Development as if People Mattered

Since finishing my papers (last week) I’ve gotten back into reading E. F. Schumacher’s (1973) “Small is Beautiful:  A Study of Economics as if People Mattered”. I highly recommend this book to any of you. This is the first in a multi-part series of posts that Kurt and I plan to write in response to this book, because we are both committed to thinking about development as if people mattered.

 

For me, Schumacher’s most compelling thoughts are on the subject of education (1973:64-83). Granted, I’m only half way through the book. Education, has he saw it in industrialized countries in the 70s, whether in the natural sciences or the humanities fails not because of over-specialization, but because it fails to enable students to form clear convictions about the metaphysical implications of what they are studying. At this point, a longer quotation is justified to explain this idea:

“All subjects, no matter how specialized, are connected with a centre...constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us.  In other words, the centre consists of metaphysics and ethics, of ideas that – whether we like it or not- transcend the world of fact[s] [and] cannot be proved or disproved by ordinary scientific method. But that does not mean that they are purely ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’[.] They must be true to reality...an apparent paradox to our positivistic thinkers[.] Education can help us only if it produces ‘whole men’ [...one] who will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of life”(1973:77).

Why, in Schumacher’s view is it critical that education allow us to develop a value framework around our convictions about the purpose and meaning of life? Isn’t this viewed by some as a potentially dangerous thing, to hold convictions about the meaning of life or particular values? Shouldn’t these be kept to one’s self?  Indeed, it can be very problematic and harmful if one tries to manipulate facts and the world around him to fit a formulaic value system. But that is not what Schumacher is saying.  Value systems cannot be translated into rules and formulae to be passed on without reference to how life is lived.

Schumacher stresses the need, in education, to differentiate between ‘convergent’ and ‘divergent’ problems. Convergent problems can be solved by logical reasoning, such as many problems dealt with in the natural sciences.  Divergent problems defy logical reasoning.  These include problems faced in the context of “politics, economics, education, marriage, etc.”(81). While convergent problems lend themselves to fully transferrable, formulaic solutions, solutions to divergent problems involve reconciling seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

So let’s briefly examine a divergent problem.  I propose that one such problem is summed up in the question: why do some people stay poor?. There is a related question: “how can chronically poor people contest their poverty”? Development without a human face, like the economics without a human face that Schumacher opposes, treats these questions as convergent. Development without a human face develops formulae for poverty reduction.  For example, more aggregate economic growth will help [everyone] escape poverty. Schumacher argues that when convergent solutions are offered for divergent problems, the solution is always limited if not disastrous, because these types of solutions necessarily ignore one of the irreconcilable opposites inherent in divergent problems.

Living out solutions to divergent problems, such as the problem of chronic poverty, involves the very basic learning cycle of conjecture and refutation (Appadurai 2004). Conjecture is like stating an hypothesis. Acting on that hypothesis may result in refutation, the realization that what you’re trying doesn’t work the way you thought it would. What happens next, if you are fortunate enough to have the resources to do it, is you adjust your hypothesis and try again. And by repetition of this cycle, in the context of an enabling environment, you learn.  This should be intuitive if we think of how a child learns to do all kinds of things in life – indeed, how we as adults continue to learn about how to relate to other people, how to influence them, how to create consensus, how to make peace, how to nurture others. 

Going back to the example of Slum Dwellers International, I have read how their methods for contesting conditions of chronic poverty involve an outside NGO supporting the poor in this kind of trial and error learning (Patel 2004). This living process of living and learning promotes the development of a value system by the poor and enables a slow, organic praxis (the process of testing out ideas) through which the divergent problems of relationship, unequal politics and prejudice are gradually solved. This is development as if people mattered.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:

Appadurai, A. (2004) 'The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition' in Culture and Public Action, Vijayendra  R. & Walton, M. (eds), Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 61–84.

Patel, S. (2004) 'Tools and methods for empowerment developed by slum dwellers federations in India', Participatory Learning and Action 50, IIED, London.

Schumacher, E. F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, Penguin, London.

Power, Knowledge and Subversive acts of the Poor

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is someone that comes up all the time in my readings around development.  This was particularly true in readings around the idea of participation.  Participation has been a buzzword in international development for around 30 years.  Now, with the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy project, participation, in a sense, is mainstream. Getting the poor involved in Development is the latest fashion.

So what does all this have to do with a famous French philosopher, the smiling, bald dude in the photo (right)? I have hardly read any of his writing (one lecture of his, to be exact), but I've read a lot more about his ideas. Essentially, Foucault is quoted with regard to the relationship between power and knowledge and how this is played out in Development.

Here's my faltering attempt to summarize what I know on this subject.  Knowledge is often created through relationships, discourses and the repetition of ideas. Relationships include norms of behaviour, certain expectations and often, a certain hierarchy.  These are not pre-ordained by an objectively true social order, they come about in the context of that relationship and they form knowledge about that relationship. The relationship reinforces that knowledge. Knowledge that is created in that relationship usually reflects the distribution of power in that relationship.  Both parties understand themselves in the context of the knowledge created by that relationship.  Unless new knowledge is created, countering the established knowledge, it is very difficult to change the power distribution of that relationship. Make sense? Okay, maybe not, so let me try to provide an example from development studies.

Poor people in an urban setting, illegally build shelters in what becomes a slum.  These people have very little voice or power in society and they are already on the wrong side of the law. So the government comes along with an order to evict everyone and destroy their shelters to make way for an airport runway extension, for example. Intuitively we know that the government has more power than the poor slum dweller.  In fact, we might see the slum-dweller as uneducated, incompetent and even in the way of progress.  And we know, without a doubt that the slum-dweller is illegally occupying land and therefore has no right to be there anyway. But stepping back, we might observe that what we believe to be true about the slum dweller is in fact based on knowledge constructed through the relationship between the more powerful party, the government and the less powerful party, the slum-dweller. Maybe the slum-dweller has the capacity to be a productive member of society, to build his or her own shelter, save money, and even tackle other infrastructure issues in the slum. Maybe the law that says the slum-dweller has no right to establish a shelter on that piece of land is a law that needs to be contested, a carry-over from another time, or even another political system.

That's not the best example, perhaps.  But it's my attempt to describe the kinds of knowledge that SDI (see my last post) is helping slum dwellers to contest, through the creation of new knowledge.  The processes that SDI and its affiliates use revolve around supporting the poor in the creation of new knowledge and in doing so, contest the prevailing knowledge and power structures that make it almost impossible to establish security of shelter and greater political voice. The tools that the slum dwellers use are simple, painstaking, slow and subversive (Patel 2004).  They get under the skin of those in power. These tools include settlement surveys (the creation of knowledge about how many people there are, where they live, what they do, etc.) conducted by the slum dwellers themselves and house-building demonstrations. Underpinning these and many other tools, is the community-building exercise of saving.  Poor people, organizing together to save regularly and in doing so, build trust, develop community and prove they are capable of managing money and, together, bigger projects - defying the embedded knowledge about poverty.

The primary criticism of the Development industry is that it fails miserably to understand and engage with structures of power and knowledge at all levels (local, national and global). In other words, mainstream Development interventions avoid political realities on the ground. James Ferguson, an anthropologist working in Lesotho in the 90s called Development the "anti-politics machine"(1994).  This is not to say that Development has an underlying agenda to ignore politics, just that the way that it operates cannot engage with politics (Li 2007). But the poor can.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:
Ferguson, J. (1994) The Anti-politics Machine. "Development," Depoliticization, and Bereaucratic Power in Lesotho, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Li, Tania Murray (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, Duke University Press, Durham.

Patel, S. (2004) Tools and methods for empowerment developed by slum dwellers federations in India, Particpatory Learning and Action, 50, IIED, London.

Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction

It's Monday morning and I'm at a computer in the library, about to get back to my paper for my module: Conflict Analysis. But I'm going to write this post first.  It's about my course of study, like Kurt, letting you know what I've actually been up to.

I'm enrolled in a 1 year Master's (MA) program (or course, as they say here - it's all very confusing for North American's like me) at the University of Manchester (Manchester, UK). I'm just completing term 1.  Classes started on Sept. 27 and ended (for me) last week.  The assessments for my classes (or modules) this term are all 3000 word essays - no exams. So that's what I'm working hard on now, trying to get the bulk of the 4 essays done before New Years so I can have a bit of a holiday with my wife's family. 3 of the 4 essays are due on January 5, 2011.  Then I have a whole month off before term 2 begins.

So, back to my course of study. When I orginally applied, I chose a pathway (within the MA International Development course) called "Economics and Management of Rural Development". Over the course of the induction week (induction always makes me think of a certain process to get babies out more quickly, but here it means "introduction"), I realized that the courses/modules that really grabed my attention were all part of a pathway called "Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction". So I switched.

I registered for the full load of four modules:

1. Conflict Analysis - an overview of theories that have been developed to explain why conflict (we focused primarily on international or inter-ethnic conflict) occurs. This is not a standard Development module.  It doesn't deal directly with questions of poverty reduction or economic development.  But it's fascinating in terms of thinking about why conflict occurs and, especially, why conflict is prolonged and how conflict affects development. Theories we've looked at include: structural violence - the idea that economic or social structures that limit peoples freedoms constitute a form of violence; greed and grievence - the ideas that people are motived to be violent out of greed or out of a sense of deprivation; and the impact of history and culture on violent conflict - that's what my paper is about.

2. Poverty and Development - a study of poverty and the relatively new poverty agenda in development, whereby poverty reduction has become a primary focus (at least on paper).  In the past, Development has focused largely on stimulating macroeconomic growth in developing countries, assuming that poverty reduction would follow 'naturally'. Here my paper will look at the extent to which the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategies acknowledge issues of exclusion.  In other words, does this new poverty-focused aid vehicle really help to include the very poorest and marginalized who are often excluded from the benefits of economic growth.

3. Perspectives on Development - a broad overview of the history of Development and of major development theories. Interesting, but fairly general.

4. Citizen-led Development - the most interesting of the four courses - looking at development as opposed to Development and how citizen-led groups in poor countries (or the global South) are making a big difference for themselves.  Participation has been a buzzword in Development for the last 40 years or so and has taken on all kinds of faces.  It's based on the idea that Development needs to include the voice and knowledge of the people it's trying to develop.  By 2000, a book came out calling participation "the new tyranny" and all but called for stopping participatory approaches all together, claiming (with some merit) that participatory approaches were doing more harm than good, that they were simply another way of co-opting the poor into a Western-led project for macroeconomic development and market liberlization.  My paper looks at how one citizen-led group, SDI, overcomes a lot of these problems.

This has definitely been an eye-opening 3 months for me. And I'm convinced that Manchester is a great place to be studying this.  Lot's of current development thinking comes straight out of this university. I feel like I'm studying in the context of the really important debates that are on-going.  And, as I've alluded to in past posts, I feel like my ideas about what my own role in development could be are crystalizing. Like Kurt, I see, more than ever, the need for dramatic change in the rich countries in terms of social norms about energy consumption and also about global poverty. Something has to change and change soon.  But I'm also even more committed to the idea of working in development on the ground and trying to be an agent of change, perhaps more in the organizations that I work for than in the context of the people I might work with.

Jordan (Manchester)