Freedom to Aspire

Development is dead. I’m trying to be a good academic and cite everything I quote, but I can’t remember who said that, or, in fact, if anyone put it quite that way. But around the late 80s and early 90s at a time in Development history called, optimistically, the Impasse, that was the consensus of many. Someone else has commented that development studies nearly didn’t make it into the 21st Century. There’s even a development school known as post-Development. They basically say that Development should be stopped altogether. But the next question is: then what?

And why do I spell Development with a capital D? By Development, I mean the large-scale international effort by rich countries to help poor countries get to where the rich countries are in terms of GDP, industrialization, material standard of living, etc. Development has been a massive project, starting, effectively, after WWII with the Marshall Plan. The US injected (development studies loves the word injected, usually coupled with the word ‘cash’ as I will do after this next parenthesis) cash into the European and Japanese economies. The amount of cash was staggering. The US did it for two reasons, because they felt bad for nearly obliterating Japan and bombing the hell out of (or maybe into) Germany and (I think more importantly) because they knew that if Europe did not recover economically, neither would the US.

With the Marshall Plan, money seemed to be the answer. With so much cash injected at once (a tactic known as the ‘Big Push’, a term coined, I believe, by Walt William Rostow) the economy would slowly recover, until it reached a ‘take-off’ point at which time much less outside money would needed and the economy would grow under its own steam. This appeared to work in Europe and Japan in the 40s and 50s. And it failed miserably in Iraq (of late). My analysis: if a doctor loses his clinic in a fire and you build him another one, his practice will be up and running in no time. If you go to a poor person in rural Ghana who survives on subsistence agriculture and build him the same clinic, a medical practice will not magically appear.

That’s Development, trying to find scientific formulas to generate economic growth, measured by GDP increase. What about development? 'Small d' development has been defined as freedom (Amartya Sen1999) as the achievement of human rights or human justice. Paulo Freire talks about education (in many ways the core process for development) as a process of awakening an understanding of our own capacity to change our circumstances. These ideas fit with Kurt’s ideas about life, liberty and the freedom to share these things. I agree. And I want to take the idea of freedom one level deeper. Development as freedom is about nurturing the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004). To turn that into a question: can we (professionals) be involved in facilitating a long-term process of building the capacity of poor people to realize their aspirations?

Our role as professionals is not to suggest an answer or a project, or even to suggest aspirations, but to avail ourselves to the poor as a tool to help them overcome the relationships and structures of power that keep them poor. If we can do this and see development as a long term, risk-laden, learning-by-doing process and not as a project, we might just be of some use. That’s from the bottom up. I believe things have to happen from the top down as well. Governments need to reform, income needs to be spread out, good institutions need to be built to protect property rights and stand for justice. But those reforms alone will not help the poor help themselves.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:

Appadurai, A. (2004) The Capacity to Aspire: Culture in Terms of Recognition, World Bank, Stanford University Press (I apologize that full citation details are not available).

Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.