Development as a Contested Term

It is vital to clarify some of the terms used in the development discourse. The first is ‘development’ itself. Development avant la lettre whereby rapid change occurred in North-western European countries as a result of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution was rather called ‘progress’ or ‘improvement’.

Although the term ‘development’ in socio-economic usage had appeared in works by, inter alia, Marx, Lenin, Schumpeter and the League of Nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘development’ in the

contemporary social scientific sense of improving the lot of the newly

decolonised countries (called below “underdeveloped areas”) dates from US

20 Private conversation.

21 Yves Congar OP, Situations et tâches présentes de la théologie, (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1967) 11.

President Truman’s use of the term at his 1949 Inaugural Address.²² The most relevant passages are found in his fourth proposition to improve a post-war world,

Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of

disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.

For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible.

I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them

realize their aspirations for a better life. And, in cooperation with other nations, we should foster capital investment in areas needing

development.²³ (my italics).

Gilbert Rist evidences that point four was an afterthought inserted by a civil servant and was regarded as “a public relations gimmick”.²⁴ It took two years for the Truman administration to launch the “bold new program”.²⁵ As can be seen from Truman’s speech, ‘development’ is viewed in terms of using technical knowledge to improve the ‘underdeveloped’ countries in the world.

Development will come about through capital investment in those areas where their poverty is not only a handicap but a threat to themselves and to the

‘developed’ world, thus indicating a lack of altruism which has always been a

22 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: from Western Origins to Global Faith, (London &

New York: Zed Books, Second edition, 2002) 71-73.

23 Harry S. Truman’s “Inaugural Address” (January 20^th 1949). Retrieved from https://trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.htm.

24 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development, 70.

25 Ibid. 70 footnote.

political element of the development concept from the global North viewpoint.

This technical view of development has not entirely disappeared even after UN Development Decades morphed into the Millennium, and now Sustainable, Development Goals. The new ‘Development Age’ after Truman was

characterised as swapping the “right to self-determination” for the “right to self-definition” for the newly independent ex-colonies as they were burdened by the terms ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘Third World.²⁶

As early as the 1960s, ‘development’ as a word meaning the improvement of the economies and lives of the people in newly independent countries became a contested term through the Latin America-led dependency theory. This,

essentially a critique of the neoliberal capitalist model, said that development was the siphoning off of the natural resources of former colonies to the ‘First World’ to improve their standard of living while making the ‘Third World’

dependent on their former colonisers economically in a form of neo-colonialism which impoverished their people further.

The Latin Americans favoured ‘liberation’ to the word ‘development’, partly through the influence of liberation theology which called for the liberation of the poor and their countries from the modernising and subjugating forces of capitalism. The supporters of ‘liberation’ sought, in the words of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the father of liberation theology, “a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class and a social revolution that would break this

dependence” to build a new, more human society since “liberation..….expresses the inescapable moment of radical change which is foreign to the ordinary use of the term development”.²⁷

Gustavo Gutiérrez further stated that only through these liberative processes can “a policy of development be effectively implemented, have any real meaning, and avoid misleading formulations”.²⁸ It is to be hoped that the new iteration, Integral Human Development, can clear some of the vestiges of

26 Gilbert Rist, The History of Development, 79.

27 Gustavo Gutiérrez O.P., A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, (London:

SCM Press, 1974) 26-27.

28 Ibid. 27.

economic imperialism and coloniality away. It is interesting to note that a Latin American RCFBO, Cáritas del Perú, in its strategic vision until 2020, describes itself as “una sólida Red Nacional Católica promotora de desarrollo integral de la persona humana”, indicating a rehabilitation of the main element of the

despised desarrollismo.²⁹

A distinction has to be drawn between development work and humanitarian work while the links between the two have to be recognised. Humanitarian work is essentially relief work after a disaster, whether caused by humans or by nature or, as is common nowadays with climate change, a mixture of the two.

Development work in all its forms is long-term. What can begin with a humanitarian programme after, for example, a typhoon which has washed houses, livelihoods and lives away begins with the provision of necessities such as shelter, food and potable water but it must end as a development programme which will ensure that typhoon shelters are built if they are in an area of

recurrence to protect people in future, and also that the infrastructure of

normality such as schools, roads, houses, places of worship and means of earning a living are restored.

There is an important debate around the relationship between humanitarian aid and development work in the academy as well as among humanitarian and

development actors.³⁰ The debate has shifted the humanitarian-development aid nexus from a “relief-development continuum” approach with relief,

rehabilitation and development work being joined together as linear phases of a recovery from a disaster which results in not just saving lives but improving them to a more sophisticated approach called Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and

Development (LRRD). This methodology involves devolving planning and analysis to partners at the country level and focusing on joint objectives.³¹ From an IHD viewpoint, it is interesting to note that evaluations on LRRD have shown that

29 Cáritas del Perú, Visión y Misiòn. Retrieved from

http://www.caritas.org.pe/ac_qs_vision.html. My translation is as follows “a strongly Catholic network at the national level promoting the integral development of the human person”.

Desarrollismo (developmentalism) was a derogatory term for the type of development described by Gutiérrez in A Theology of Liberation 26.

30 Róisín Hinds, Relationship between Humanitarian and Development Aid, Helpdesk Research Report, GSDRC Applied Knowledge Services 2015. Retrieved from

http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/hdq1185.pdf.

31 Ibid.

they work best when there are strong local partnerships at the grassroots level.

This perceived need in traditional humanitarian situations to take into account longer-term developmental goals justifies my inclusion of both humanitarianism and development in my hermeneutic of IHD.

Just as the word ‘development’ is contested, so are many of the terms used to describe developing countries and the people who suffer poverty and injustice in them. There is a wide range of terms which are widely regarded as more

politically acceptable. One of the most common nowadays is the use of the global South called developing countries) as opposed to global North (so-called developed countries) though geographically this is a nonsense since two of the richest countries in the world, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, are in the southern hemisphere and some of the poorest countries in the world such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Laos are firmly in the northern hemisphere. Institutions such as the World Bank use terms such as low, lower-middle, upper-middle and high-income countries. It readily admits that these groupings which judge a country’s economy on per capita Gross National Income (GNI) do not sum up a country’s development status or welfare.³² In a thesis which stresses that development is more than about income levels, use of these terms would be counter-productive. In this thesis, I have chosen to use both ‘developing country’ and global South’, being fully aware of their inadequacies and unfortunate connotations.

In a similar way, I use the term ‘the poor’ for the beneficiaries of humanitarian or development programmes. Many development workers, even in FBOs, object to the term as being too demeaning, preferring ‘the marginalised’ or ‘the vulnerable’ instead, even though there are poor people who are not

marginalised or even vulnerable, terms which are not in themselves exactly exalting either and not without controversy. There is no perfect term but I maintain that the use of ‘the poor’ in a theological text is permissible because of the word in common use for a ‘poor person’ in the New Testament – Greek πτωχός (ptóchos) – which is used thirty-four times for someone who does not

32 World Bank, Why Use GNI per capita to Classify Economies into Income Groupings?, 2018.

Retrieved from https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/378831-why-use-gni-per-capita-to-classify-economies-into.

have what is necessary to subsist, but also six times in the spiritual sense where they were placed alongside the sick, the lepers and the disabled, expressing poverty as “a scandalous condition and poverty as spiritual childhood”.³³

At all times, I try to use terminology that is inclusive and that does not reduce the dignity of the so-called beneficiaries of humanitarian or development programmes and add to their being treated as ‘Other’. I therefore eschew fundamentalist interpretations of the role of FBOs in general and RCFBOs in particular in the thesis. I employ the term ‘fundamentalist’ to characterise those FBOs/RCFBOs which believe that their particular brand of faith is a truth that has to be passed on to those in need as part of what Anthony Giddens calls

“beleaguered tradition”. Such a tradition fights against globalisation and its multicultural facets but using it not to defend the vestiges of an imagined faith but to dupe the most vulnerable for whom they are providing some kind of humanitarian or development assistance.³⁴ In my view, it is a moral outrage to mix conversion with humanitarian aid and does immeasurable harm to the work of mainstream FBOs, let alone the people fundamentalists target.

1.9.2 Context: Modernisation Theory and the Role of Neoliberalism

In order to place my references to development theories into context, I am giving a short summary of some development theories which impinge on IHD. I begin with one whose influence, at the micro level, still permeates Government aid programmes and those of NGOs, FBOs and RCFBOs as well as, on the macro level, those of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The theory is usually called

‘modernisation’ theory.

The American conservative economist, W.W. Rostow (1916-2003), was a seminal figure in the promulgation of the modernisation theory, particularly through his Stages of Economic Growth. He added the subtitle, A Non-Communist Manifesto, to his series of lectures betraying his obsession with the stakes of the Cold War

33 Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation 291 and 303, note 19.

34 Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: how globalisation is reshaping our lives, (London: Profile Books, 1999) 49.

and his role as one of the chief architects of American involvement in the Vietnam war. His book aptly illustrates how development was also a political concept and a locus of ideological warfare.³⁵ Rostow assumes the ‘First World’

would be the model that the ‘Third World’ would follow. The five stages of economic growth are traditional society, transitional stage (preconditions for take-off), take-off, the drive to maturity and high mass consumption.

It is not important, for the purposes of this thesis, to enter into the details of the five stages but it is vital to explain Rostow’s ideological ‘child’, the

neoliberal paradigm that is the current economic model in the world and which developing countries are urged, and sometimes forced, to follow as a stipulation of an aid package. Yet modernisation theory has been charged with producing gaps of huge inequality between the rich and the poor. For example, in 2015, Oxfam published its report on global income disparity before the World

Economic Forum, showing that, in 2014, the richest 1% of people owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 92%.³⁶

The reason for this inequality can be laid at the door of neoliberalism. In its purest form, neoliberalism is, in David Harvey’s words,

a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework, characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.³⁷

The state’s role was to guarantee the proper functioning of markets and the societal structures to shore up the neoliberal edifice.

Neoliberalism has a complicated history but there are essentially three phases.

The first lasted from the 1920s until 1950 and detailed how to organise a market-based economy upon which society would be constructed, while

35 Walt Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1960).

36 Oxfam, Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More, (Oxford: Oxfam Issue Briefing, 2015). Retrieved from https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125.

37 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 2.

guaranteeing the liberty of the individual at a time of the rise of the collective under Communism.³⁸ The names associated with this phase were Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics but they influenced mainly Europe.

The second phase was from 1950 until the 1980s, the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as Prime Minister of the UK and President of the USA

respectively. This was a time when neoliberalism became more of a movement to introduce a free market of deregulation of companies, smaller government and reining in of union power, ultimately presenting the market as the producer of social goods and the creator of a society where ‘the good life’ could be experienced.³⁹

The third phase, the most important in terms of the impact on countries of the global South, lasted from 1980 until the present time whereby the main tenets of neoliberalism but especially market liberalisation and fiscal austerity

influenced trade and development policy. The Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), as well as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) adopted neoliberalism. It was called the ‘Washington Consensus’ that covered, in

addition to free market principles already mentioned, tax reform, privatisation and structural adjustment programmes that pauperised a whole swathe of countries in the ‘developing’ world.⁴⁰

Given its almost universal presence not only in the discipline of economics or politics but also in universities, the media, boardrooms and governments, neoliberalism has become the norm for understanding the world in which we live.⁴¹ It also has been destructive of the sovereignty of nations, labour and social relations, the welfare state and a society with empathy for others at its heart.⁴² Market exchange is seen, as P. Treanor, quoted by Harvey, states, “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting

38 Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press 2012) 6.

39 Ibid. 7-8

40 Ibid 8.

41 Harvey, 2005, 3.

42 Ibid.3.

for all previously held ethical beliefs”, emphasising the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace.⁴³

From a development perspective, neoliberalism is a handmaid of modernisation theory where all forms of social solidarity have to be broken and political and religious belief systems that contradict the new ‘truth’ of neoliberalist dogma have to be undermined and ultimately eliminated. The difficulties with this model are that it takes western cultures as its sole example; it does not state the pre-conditions for growth; it deals solely with economic growth, not a more holistic view of development; it rules out religion as a positive force in

development and ignores the fact that most human ‘targets’ of the development process have a belief system which shapes their world view.

The model demands the ending of ‘backward’ cultures and traditions, among them religious traditions, which have no place in modern society. It has, as its final goal, not human wellbeing but, pace Rostow, “high mass consumption”, now regarded as, at best, an ambiguous goal for humanity and, at worst, a disaster for the planet. In the follow-up to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), few of whose targets were fully reached, despite some successes, the world’s nations signed up to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, taking the environment and the role of “high mass consumption” in degrading the planet more fully into account.⁴⁴ Even while most countries still pursue neoliberal economic models, Sustainable Development Goal no. 12 - to seek sustainability in producing and consuming goods by separating economic growth from the use of natural resources - undermines an important part of the neoliberal project which may result in an internal contradiction for the SDGs to meet their goals concerning the wellbeing of humanity.⁴⁵

43 Harvey 2005 3 and quoting P. Treanor ‘Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition’, 2016.

Retrieved from http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html.

44 The Guardian, What Have the MDGS Achieved? July 6^th 2015. Retrieved from,

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/datablog/2015/jul/06/what-millennium-development-goals-achieved-mdgs

45 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Goal Number 12, 2017. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/.

Amartya Sen supplies a trenchant and largely humanist critique of the neoliberal view,

The ends and means of development require examination and scrutiny for a fuller understanding of the development process; it is simply not

adequate to take as our basic objective just the maximization of income or wealth which is, as Aristotle noted, “merely useful and for the sake of something else”. For the same reason, economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself. Development has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons,

exercising our own volitions and interacting with – and influencing – the world in which we live.⁴⁶

I shall explain in later chapters how the modernisation theory militates against

I shall explain in later chapters how the modernisation theory militates against

In document A hermeneutic of integral human development: bridging the gap between magisterial theory and Catholic agency Praxis (Page 36-200)