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Re-examining Development Debates: Concepts, Strategies and Processes 11th Annual Conference of India
Posted Date: 01 Nov 2007 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: General
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Posted By: Bala Member Level: Diamond
Rating:  Points: 3
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Re-examining Development Debates: Concepts, Strategies and Processes
11th Annual Conference of Indian Political Economy Association
2nd & 3rd November, 2007
Jointly organized by Indian Political Economy Association (IPEA)
&Department of Commerce & Business Management,Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar
Dear Sir/Madam,
You may be glad to know that 11th Annual Conference of Indian Political Economy Association is being organized jointly by the Indian Political Economy Association and Department of Commerce & Business Management, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar on 2nd and 3rd November, 2007. The theme of the Conference is Re-examining Development Debates: Concepts, Strategies and Processes.
Looking forward to welcome you.
Yours sincerely,
Prof. Amarjit Singh Sidhu
Coordinator
Head, Department of Commerce & Business Management,
Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar– 143 005
(Registration Fees: For IPEA Members Rs. 400.00 and spouse Rs. 350.00. For non-members Rs. 500.00. For non Amritsar cheques please add Rs. 25.00)
Contact:
Prof. V. Upadhyay
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Delhi
Hauz Khas, New Delhi – 110 016
Tel. No.: 26591375 (O); 09871433606
E-mail: vrajaindrau@hotmail.com; ipea.india@yahoo.co.in
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Responses
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| Author: Bala 01 Nov 2007 | Member Level: Diamond Points : 5 | Discussion Note
Re-examining Development Debates: Concepts, Strategies and Processes
The 11th Annual Conference of the Indian Political Economy Association
The post-Second World War dominant discourse on economic development started off by defining development in quantitatively measurable senses (Gross Domestic Product, GDP and per capita GDP) that were claimed to be universally valid and relevant at the national as well as regional and micro levels. The former colonial powers were among the lead agencies /actors who advocated and succeeded in making the third world countries adopt this concept and associated theoretical baggage under the auspices of the UNO and its several development decades. This procedure made the emerging development discourse look like a truly joint product of the comity of nations and gave it an aura of general validity, universal relevance and acceptance and endowed it with the capability of promoting the interests of the world community in general and the poor, underdeveloped countries in particular.
Development identified with economic development and the associated high level of living, was from the very beginning understood in an international comparative perspective. It seemed almost the sole criterion that determined the degree of modernisation in terms of application of science, technology and reason to national social and economic affairs. However, the global comparative perspective was concretised essentially ahistorically and one-dimensionally.
The whole exercise was done ignoring the major historical processes associated with long periods of oppressive and exploitative colonial rule, which shaped international relationships even in the era when direct colonial control over many of the third world nations had ended immediately after the World War II.
A large number of critical features like the differentiation in the domestic economy and society, the role played by the colonial period elites and their character and relationship with the rest of society, the ruinous impact on the super structure, the impact of de-industrialisation on the TWCs, were not taken as elements of the crisis and abysmal conditions to which the TWCs were driven.
It appears that instead of basing on and deriving some useful theoretical and practical insights and from the specific conditions in their mutual relationships and historical antecedents of the TWCs, the mainstream development theory became an arena to apply the concepts, principles and insights of the macro and micro mainstream, neo-classical and Keynesian economic theories to conditions of agricultural economies struck in low and near stagnant per capita income grooves. The purpose seemed to be to explore how these countries could be made to successfully imitate the patterns, processes of the rich and mature industrialised countries so as to approximate their levels of per capita incomes and stages of growth and could sustain these processes and the associated contributing institutional ensemble of market economies in an open economy framework.
It is clear that this approach to increasing the rate of growth of income, especially in the form of goods of industrial origin, supposed to be for purposes of raising per capita income and raising the living standards of the poor countries did not take in to account the pattern or the nature of goods and services, their location and relationship with the traditional sets of activities. In this thinking what was especially ignored was the question of the non-suitability, non-affordability or non-sustainability of an imitative product-mix. As a result the emerging mainstream development approaches failed to emphasise the criticality of the low-income or livelihood goods capable of raising the standard of living of the people who lacked even the very basic minimum necessities of existence and survival. The same was the fate of questions concerning the desirability and environmental impact of the new pattern of production consumption inherent in the imitative, catching-up industrialization process as the key to development.
| | Author: Bala 01 Nov 2007 | Member Level: Diamond Points : 5 | What can be seen from the above is that development was viewed in economic terms, in terms of per capita and aggregate national income, with growing weight of industrial goods, had a comparative international perspective and that its normative focus on the economic and materialistic terms (availability of a bundle of goods and services as defining the standard and thus the quality of life) and was individualistic (in the sense that it was the income produced by or available to an individual or the capability to produce and avail of income so understood that was taken to be the critical variable determining the development status and prospects of an individual). The average levels in these respects were treated as representative portrayals of the overall national situation, ignoring the prevailing inequiteous distribution of income or assets (or of opportunities or capabilities)
It is true that development need not be visualised in terms of a thoroughgoing socio-economic transformation as development and a social revolution need not be the same thing. Is the contrary position leading to exclusion and denial of the right to development to the majority of the people, the essence of development?
In so far as per capita incomes of different countries were treated as measurable on the basis of a common understanding and approval of the implicit value-structure across time, space and political boundaries or cultures, it appears that development embodied a universally accepted set of normative preferences and values. Such a one dimensional, universal view of human societies is totally unrealistic as cultural diversity and many-facetedness or multidimensionality or pluralistic values of different societies is a fact of life as we see around ourselves.
The dominant development discourse seemed to maintain that giving highest priority to the material needs capable of satisfaction by the market processes is the agenda of development. But, in effect, it tended to ignore the pluralistic normative dimensions of development.
Beginning in the early 1970s severe difficulties and contradictions were facing the rich industrialised countries. Despite their unprecedented growth with relative stability and continued leading position in the world economy, owing to the rising bargaining power of the working class arising from near full employment conditions, intensifying fiscal crisis of the state and reduced investment opportunities and rates of return of the late 1960s, the industrialised countries were in the throes of a change of course that tended to tilt in the direction of reinvigorated conservatism and movement away from social market.
The rich countries, the academic establishment controlled by them and the international development finance institutions spearheaded what came to be known as the counter revolution in development theory that later flowered in to the Washington Consensus, advocating a one-recipe-fits-all approach of structural adjustment by means of reviving the market orthodoxy that had but only a fringe presence in the immediate post-war years.. However, some of the theoretical foundations of the revived market-led, open borders approach in terms of the neo-liberalism were found to be rather infirm. Hence a corrective framework was sought to be created within the framework of the school and came to be known as the new political economy of development and worked in terms of information asymmetries, expectations, institutions, governance, etc, amounting, in effect, to various techno-economic, managerial, nuts and bolts correctives A related face-saving approach, realising the failure of the trickle-down processes to become operative, took the form of supplementing the traditional dominant development discourse by means of what may be called MacNamara- Mahbub-ul-Haque approach of initiating different kinds of anti-poverty or poverty-alleviation programmes, i.e. some kind of pull-up processes to energies and supplement the weak or inoperative market-based trickle-down processes.
Parallel to the conservative trends in mainstream, dominant development discourse as discussed above, there also appeared by the beginning of the 1970s, strident and well-reasoned voices of concern and criticism against the theories of economic development. These critical voices reflected the widespread dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the outcomes produced by the application in man different forms and to varying extents of the dominant development theories.
A number of alternative approaches that amounted to reworking the entire development discourse working on the basis of several comprehensive concepts of development as the manifestation of some of the visions of a just, fulfilling and desirable social existence for either the majority of or the entire population living in certain inter-linked localities/regions or nations who were not taken on board the development juggernaut and thus were denied just and fair participation and sharing of the goodies of all that was done in the name of development and consequently were burdened with the financial, real and short-run and long-run (including environmental) costs of the project third world, catching up development.
The range of these critiques and alternatives was quite wide, starting from what constitutes development to almost every aspect of the on-going processes of social change in the broad sense of the term. Many of these alternatives stressed the emerging reality of the North-South relationship and the new debt-bondage that began to grip the thinking, policy processes and social development directions of the poor countries. Important and powerful among these were the works of the dependency theorists that tended to focus mainly on the Latin American experience.
A related phenomenon was that of the Green critiques who underlined the ferocious depletion of and damage caused to the environment. Grave concerns are being expressed about global warming due to emission of carbon-dioxide and other green house gases into the atmosphere, destruction of ozone layer, loss of bio-diversity, rising rate or species extinctions, deforestation and the depletion of non-renewable resources. The ecological crises are the result of destructive uncontrollability of the present development path, which is threatening the very survival of life on earth, as we know it. Ecologists insist that there is now clear evidence that shows that global warming and other crucial environmental problems have crossed critical thresholds and that there is now very little chance of averting ecological disaster.
Thus we are witness to some very devastating and powerful critiques of the dominant development economics, strong on theoretical, empirical and historical grounds as also in terms of the breadth, minutae and realism at the same time and with a promise of generating alternative, plural frameworks. During the last two or three decades various alternative development theories a number of really comprehensive and multi-dimensional character have been attempting to positively and sensitively responds to the needs, aspirations and rights of the victims of the mal-development paths.. Many such ideas are coming to the fore to enrich, deepen and sensitize the understanding of the TWCs processes and problems.. Still, they seem to be leaving out some major questions unattended or partly attended as to how to mainstream and operationalise the new insights in co-ordinated and effective ways in order to end the hegemony and real life influence of the Gods that failed.
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