DSA Annual Conference – "Values, Ethics and Morality", 05/11/2010

1. dsa development studies association DSA Annual Conference – "Values, Ethics and Morality", 05/11/2010 Panel 6. Development studies: requiem or wake-up call Theretreatfrommodernityand thefutureofdevelopmentstudies John Toye QueenElizabethHouse, Oxford University

2. 1. Summary • The idea of development emerged on the public policy stage at the apogee of enthusiasm for all things modern; • Subsequently assailed by critics of modernity; • The idea of development then reconstructed in the modernist mould under the new label of “human development”. • The reconstruction was only partially successful for two reasons: • (1) The role played by reason in Sen’scapabilities approach remained unclear. • (2) The Identification of development with “the overcoming of unfreedom” neglects the tendency of modernisation processes to undermine the expansion of capabilities.

3. 1. Summary (cont) • This is a tendency that needs urgent attention as the world struggles to understand and ameliorate the crisis of man-made global warming. • Adaptation to climate change, the need for greater urban planning improved national science and technology policy and the crafting of should all form part of the core of any development studies curriculum.

4. 1. The starting point: H.G. Wells vs J.R. Haldane 1941 • “We have the makings of a great international movement for pulling our scatterbrained world into sane, effective mentality. We are the small beginning that may start an avalanche which will cleanse the world. Men of science have the alternative of being like Greek slaves and doing what they are told by their masters, the gangsters and profiteers, or taking their rightful place as the servant-masters of the world” • H.G. Wells: address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s 1941 conference on Science and the World Order. • The growing gap between the material conditions of the colonisers and the colonised could not be closed suddenly. What was needed was “a studied adaptation of custom to modern uses”. Three pre-requisites of all further social progress that colonial administrations could and should provide – adequate nutrition, medical facilities and popular education . • J.R. Haldane speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s 1941 conference on Science and the World Order.

5. 2. The official concept of progress: H. Frankel vs W.A. Lewis (1951/2) • Herbert Frankel attacked the presuppositions of modernising development by criticising the UN’s 1951 report Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries as representing conventional mid-20th century thinking about development and as constituting “something like an Official Concept of Progress”. • Denied that progress could be measured in terms of increases in national income. • Denied that rapid economic change was desirable. • Denied the role of government action in promoting beneficial change in underdeveloped countries. • Condemned government planning as authoritarian and large-scale international capital transfers as unnecessary and possibly damaging to the prospects of underdeveloped countries if invested in relatively less productive projects.

6. 2. The official concept of progress: H. Frankel vs W.A. Lewis (1951/2 • Having served on the UK’s Colonial Economic Advisory Committee in 1943-44, Lewis promoted what was in the early 1950s a radical development agenda: that economic development • 1. should proceed “as rapidly as possible”; • 2. should be assisted by government planning; • required a “sudden jump into industrialisation”; and • needed an increased capital flows to the colonies. • Lewis argued that what Frankel was rejecting were the presuppositions of the UN member governments who had sought his advice. His report answered the question the UN asked him to answer – what should governments of developing countries and the international community do if they wanted the income gap between industrial and developing countries not to widen further?

7. 3. Two cultures? H.R. Leavisvs C.P. Snow (1959-62) • In his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, entitled “The Two Cultures” H.R. Leavistook on two issues: • The need to “sharpen the concern of rich and privileged societies for those less lucky” ; and • the cultural gap between scientists and literary intellectuals. • C.P. Snow held that “industrialisation is the only hope of the poor (...) [I]n any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories” (...) “[I]t only takes will to train enough scientists, engineers and technicians” (...) “[I]t is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution (...) within fifty years” if the essential capital was made available “from outside” .

8. 3. Two cultures? H.R. Leavisvs C.P. Snow (1959-62) • Leavis’s rejoinder was to distrust the benefits of industrial progress for the “the Congolese, the Indonesians, the Bushmen (...) , the Chinese [and] the Indians”. • He had no sympathy with the export of a Western culture and society of which he did not approve; he believed the “civilisation” it would impose elsewhere would be destructive. • C.P. Snowreplied with 3 clarifications • Morally, he argued that it was “antihuman” to show no solidarity with those whose basic needs remained unmet; • Politically, industrialisation did not mean the authoritarian imposition of an alien culture: rural-urban migration was a means of social liberation and political empowerment; • Educationally, the effort to understand the scientific transformation of the world, past, present and future was producing a third culture, bridging the gap between scientists and literary intellectuals.

9. 4. The appropriate technology debate: Schumacher vsKaldor (1960s) • Schumacher’s main concern was that development be human-centred: production, commerce and politics should be of an appropriate (i.e. smaller) size, and technology should be affordable. In developing countries, the consequences of the strategy of economic development was a “mutual poisoning” of the rural and urban sectors. • Kaldorattacked Schumacher’s intermediate technology proposals as romantic “nonsense”: where capital is scarce, it must be invested in projects with the lowest possible capital-output ratio, since “the most modern machinery produces much more output per unit of capital invested than less sophisticated machinery that employs more people”. • Overall, critics gave Schumacher the benefit of the doubt. He argued for a better moral and ethical basis for development, taking it out of the hands of economists who claimed to be objective but in fact served the rich and privileged.

10. 5. Reconstructing the Norm of Development: AmartyaSen (1970s onwards) • Senfound Rawls’s criticisms of utilitarianism persuasive, but his contract-based theory inadequate. This led him to propose a normative focus on the “freedom to achieve actual livings that one can have reason to value”. • His capability approach can focus either on the set of functionings that a person has realised or on the set of alternative functionings between which a person is free to choose – that person’s “capability set”.

11. 5. Reconstructing the Norm of Development: AmartyaSen (1970s onwards) • Sen’s capability approach resolved many of the questions previously in dispute. • Individual/international income levels/differences are not an inadequate indicator of well being. • Wellbeing has to be assessed over a much broader spectrum of influences, of which income is only one. • Nutrition, health, education, gender equality and personal security are also vital ingredients of wellbeing. • Development does not consist simply of increases in future consumption. • It is the exercise of agency by individuals, and that requires the removal of constraints on the exercise of agency.

12. 5. Reconstructing the Norm of Development: AmartyaSen (1970s onwards) • Sen also wanted to establish that greater opportunities would result in better outcomes: better education results in better health; better health results in higher income; expansion of income results in better education, and so on. • Sen admits that the unfettered exercise of human agency generates forces the contradictions of which constantly change the contexts in which citizens are able to act. Entire populations should discuss how far to adapt their traditional culture to secure the advantages of modernity.

13. 6. Conclusions • The core of development studies does exist. I persevere in this view, advanced 30 years ago, though today I would accord an important role to Sen’snormative reconstruction. Alongside it, though, I should place an historical account of capitalist modernisation and its contradictions, if only to explain why, despite its past success in “overcoming unfreedoms”, modernisation remains such a contentious process. • Perhaps the most dramatic example of the auto-subversion of modernity is the threat of dangerous climate change as a result of two hundred years of industrialisation. Under capitalism, the freedom to pollute the environment has created economic opportunity and economic growth, • Now the consequences of this freedom are better understood, development studies either has no future, or must adapt to climate change, creatively articulating with other disciplines to identify new theories, new policies, and a new ethics.