
• Corruption--plenty of this to go around, in most every country, but especially in some of the post-colonial, non-democratic states classified as 'low development.'
• Darwinian argument--the survival of the fittest--similar to the above point. The countries that made it to the top of the food chain earned it (but usally they 'earned' it through the exercise of coercive power)
• There are severe power, culture differentials in the world. Colonialism embodies this--some countries took technologies and used them to colonize; others did not manifest that violent expansionism.
• There is a valid argument to be made that, in part anyway, the history of development is the history of underdevelopment--industrialized countries 'developed' at the expense of those societies they exploited in the process (Griffin's thesis)

How has development come to be practiced?

• Historically-assumptions are that development is economic, structural, replicable, measured in the aggregate, and mainly having to do with technology transfer (remember the POET model ...)
• There is a mixture of bi- and multi-lateral activity, among various types of organizations
• Politically-the Cold War and non-aligned states were fought over--often times it was more important to have a ruthless despot in power, as long as he was your ruthless despot, that a leader who wanted to chart an independent course for his/her country (Ghandi, for example). Imposing the nation-state structure on societies that had often been tribal at most, gave power to certain groups, who were able to wield that power because of the military aid of their 1st or 2nd world benefactors.

Has development had an effect on global inequality?

• Hard to say-there are lots of forces at work (economic, political, natural, social, etc.). Development is just one of many--there is globalization of the economy, spread of pop culture, militarization and terrorism, etc.
• Inequalities have deepened-It's probably not a coincidence that this has been accompanied by increased free trade, neo-colonialism and the rise of multinationals
• Circle of corruption-public money and private wealth accumulation. Many leaders in the third world took public money from bilateral development, turned around and put it into their private Swiss Bank accounts. Hence the huge levels of debt that developing countries have accumulated.
• Resource extraction and sustainable development. Is this a problem? Ask yourself how we manage to conserve land and resources here in the states? Could we 'lock up' forests if Weyerhauser couldn't go to Indonesia and log? Who gets the rights to log, and who benefits? Would we expect resource extraction methods to be sustainable in poor countries?
• Gender-biased development--we're getting there, slowly
  • Colonials were often working off erroneous assumptions about household power, household unity and who benefits from additional inputs and assistance, gender division of labor, etc.
  • 'Development' projects in many cases have actually hurt women. For example, commercial farming campaigns--hopefully you have a feel for this type of technology transfer and why it has been a model of development--has in many cases, especially in Africa, facilitated the transformation of labor division and turned many women farmers into unpaid laborers on their husbands' land.

Development assumptions:

• Economic (measured in GNP, GDP)--it's mostly about raising living standards. A job, no matter what kind of job, that raises average incomes, even cleaning out open sewers, would by this standard be considered development.
• Replicable: demographic transition, agrarian transformation--we can repeat it if we simply follow the formula (i.e., the economic theory)
• Structural (transforming the economy, not just making more)--refer back to the agricultural transformation.
• Technology transfer as the key
• Aggregate: we measure the total size of the pie, not how it's distributed
• Benevolent concept, process

Problems with that?

• It can fosters greater dependence on other economies, natural resources (petroleum, need for foreign currency to purchase the inported inputs necessary to pursue the industrial development model)
• Promotes subservience to the market (food security issues vs cash crops)--cash economies require income.
• Cultural changes (relations to property, livelihoods)--remember what can happen with what appears to be a simple technology transfer.
• Erroneous assumptions about replicating history. Europeans emigrated in the 15th century to Latin America, and in the early 20th century to the U.S. Without these outlets, economic depression might have produced a different outcome in the 20th century. There are no more frontiers, and industrial countries are tightening immigration laws)
• Neglects real development, people's lives and livelihoods, focusing on size of pie, not number and size of slices - e.g., is the current contribution of groups reflected in their perceived role in development? For women, the answer is no. Relative to their economic productivity, they receive inadequate resources.