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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Whether understood as a long-run historical process or an intentional political project, international development transforms not only societies and economies but also key ideas about how the world works and how problems should be solved. In this compelling book, Michael Woolcock demonstrates that achieving peace and prosperity for all is supremely contingent and often contentious: the means and ends of development are often perceived as alien, unjust, and disruptive, its benefits and costs unequally borne. Many development challenges are not technical problems amenable to an expert's solution, but require extensive deliberation to find and fit context-specific responses. Woolcock insists that it is each generation's challenge to find shared, legitimate, and durable solutions to the moral imperative to reduce human suffering while simultaneously redressing the challenges that development success (let alone failure) inexorably brings. This skillful guide will be essential reading for students and practitioners working in this complex field, and for anyone seeking to help "make the world a better place."
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures and Boxes
Figures
Boxes
Summary
Prelude: An Invitation…
…to see the development process as an “epic adventure” (Hirschman), replete with “challenge, drama, and grandeur” (because the broad material welfare gains it can yield are costly, their realization inherently fraught); to recognize that all of humanity is now on such a shared journey (whether we know it or not, like it or not); and to mindfully offer up one’s skills and resources – no matter how seemingly modest – for the betterment of everyone, especially those who suffer the most. We can only do what we do because others do what they do.
Notes
1 Navigating Our Diverging, Integrated World: The Three “Developments”
Whether undertaken by nation states (“national development”), large international development organizations (“big development”), or charities and advocacy groups (“small development”), efforts to eliminate global poverty are the embodiment of a quintessentially high-modern belief that human reason and resources can transform history itself. Achieving this requires a coherent social contract connecting citizens and the state, and states capable of implementing increasing complex tasks, at scale. It is national development that fundamentally drives broad improvements in human welfare.
The three “developments”
Four key elements of a national development process
Why the “social contract” matters: balancing the power of states, societies, and firms
How different types of social contract shape economic growth and poverty reduction
Creating, changing, and strengthening the social contract: how can the past guide the present?
Notes
2 Managing a Contentious World: Cooperation, Inclusion, Process Legitimacy
Twenty-first-century development as the leading edge of humanity’s 100,000-year journey (out of Africa), made possible by an array of unique social institutions. For most of this history, however, human welfare remained low and stagnant; this changed only when levels of productivity radically improved across society, a result of unwitting initiatives to routinize material “improvement,” constrain elite power, and provide universal support to society’s most vulnerable members. These initiatives, launched 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, put in motion contentious transformational processes that continue to this day.
Development as an “epic adventure”
“Process legitimacy” and development: forms, sources, and applications
1. Why process legitimacy matters
2. Forms and sources of process legitimacy
3. How competing forms/sources of process legitimacy are reconciled
4. Additional evidence
Notes
3 Building a Better World: Why Some Problems Are So Much Harder than Others
The development process increases the scale and complexity of economic, social, political, and administrative life. Succeeding at these tasks merely creates the next round of more complex challenges; failing generates cynicism, frustration, and despair. The solutions to some of these problems are known or knowable, but many – such as building the rule of law – are not; the problems need to be resolved anew by each generation, in each context. Our prevailing aid architecture was not designed to address such problems, which will only intensify in the coming decades.
National development as a fourfold transformation
Building the rule of law: why such a long and “fragile path of progress”?
If quality of implementation matters, what underlying principles might enhance it?
1. Uphold process legitimacy
2. Forge an explicit theory of change against which evidence is interpreted
3. Map, explore, and explain outcome variation
Two (unresolvable?) conundrums
1. Discerning when to stay the course, make adjustments, or concede defeat
2. Discerning when to prioritize instrumental vs intrinsic criteria
Conclusion
Notes
4 Engaging an Increasingly Complex World: From What We Have to What We Need
For all its inherent limits and numerous flaws, the liberal international order is a modern marvel, a legacy bequeathed to us that has yielded historically unrivaled peace and shared prosperity. Even so, we need to show the same bravery, courage, and commitment of our predecessors to forge new approaches harnessing twenty-first-century technologies and sensibilities for twenty-first-century problems. Discerning how to live together, despite all our differences, remains (as it has always been) humanity’s greatest challenge – and opportunity.
The implementation gap: how reforms succeed at failing
The challenge of evaluating complex adaptive interventions
The specific case of assessing community-driven development interventions
The longstanding quest for an alternative aid architecture
Conclusion
Notes
Epilogue: Putting Your Time, Talents, and Treasure to Work (for Others)
We live in an interdependent world; few of us grow our own food, make our own clothes, build our own houses, supply our own energy, or protect our own communities. Others do these things for us; in exchange, we offer up instead our particular skills and resources. Whether seeking a full-time career in the development business, or committing one’s spare time to causes of concern, or just seeking to be more informed about global affairs, it is recognition of our deep interdependence that should inspire us to give back, to offer up, to pay forward.
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
“Getting to $1600” – levels of development and extre...
Figure 1.2
In low- and middle-income countries, populations are rising but government quali...
Figure 1.3
Changes in state capability, 1996–2018
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
GDP per capita income, 1400–1900 (in 2011$)
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Development as a fourfold transformation
Epilogue: Putting Your Time, Talents, and Treasure to Work (for Others)
Figure E.1
Navigating the clash of knowledge-claiming systems
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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International Development
Navigating Humanity’s Greatest Challenge
Michael Woolcock
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © World Bank 2023
The right of Michael Woolcock to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4514-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4515-5(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941532
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this volume are entirely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of The World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or the governments they represent.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Figures and Boxes
Figures
1.1 “Getting to $1,600” – levels of development and extreme poverty reduction
1.2 In low- and middle-income countries, populations are rising but government quality is falling
1.3 Changes in state capability, 1996–2018
2.1 GDP per capita income, 1400–1900 (in 2011$)
3.1 Development as a fourfold transformation
E.1 Navigating the clash of knowledge-claiming systems
Boxes
1.1 Redressing inequality in Europe and Central Asia: state capability and the social contract
1.2 Responding effectively to the coronavirus: a vibrant social contract in Kerala
2.1 When and why was there an “Industrial Revolution” in England?
2.2 The social costs of development success
3.1 The World Bank’s Justice for the Poor program, 2002–2015
4.1 Public sector reform in Malawi, 1995–2016
4.2 The Kecamatan Development Program, Indonesia
Summary
Over the last seventy-five years, historically unprecedented gains in human welfare have been attained in most parts of the world, but the hardest challenges await, in large part because of this success. There are three distinctive ways in which development is practiced and experienced: as the activities transpiring within a sovereign nation (“national development”), as a vehicle for providing international resources and expertise at scale to these sovereign nations (“big development”), and via the efforts of charities and advocacy groups focused on the particular concerns of particular people in particular places (“small development”). Each has its place, but none on its own can address the searing policy design and (especially) implementation challenges the world now confronts – and will increasingly confront whether development itself succeeds or fails.
Consistent disappointment with efforts to “build the rule of law” over the last fifty years exemplifies these challenges and opportunities. A rare sectoral issue supported by both the global North/South and the political left/right (albeit for different reasons), such efforts have also been perhaps the “least successful” in terms of what they have actually accomplished. Persistent failure endures here because this kind of problem requires locally legitimate context-specific solutions, not imported “best practices” that too often change only what systems look like (and are thereby counted as a “success”), not what they can demonstrably do.
Complementary design and implementation systems are needed to address the increasingly diverse kinds of problems associated with providing basic services (order, education, health, sanitation), how to give and receive, how to engage with human diversity, and how to manage shifts in occupational demands, realignments of power (at all levels), and rising expectations. These are intense twenty-first-century versions of ancient human problems, the resolution of which requires everyone to do the hard work of listening, negotiating, compromising, integrating, and respecting. Resolving inherent contentions between different groups over what constitutes “progress,” and how to attain and apprehend it, remains, as it always has been, humanity’s greatest challenge.
Prelude: An Invitation…
History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which,
as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.
Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst
Most well-meaning people want to believe that their actions and charitable contributions somehow serve “to make the world a better place.” At Harvard Kennedy School, where I have taught a graduate seminar for more than sixteen years, this objective is explicitly stated as its core mission. Beyond individual efforts, most well-meaning people surely also want to believe that the collective tasks undertaken or sponsored by their governments, civic groups, and favorite charities – whether in poorer countries abroad, or to redress the challenges faced by the less fortunate in their own countries and communities – are helping to “improve” lives, livelihoods, and opportunities. More broadly still, most people have some sense that the steady advance of science, law, technology, communications, human rights, medicine, transportation, and infrastructure have changed the world, mostly “for the better,” and that it is desirable that these hard-won advances be made available to everyone. So understood, development is the process by which reason and resources are intentionally deployed, at scale, to enhance human welfare.
The abiding challenge, however, is that there may not be shared agreement on what constitutes “better,” and especially how exactly any “improvement” might be brought about; indeed, forging a broadly shared and politically supportable understanding of what counts as legitimate “progress” is itself part of the development process.1 Even where there is general agreement on what constitutes “better,” it is extraordinarily difficult – logistically, politically, financially, administratively – to ensure everyone has access to clean water, safe food, comprehensive health care, insurance (of various kinds), quality education, a reliable mail service, affordable energy, and honest business practices. There is surely also broad agreement that everyone should be able to presume they will be physically safe in all places, that public infrastructure will be regularly maintained, that elections will be free and fair, that courts will uphold the rule of law, that the trains will (mostly) run on time, and that one’s financial and material assets are secure – though achieving these too is a wondrous accomplishment. So wondrous, in fact, that life for most people most of the time for most of history has not been characterized by these things, even as most readers of this book can confidently take most of them for granted.
In whatever form it takes, however, the attainment of “better” is always a package deal: realizing it inexorably changes other things around it and generates new challenges of its own; if financial or medical resources are routinely squandered in the notional pursuit of improving infrastructure and public health it can lead to cynicism and despair, sometimes even outright tragedy. The development process is thus always fraught, no matter whether it succeeds or fails. Providing a formal education to everyone for at least ten years, for example, where once there was widespread illiteracy, is likely to both expand employment opportunities, promote gender equality, and enhance civic participation; but achieving this goal at scale is also likely to require providing instruction in a majority (usually national) language, thereby making it harder for minority languages and cultures to endure, while requiring minority speakers to do the additional work needed to learn new material in their second (or even third) language. Rising levels of literacy and numeracy are likely to challenge how traditional leaders secure legitimacy, to undermine prevailing dispute resolution procedures, to introduce alternative frameworks for how illness, injury, and crop failure (and misfortunes more generally) are understood, to encourage migration to higher-paying jobs, and to alter longstanding social norms pertaining to gender roles, respect for elders, adherence to religious practices, cultural rituals, and obligations to family.2
Similarly, expanding life expectancy by two decades (e.g., from forty-five to sixty-five years) via widespread improvements in education, nutrition, sanitation, and public health will, over time, likely be accompanied by parents having fewer children and the emergence of a new social category of people (“retirees”) requiring pension systems and medical facilities for addressing their distinctive disability and disease profiles. Where once the children of large families directly supported their aging relatives, rising prosperity will mean the two or three children from the smaller family unit are likely to be geographically dispersed, their aging parents now supported by professionals in nursing homes. Where parents may once have determined their children’s marriage partners, now – to their deep consternation – they may have little or no say. The same roads that promote travel and trade in goods, medicines, and services can also enable human trafficking and the spread of drugs, weapons, and diseases. We need no reminding that ubiquitous social media has both a very bright and a very dark side. Clearly, economic growth can be the basis of global poverty reduction, yet it can also result in widespread pollution and the spreading of non-biodegradable plastic to the deepest point on the planet (the bottom of the Mariana Trench), justify the destruction of irreplaceable rain forests, and entail using forms and levels of energy consumption that raise average global temperatures, thereby altering weather patterns and decreasing soil fertility, leading to mass migrations by farmers within and across national borders – all generating disruptions experienced most consequentially by those who have contributed least to the problem, and who are in the weakest position to respond.
Raising productivity – the key driver of economic growth – means entire categories of employment and ways of life are inexorably rendered obsolete. One of the most common forms of male employment in nineteenth-century England was being a wheelwright; now there are none, such skills being valiantly sustained only by weekend hobbyists. Historically, it has taken about seventy farmers to feed one hundred people, but in the wealthiest countries it now takes as little as three: in agriculture, “raising productivity” – a first-order development priority – means that, over time, sixty-seven of these seventy farmers and their families will have to find alternative sources of employment; or, most likely, will have little choice but to uproot their lives and disrupt their home communities by seeking “better opportunities” in distant cities, probably (at least initially) in informal squatter settlements. In rich countries today, a steady decline in democracy coupled with rising inequality, political polarization, and an escalation of “deaths of despair” shows that hard-won welfare gains can unravel, that material prosperity, paradoxically perhaps, creates its own wrenching social problems. The nature and scale of these challenges may vary over time and across levels of development; those challenges with technical solutions (such as eradicating polio) may seemingly be solved once and for all, but other problems (how to constrain elite power, how to resolve violent conflict, how to raise children) must keep being addressed anew by each generation, in its own way. In this latter space, “knowledge” rarely accumulates. Humans can now take color photographs of black holes 26,000 light years away by coordinating eight cameras located across the globe … but we continue to struggle, as we always have, with how to get along with each other. “Development” makes rocket science and brain surgery possible; it also creates larger and more complex forms of ancient human problems (world wars, environmental collapse) while opening new opportunities for resolving them (multilateral forums, international law, mediation). Promoting both prosperity and security is the vexing challenge and promise of development (Bates 2021).
In the early twenty-first century, another “paradox of progress” is our apparent predisposition for taking increasingly strident either/or views on contentious policy issues, making it hard to create and protect space for finding nuanced or innovative solutions to development’s vexing challenges. Viewing only the unhappy outcomes I’ve listed above, it is all too easy (and common) to lump them with other social outcomes one finds abhorrent in the world, and to deem them all to be the products of an insidious, all-encompassing “neoliberal” agenda promoted by corporate interests and/or “globalists,” for which the solution is the adoption of a “nation first,” “post-development,” or “end of development” agenda. Similarly, it is equally easy to double down on an “the end justifies the means” stance – a view long articulated to justify slavery and colonialism3 – in which pursuing aggregate rates of economic growth excuses all manner of imposed indifference to lives, livelihoods, human rights, due process, public health, and the environment.4 Yet economic growth is clearly the primary engine that, over the last two centuries (and especially the last seventy years), has transformed the world from one in which 80 percent of people lived in extreme poverty to one in which less than 10 percent now do (Galor 2022; Pritchett 2022). Despite today’s frequent headlines of despair, the late great Hans Rosling (2018) never ceased to remind us that, in so many fundamental ways – longevity, education, health, safety – life today is vastly better for most people most of the time than it has ever been, even as much clearly remains to be done.
This complex reality of development – that it can generate historically unprecedented and widespread gains in human welfare, yet in so doing wrenchingly transform societies, the environment, and global geopolitics – is perhaps the reason why one of development’s earliest and most thoughtful scholars, Albert Hirschman, referred to it as an “epic adventure” (Hirschman 1995: viii). The development process is epic because the journey is transformational yet rife with uncertainty – glorious success, tragic failure, and serendipitous muddling through are constant companions; as such it is also an adventure, Hirschman argued, infused with “challenge, drama, and grandeur.” Befitting the metaphor, successfully navigating an epic adventure is more likely if one undertakes extensive preparation, has a good map and a reliable compass, seeks discerning and encompassing leadership, assembles a brave, persistent, and capable crew, upholds the golden rule when encountering strangers along the way (whether as host or guest), forges sustained commitments perceived as legitimate by all parties, and prepares contingency measures in the likely event that things don’t quite go according to plan.
Alas, this is not how development is usually understood; from the outset, the dominant metaphor characterizing the development problem has been one of “gaps” needing to be quickly filled by reason and resources.5 Here too, however, nuance is needed: there are plenty of serious problems for which careful expert assessment is precisely what is needed (e.g., deciding when to raise interest rates to curb inflation); but there are also many other key problems in development for which an imperative to provide single solutions is itself the problem (e.g., managing classroom teaching, curative health care); indeed, such solutions can be a potentially binding constraint problem blocking the attainment of broader objectives.6 But in a world of finite resources, short attention spans, impatience with nuance, and a public imperative to show quick “results,” it is always easier to prioritize the former over the latter. Development is replete with complex problems which, by definition, do not have simple solutions.
In seeking “to make the world a better place,” one must therefore respect the enormity of the task and the stakes, and strive to remain humble but persistent in the face of them. If development’s fated status is that of humanity’s greatest challenge, then it is one for which there has never been, will never be, and never should be a single story to explain it or a simple/universal solution to resolve it;7 the only solution is the one that we craft together at any given historical moment. Development worthy of the name thus must be a negotiated two-way process of giving and receiving,8 not merely a matter of the experts dispensing directives, the strategists promoting their interests, the privileged showering their beneficence, or the powerful imposing their will because they can.9 Being both good “givers” and good “receivers” is not a pious aspiration but a task requiring all parties to do the hard work of taking each other seriously, working together to help create and protect the spaces wherein the wrenching trade-offs of development can be equitably and legitimately negotiated.
As such, this short book seeks not to offer a list of proven solutions to global poverty, to promote rigorous research methods to identify them, or grand plans to ensure global peace – plenty of others have done this. Rather, it extends an invitation to “see” and regard development as being akin to an epic adventure, to recognize that all of humanity is now on such a shared journey whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, and to mindfully offer up one’s skills and resources – no matter how modest or inadequate they may seem – for the betterment of everyone, especially those who suffer the most. We are all in the same canoe, as New Zealanders like to say.
*
This book stems from a series of four ninety-minute lectures I gave on a given Saturday in London each year for over a decade (from 2008 to 2019). They were given to young lawyers working pro bono for Advocates for International Development (A4ID), an NGO connecting British lawyers with firms or organizations in the global South needing to engage legal systems in Britain or the European Union, but who lacked the resources, connections, or expertise to do so. Most of these lawyers were offering their skills as a matter of personal conviction, most possessing only passing knowledge of the broader field of international development into which they were dipping their professional toes, but who, like many others, felt a moral obligation to give back nonetheless, to offer up their particular talents as a way of helping “make the world a better place.” In exchange for offering their legal expertise, A4ID’s participants were offered a series of weekend seminars by various academics and legal practitioners, introducing them to various facets of law and development so that they could thereby gain a better sense of how this sub-field functioned, and thus how they might best contribute to it.
In the early years of these talks I was based at the University of Manchester, so a day trip to London to give these lectures was no big deal. (Yes, I gave all four ninety-minute lectures on one day!) But upon returning to Washington, and even when based in Malaysia for nearly two years, I felt compelled to return to London each year for this forum – not only because I wanted to honor these lawyers’ efforts but because the space afforded me over the four lectures was long enough to explore issues I cared deeply about in some detail but short enough to require my framing of them to be sufficiently clear and compelling to non-specialists. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience, so upon being approached by Polity Press to prepare a manuscript on international development I decided that transforming these lectures into a book seemed an appropriate way of giving these earlier efforts a formal life, a broader reach and a longer “legacy.” I leave it to readers to decide if the written (and considerably updated) form of these lectures achieves these goals.
I come to the themes expressed in this book from a rather unique standpoint, one grounded in an unusual career trajectory; as such, I have a perspective on international development that, for better or worse, does not fit neatly into the usual political, professional, or disciplinary categories. I have worked at the World Bank for the best part of a quarter century, but in the Development Research Group – so, I reside “in” the world of high-level development policy and operations but am not “of” it as such; I have too much respect for real development practitioners to ever call myself one. Within the Research Group itself, which has existed for more than four decades, I remain the first and only sociologist to have a full-time staff position among a star cast of nearly one hundred economists; from this vantage point I have written papers not only with numerous economists but also with lawyers, historians, political scientists, nurses, anthropologists, and geographers. In this realm I thus reside “in” the world of development economics but am not “of” it, either.10 During sixteen of my years at the World Bank I have also taught part-time at Harvard Kennedy School, dating back to 2000–1. I was raised in an academic family, my instinctive approach to complex issues is to think about them in scholarly terms, and over the course of my career I have held two tenured academic appointments, but my choice has been to retain a foot “in” the academic world while not becoming fully “of” that world – mostly because I find I learn most about development (at least as it’s framed, enacted, and assessed by multilateral agencies) by being more closely immersed in it, and by being surrounded by those whose understanding of what counts as a question and what counts as an answer is often rather different from my own. Others, of course, may quite reasonably and rightly make different choices, but these have been mine. That said, John Berger’s (1972) adage that “a way of seeing is always a way of not seeing” applies as much to me as to anyone else, and it may well be that having a uniquely situated career path only makes my insights uniquely flawed… In any event, my hope with this book is that seasoned development professionals, scholars and students, concerned citizens, and those most directly engaged in and affected by development efforts will find these pages helpful. Better yet, I hope it may inspire its readers to do the hard work required to engage in principled ways with the vexing challenges of international development – challenges which, I contend, are only going to become increasingly important and contentious in the coming decades.
Numerous competing obligations associated with my work at the World Bank (compounded by the global Covid-19 crisis) created several long delays in producing this book. Having been granted multiple extensions, I am very grateful for the forbearance extended to me by Polity’s editorial team, especially Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir. I am also indebted to reviewers of both the initial proposal and the subsequent draft manuscript for their helpful feedback, suggestions, and critique. I am indebted to Yetmwork Habte Woldegiorgies for her excellent research assistance and preparation of the key figures. I am always conscious that I can do what I do because so many others do what they do – from my family members and close colleagues to those more directly doing the giving and receiving in development. Most of my professional work is written for development researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and graduate students, but this time my focus extends to include – indeed, this book is dedicated to – all those who seek to “make the world a better place,” especially those who voluntarily offer up their skills and resources for the benefit of those less fortunate, or who faithfully show up every day to do difficult work in dangerous places with vastly inadequate resources, irregular pay, little protection, and even less professional or public recognition.
I especially wish to recognize the contributions to my personal life and professional development of four extraordinary students who have taken my Harvard Kennedy School class between 2001 and 2022. First, Father Phillip (now deceased; from the Philippines); second, Mosa Rahimi (an ethnic Hazara from Afghanistan). The epic adventure of these two amazing men – raised in humble rural families in the poorest, most violent, most discriminated against, and most isolated parts of their home countries (which for Mosa included nineteen years as a refugee) – somehow unfolded in ways that led to semester-long stops in my class at Harvard. Third, Halimatou Hima (from Niger) – the first person in the history of her country to get graduate degrees from both Harvard and Cambridge, who went on to serve as the only woman on her country’s delegation to the UN Security Council, and who now works tirelessly to craft hybrid education systems faithfully drawing on Niger’s pre-colonial past and present to better prepare its students for the future; and fourth, Ganchimeg Ganpurev (from Mongolia), who spent much of her childhood learning the ancient traditions of her grandparents – who, after their retirement, happily chose to live as nomadic herders on the Mongolian steppes – so that, in time, she could assume the responsibility of preserving and passing along their distinctive but fast-disappearing knowledge, but who now has to choose, fatefully, between returning to Mongolia to honor that commitment or pursuing a promising high-level career at a prominent multilateral agency. Nothing I ever proclaimed in class about the virtues and disruptions of development was a mere abstraction to any of these four; they had lived it, celebrated it, and suffered painfully for it. They could also powerfully convey to others, with credibility I cannot and will never be able to summon, what the best and worst of humanity can do in the name of claiming to be “making the world a better place.” Phillip, Halima, Ganchimeg, and Mosa are the quintessential embodiment of the broader message conveyed in T. S. Eliot’s powerful epigraph that opens this book: all four have known both servitude and freedom, in different ways at different times; the places and faces that made them, and which they loved, have now mostly vanished, renewed and transfigured into another pattern through a combination of choices, contingencies, and events … which in time will become another pattern, perhaps equally precarious and fraught, hopefully less so.
Even if, empirically, the heavy lifting of securing widespread peace and prosperity is shaped by larger institutional processes, political dynamics, and policy choices, this should never mean that the seemingly modest efforts of individuals and small groups don’t matter. They surely do, in their own right intrinsically, and because, historically, forging moral and empathetic solidarity with others is the soil in which better policies, programmatic efforts, implementation capabilities, and welfare-enhancing priorities can grow, where greater legitimacy to a wrenching change process is forged, and justice potentially secured. It is how the epic adventure of development becomes a little less epic.
Notes
1
The historical instantiation and inherent contention associated with the ideas of “progress” and “improvement,” in both the moral and material senses, are explored in chapter 1.
2
An indicative empirical example of such phenomena is provided by Berry (2015), who examines the complex ways in which seemingly successful efforts in Rwanda to empower women (e.g., Rwanda has the world’s highest percentage of women in parliament) has been “undermined by deeply rooted social processes” (p. 1) elicited by this apparent success. Hessler (2022) provides a firsthand account of the ways in which rapid and sustained economic growth in rural China over the last two decades has created wide (sometimes perplexingly different) intergenerational life experiences: parents remain poor illiterate rural farmers even as their children reside in the urban middle class attending university and driving electric cars. More formally, see also Ang (2016).
3
Pitts (2005) deftly explores the emergence of different arguments used to justify these practices. See also Armitage (2012).
4
See, among others, Szreter (1997); on associated processes of widening inequality during the British Industrial Revolution, see Allen (2009). Scott (2017) summarizes recent evidence indicating that the emergence of the world’s first cities and “civilizations” (i.e., antiquity’s earliest states) left vast swathes of the population worse off.
5
Encapsulated in the classic article by Romer (1993).
6
See Pritchett and Woolcock (2004).
7
On this point, see Adichie’s (2009) famous “The danger of a single story” TED talk address, observed over 31 million times. Even so, there is an equivalent “danger” in having no story, or too many competing stories.
8
See chapter 1 of Klitgaard (1990).
9
I take this to be the central critique of Giridharadas (2019). However, by arguing – as I do – that development derives its legitimacy and content from incorporating everyone, there must, by definition, be a role for those deemed to be “elites.” I address such matters in the epilogue.
10
And by virtue of my career-long residence outside academic departments of sociology, I strongly suspect I’m now widely regarded as being neither “in” nor “of” the world of sociology! Such is my life.
–1–Navigating Our Diverging, Integrated World: The Three “Developments”
The following is adapted from a feature story in The New York Times, February 2022:1
Western scientists have recently discovered that a large peatlands ecosystem in rural Democratic Republic of Congo contains carbon at levels such that the equivalent of “20 years of US fossil fuel emissions” would be released if the peatland were ever to dry up. From a climate change perspective, the scientists insist that the peatlands must be protected, lest a global “carbon bomb” is detonated. But how, by whom, and on what basis will the protecting be done? Enduring tensions exist between two neighboring villages as to who is the rightful jurisdictional custodian of the peatlands, each invoking different historical “maps” and memories to make their case, while government officials preside over a deeply compromised system for granting permits to loggers. Villagers derive much of their livelihood from logging and other activities in the peatland, paid for by foreigners … Should the villagers instead be paid to “do nothing”?
Beyond the peatland’s income generating potential, villagers also maintain that it is best understood as the sacred resting place of their venerated ancestors; they have little comprehension of what “carbon” is and does, and see little reason why they should forgo lucrative income from allowing the felling of old-growth trees to address a problem – climate change – they cannot fully apprehend and to which they have contributed almost nothing, wryly noting that the journalists writing the story about them probably contributed more to climate change by travelling to DRC than all the villagers combined have done across their lifetimes. It is unclear how anyone might successfully reconcile these competing claims and interests; the tensions run deep and few sources of authority are credible in the eyes of all stakeholders. For now, it seems a lone DRC scientist has achieved broad legitimacy – based on his unique combination of linguistic, scientific, and cultural knowledge.
International development is the process by which human welfare – experienced most broadly as rising prosperity and security (Bates 2021) – is intentionally enhanced, at scale, in ways broadly perceived to be legitimate. It is humanity’s greatest challenge, however, because almost every aspect of it is complex, contentious, and disruptive. Initiating an inclusive development process is hard; sustaining it is harder still; and no matter whether such efforts succeed or fail, societies and geopolitical arrangements are fundamentally altered, in the process shifting the foundations on which power, identities, status, expectations, and the formal and informal rules shaping economies, polities, societies, and public administration are structured. As the story above seeks to convey, the development process in the early twenty-first century often brings together different groups, sometimes from around the world, with very different understandings of what the key challenges are, how they should be addressed, on what basis, and who bears responsibility for them.
In the case of the peatlands in DR Congo, one group of outsiders invokes the legitimacy of science to convey their concerns about a mysterious gas contained within a unique but fragile natural resource; another group offers villagers valued jobs felling ancient trees that are part of this resource; still another group asks lots of questions, takes
