This article traces the evolution of the ideologies and narratives that have framed 'development' since its post-Second World War inception, through growth and dependency, adjustment and human development, state to market, to more equitable and globally supported sustainable development strategies required for the post-2015 decades. It analyses the ideas that became the main contributors to a multipolar and still contested narrative of national and global development, highlighting what can be learned from the process that led to current perspectives and goals for sustainable development.
The article focuses especially on contributions by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and its global partners, both as critic of dominant orthodoxies and as creator or supporter of alternatives. It ends with reflections on the adequacy of the current narratives and perspectives in light of the challenges facing a multipolar, interconnected and interdependent world, and conclusions about future directions for thinking, action and research.
In the wake of the Second World War and with the approaching independence of most African and many Asian nations from European colonisation, a concept, a mandate and a path started to take shape. The concept was the development of the 'underdeveloped countries' of the world, renamed in the 1960s the 'Third World' and more recently the 'developing countries'. The mandate was for 'developed' nations, the rich Western economies of Europe and the new world economic
powerhouse, the United States (US), to create the conditions to fight
'underdevelopment' in other nations in the world. The 'Third World' could only reach the levels of 'First World Development' by following what, with some re-invention of history, was said to have been the
development steps of those that had first walked the same path.
From President Truman's inaugural speech in 1949, Walt Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto in 1960, the International Labour Organization's Employment, Growth and Basic Needs (ILO 1976) in the 1970s and Our Common Future, the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987)
in the 1980s, the objectives and narratives that defined 'development'
changed dramatically. By 2000, Human Rights had been made an integral part of Human Development – and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had been set and endorsed by the United Nations (UN). Many of these components are now found in the universal Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015 by all 193 UN member states.
In considerable contrast to these dominant and Western intellectual formulations, actual economic and social advance proceeded along
diverse paths, depending on the time and place. Different success
stories, from Japan to the 'Asian Tigers', to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and Rising Powers, called into question the idea of 'one path'. The collapse of communism dealt a major blow to countries trying the state-led planned economy route. At the same time, the failures of the Washington Consensus, implemented in the 1980s and early 1990s through the conditionalities of structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s, resulted in a 'lost decade' for Africa and Latin America. These failures also cast doubt whether the 'Western recommended path' could achieve the more pragmatic successes of Asia (Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and, more recently, China) as highlighted by Wade (1990) and Lin (2014). Recently, increasing evidence of climate change and growing awareness of planetary boundaries shows clearly that no previous path will be adequate for the challenges of the future (Raworth 2012). There is thus a growing realisation that sustainable development on a worldwide scale cannot be pursued without fundamental changes by all major actors, of each country's own path and in the structures of international global governance supporting – or obstructing – its achievement.
This short review revisits early reflections originating in the Institute of
Development Studies (IDS) on these changing development narratives and the role academic research and thought from within it contributed to the debate, supporting, critiquing or warning against the adoption of dominant orthodoxies. It draws particularly on Bienefeld (1992), Ferguson (1998), Thorbecke (2000) and Jolly (2008).
In his critique, Rist (2007) suggests that, from inception, 'development' was an empty concept, a 'public relations gimmick' coined to add some originality to President Truman's inaugural speech. However rhetorical it may have seemed, the speech expressed an optimistic view that 'underdeveloped' countries and peoples could aspire to modernisation and the living conditions of people in 'developed' countries. And within
the UN, the effect was positive and electrifying. Hans Singer, then employed as one of the UN's first economists, rushed to redraft the
UN's budget for technical assistance with a proposal for an Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA), giving the entire UN an operational role (Shaw 2002).
Industrialisation, as Thorbecke (2000) points out, was the core of the
first main strategy of 'development'. The proposed method, partly
inspired by the reconstruction of Western Europe, under the Marshall Plan, and the strong industrialisation of the USSR (ibid.), was also motivated by contemporaneous concepts of critical minimum levels of investment. Theories like Rosenstein-Rodan's 'Big Push' (1943) and
Rostow's 'Stages of Growth' (1956) played a significant role in framing
these early policies, even supported by anthropological studies on cultural obstacles to economic 'take-off' (Geertz 1963a, b).1 With a focus on economic growth, economic theories, policy objectives, strategies and practice of development agencies, all aimed to support investment in the industrial sector as the pathway to development.
These were periods of optimism. In the wake of the Second World War, an era of political decolonisation and consistent and stable economic growth in both 'capitalist' and 'Soviet' blocs suggested that at least one of the competing paths would lead 'underdeveloped' nations to 'development'. Somewhat ignoring the weak administrative starting points in many developing countries, the notion of 'development' soon filled the vision and ambitions of leaders of independence as well as of many others wanting to build a fairer, better world. As Fred Bienefeld, one of the early IDS Fellows, put it:
The dream was human liberation – from poverty and want, from oppression, from violence, from the drudgery of monotonous and stultifying work. The dream was of life in stable communities, rich in human relations, secure, materially prosperous and focused on leisure undertaken for their own sake and not for instrumental reasons (Bienefeld 1992: 3).
The dominant objective of the 1960s and 1970s was economic growth,
led by government planning in both Western and Soviet-influenced
countries, though with state direction in the latter and much use of the
market in the former. It was Dudley Seers, the first director of IDS, who questioned whether growth was enough to fulfil the desired improvements
in the living conditions of people in poorer nations. Having earlier
been the first director general of the UK's recently created Ministry
of Overseas Development (now called Department for International Development, DFID), Seers voiced these concerns and mapped out tests for a wider perspective of development:
The questions to ask about a country's development are therefore: What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three of these have declined from high levels, then beyond doubt this has
been a period of development for the country concerned. If one or
two of these central problems have been growing worse, especially
if all three have, it would be strange to call the result 'development',
even if per capita income doubled (Seers 1969).
The importance of an employment focus and an equitable growth path towards poverty reduction was also stressed in the first three reports of the ILO Employment Missions, in all of which IDS played a leading role (Colombia 1970, Sri Lanka 1971 and Kenya 1972).2
Each report applied these objectives to the specifics of the countries concerned. From these emerged the IDS/World Bank study, Redistribution with Growth (Chenery et al. 1974), in which the examples of redistributive growth were sought in developing countries and were drawn from the very inadequate data of the time. More influential – and more acceptable politically at the time – was the concept of development strategy directed to the fulfilment of Basic Needs,3 which also grew out of the recommendations of the Kenya ILO mission but which was brought together and formulated more analytically in ILO's Employment, Growth and Basic Needs: A One-World Problem (1976). For the last few years of the 1970s, basic needs became development orthodoxy.
The contributions from IDS to alternative thoughts on 'development' in the 1960s and 1970s went well beyond macro-economic strategy. They included the much debated and often cited study by Michael Lipton, 'Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of Urban Bias in World Development' (1977). The first examples of pioneering work on participatory methodologies for action and research can be found in the late 1970s with Rapid Rural Appraisals (Chambers 2008: 68). IDS came late to issues of gender and women in development, until Kate Young (1979) established the Subordination of Women programme, launched in two mobilising conferences held at IDS in 1979 (see also Nesbitt-Ahmed and Edwards, this IDS Bulletin).4 IDS research and teaching
identified three alternative paradigms for development analysis: the
structuralist, the neoliberal and the Marxian, with some IDS Fellows
working within each, though with different degrees of pragmatism in
their analysis.
In hindsight, a missing dimension from the three questions of Dudley Seers emerged in the UN's Conference on the Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The planet that had hosted a Space Race and landed a man on the moon in 1969 was dangerously nearing the destruction of its own environment. Barbara Ward, one of the early IDS trustees (then called governors), had aptly captured the global challenge in her book Spaceship Earth (1966). This was carried much further 20 years later in Brundtland et al.'s path-breaking report of the WCED, Our Common Future (WCED 1987). By the mid-1980s, hardly three decades from the launch of the development enterprise, the path taken by the world economies, led by those claiming to be 'developed', had brought to the fore a fundamental question: is the planet capable of sustaining these developments?
The age of optimistic belief in investment-driven, economic growth, supported by 'developed countries', began to wane in the 1970s. A three and a half-fold increase in oil prices in 1973/4 brought the richest countries to their knees and world economic growth shuddered to a halt 5 – though with the OPEC oil-exporting countries surging in new-found income and wealth. For a short while, developing countries saw the chance for a new global deal – a New International Economic Order (NIEO). At IDS, Reg Green and Hans Singer even spelt out a way forward: 'Toward a Rational and Equitable New International Economic Order: A Case for Negotiated Structural Changes' (Green and Singer 1975).6 But the realpolitik of rich country interests and ideas became the order of the day. After a year or two of apparent North–South negotiations, serious talk of NIEO was dead. Instead, the banks of the North had found a way to recycle the oil-generated surpluses from the OPEC countries, the so-called 'petro-dollars', into whichever country wanted them and was prepared to borrow to pay. Any idea of the NOPEC countries – Singer's phrase for the developing countries without oil – directly receiving a share of OPEC income as payment for supporting the OPEC cartel had gone out the window. NOPEC countries borrowed heavily and their debt rose along with
price inflation worldwide, setting the stage for the Bretton Woods-led
structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and the lost decade for development in Africa and Latin America – though not in Asia.
Again, the 'development' impetus was drawn from an idealised version of a 'path of righteousness' imposed by the richest economies: 'do as I (claim to) have done'. In the 1980s, mainstream 'development
policy' began to advocate 'fiscal conservatism'. Milton Friedman was
advocating a monetarist strategy for the US, and over two or three years his rules for strictly controlling the supply of money were seriously implemented in the UK by the new Thatcher government. After some disastrous experiences, these were abandoned, though neoliberal economic policies remained.7 In the US, under President Reagan, neoliberal policies were applied more pragmatically. All this created worldwide a newly acquired faith in (or forced conversion to) markets and neoliberalism.
In Latin America and Africa, action to reduce the debt forced serious changes. Basic Needs went out the window, helped in the World Bank by the retirement of Robert McNamara, their great proponent and early defender of poverty-reducing strategy. The shift in strategy was furthered in the case of sub-Saharan Africa by the World Bank's report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (Berg 1981), drafted mostly by Elliot Berg but with more pragmatic interpolations by others. This neatly shifted the blame in African countries from external factors – debt and the failures of NIEO – to internal failures, especially of government-led action as opposed to reliance on the market and private sector. Also in the Bank's sights was the Lagos Plan of Action, the first truly Africa-born strategy prepared by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and African ministers of planning and endorsed by heads of state and government for the Economic Development of Africa 1980–2000.8 It is still worth reading for its long-term perspectives and political-economic strategy. At IDS, Reg Green wrote a devastating critique of the Berg Report, noting
parallels with the book of Genesis, with different sources and authors for different parts of its argument (Green and Allison 1984).
Mainstream orthodoxy – in the West and forced on Africa and Latin America but not in Asia – now looked to the private sector to take up roles that weak and highly indebted governments of new nations had yet fully to assume. The new global pathway to 'development', particularly in the Western 'capitalist' hemisphere, was 'structural adjustment'. Aid was made conditional on implementing policies laid down by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and mostly also coordinated with the larger donors. Governments of developing countries were no longer seen as the natural engines of industrialisation and growth but as mistrusted over-spenders, needing to be disciplined. Structural adjustment policies cut back on all forms of government spending and on developing governments themselves.9 This underlying
mistrust of national governments gave rise to a second effect: the
increase in the perceived importance of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as those 'better prepared to work with the "poorest of the poor"' (Riddell 2007). Arguably, these two new instruments continued the paternalistic vision that underlay much 'development' from inception, albeit taken one step further. Not only were 'developing' nations to follow the (imagined) footsteps of the 'developed', their institutions were not to be trusted in pursuing the 'right initiatives'. They needed to be conditioned into better practices or even replaced by (international) civil society in assisting the poor and excluded in their societies.
The effects were dismal at best, especially for living standards and
public services (Cornia, Jolly and Stewart 1987). The recrudescence of humanitarian crises and the continuing indebtedness of ever-shrinking public systems revealed the failures of a solution that had pushed Africa and Latin America into what is now considered a lost decade.
In contrast to the recipes of the Washington Consensus, the countries of South East Asia stood out as 'shining examples'. These were the 'Asian Tigers', originally hailed as examples of free-market success. After careful research by IDS Fellow Robert Wade, they proved to be notable deviants from orthodoxy – as analysed in his much praised book, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (1990). Leadership by a strong state could be combined with the market and with strong export orientation. Other Fellows also worked together at the same time to produce a more general theoretical and operational volume, States or Markets: Neo-Liberalism and the Development Policy Debate (Colclough and Manor 1993). This restored balance to an often polarised debate: excessive intervention and price distortions had held back development, but equally a simple ideologically-driven turn to free-market economics was also over-simple and dangerous. At a higher level of generalisation, through this book IDS challenged the narrow orthodoxies of the 1980s and put forward a more balanced view.
The narrow-minded mainstream policies of the 1980s and 1990s should not obscure the various ways in which IDS thinking proposed alternatives to the adjustment remedies. In the early 1980s, after Richard
Jolly had joined UNICEF, a first publication was issued, 'The Impact
of World Recession on Children' (Jolly and Cornia 1984), which was prepared by an international group that included Hans Singer and dedicated to Dudley Seers who had died in May 1983. This led to further challenges to orthodoxy, notably at the global conference of the Society of International Development (SID)10 in 1985 where Jolly presented the Barbara Ward memorial lecture on 'Adjustment with a Human Face'. Two years later, UNICEF issued a major research study, Adjustment with a Human Face (Cornia et al. 1987), widely distributed in three languages. At IDS, the new director, Mike Faber, with Reg Green ran a succession of studies on alternatives to structural adjustment, supported in part by the World Bank.
By 1990, it was clear that many structural adjustment programmes had failed to achieve their objectives. The blame initially was placed on the developing countries themselves – for not having properly implemented the programmes or not having stuck with them for long enough or for some other reason.11 This orthodox focus gradually shifted to blaming weaknesses in their administration and the need for strengthening governance and introducing democracy. Strengthening democracy also accorded with Western political policy after the collapse of the USSR.
At IDS, a Governance Team was formed in 1991/02, initially critiquing the emerging donor agenda and putting forward positive ideas for 'Good Governance' (Robinson and Moore 1993). This work developed further and more widely over the next decade or two, researching in detail issues of taxation, finance and the environment, each with particular attention to how smaller groups within countries were being affected, or more often neglected, in the international drive for improving governance.
One of the more original parts of IDS' work in the 1990s grew out of Mick Moore's work on Taxation, which explored and then demonstrated how the form of public revenue was a major determinant of the quality of a country's governance. Starting in the 1990s and ahead of the curve, this has today become a mainstream development issue, underlying a shift from an aid-centric to a tax-centric debate on resource mobilisation. IDS' focus on economic organisation in developing countries led to research on spreading the gains from globalisation, with the central proposition that the way an economy is organised has major repercussions on the speed and quality of growth, the accumulation of capabilities and the distribution of gains.
Finance was also (and continues to be) the central focus of the work
of Stephany Griffith-Jones, who contributed to research and policy suggestions on how to make the domestic and international financial
system more stable so that it can better serve the needs of inclusive economic development and the real economy. In 'The Growth of
Multinational Banking, the Euro-Currency Market and their Effects on Developing Countries' (Griffith-Jones 1980), she warned of the
risk of excessive international bank lending to developing economies. Her book, Debt and Development Crises in Latin America: The End of An Illusion (Griffith-Jones and Sunkel 1986), showed the negative effects
of the 1980s Latin American debt crisis on the region's economic
development. Griffith-Jones was an early advocate of debt relief in
Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
The collective efficiency of small producers was another element which had a major influence on the ability of local enterprises to
compete in the global economy. This line of research transformed the research and policy agenda on small-scale industry and the informal sector. The analysis of global value chains was a second line of pioneering work, involving John Humphrey, Raphie Kaplinsky, Hubert Schmitz, Khalid Nadvi, Stephanie Barrientos and Adrian Wood, as well as graduate students and partnerships with Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The central insight was that the way trade was organised was critical and had major repercussions: on access to markets, prospects for upgrading, distribution of gains and possibilities for successful policy interventions. The importance of this work was that it challenged the triumphalism of export-success globalisation by arguing that the key issue was not whether a country should participate in globalisation but how it should do so. This work was well disseminated through an international conference in 1999, with high-level participation from the World Bank and the UN, a special issue of World Development, an article, 'The Governance of Global Value Chains' (Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005), and several books including Value Chain Analysis for Policy Makers and Practitioners (Schmitz 2005) and Globalization, Poverty and Inequality: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Kaplinsky 2013).
The work on global value chains led to research on the major shifts in global power and the Asian Drivers Research programme, formally started in 2005, though with recognition of the issues well before this. While the theme is now mainstream, at the time it was ahead of the curve. Now under the Rising Powers and Global Governance
programme, IDS seeks to explore the increasing influence of the
BRICS and other rapidly changing middle- or low-income countries. In this way, IDS is advocating a restructuring of global development institutions and the governance of global public goods (such as the environment, food and health).
The environment was another area where, in the 1990s, IDS critiqued mainstream thinking and moved research into exploring more positive alternatives. Community-based natural resource management was by then a popular approach in environmental circles. Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and others shared the ambition but showed how practical implementation often fell short of expectations, especially by neglecting intra-community
dynamics and the specifics of context, given that ecologies are so
heterogeneous. Central to this work was a focus on sustainable livelihoods, which again showed how often mainstream approaches produced systematic 'pathologies' by too narrowly focusing on 'impact'. The IDS environment group then moved on to deal with institutions and uncertainty and paid more attention to the dynamics of ecology. By the mid-2000s, these issues had been brought together in the STEPS programme focused on Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability.
Some of these themes were common to IDS' work on participation, originated and sustained since the 1970s by Robert Chambers, but moving in the 1990s into various forms of Participatory Rural Appraisal and farmer participatory research. John Gaventa carried much of this work further with more attention to power and politics applied to
Citizenship, which redefined the agenda for research and policy.
Globally, the 1990s offered another significant contribution to reflections
on development as a multidimensional process, social as well as economic, political and cultural. This was through the Human Development Reports (HDR), the creation of Mahbub ul Haq under the sponsorship of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 1990) and with strong philosophical underpinnings from Amartya Sen, who earlier had analysed development in terms of strengthening human capabilities and expanding people's choices. Mahbub ul Haq had long followed the work of IDS and Amartya Sen had been a governor in the 1970s. In 1996 Richard Jolly took over from Mahbub as the Principal Coordinator of the HDR and oversaw reports on human development and economic growth, poverty, consumption and globalisation. The 2000 report on Human Development and Human Rights analysed the links between them, especially what human development adds to human rights and what human rights adds to human development (UNDP 2000).
The advent of the new millennium provided fertile ground for a much broader and multidimensional approach to development to take hold.
Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the UN, issued a major document,
We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (UN 2000). This gold-covered document provided the background for the Millennium Declaration, adopted by governments at the Millennium Summit – attended by 149 heads of state and government and senior representatives of another 40 countries. The Declaration is an impressive document, much broader than the still-important but more narrowly-focused MDGs.
The years since 2000 have witnessed what arguably has been the world's most ambitious project of coordinated action on multidimensional deprivations, the MDGs. Initially criticised for being little more than an international set of 'good intentions' devised by those that claimed success in the 'development process' and bestowed upon
those that were still 'developing', the MDGs offered, nonetheless, basic
goals and a common language. Time would reveal the MDGs as an instrumental yardstick against which the Rising Powers, particularly China, would defend the success of their own development pathways,
affirming alternative narratives on how to proceed in the future. This
is particularly noticeable in The Quest for Prosperity by Justin Lin (2014), where he delineates a Chinese-inspired path for 'developing' economies
to find prosperity. The MDGs have also provided a frame of goals
against which the successes and failures, triumphs and shortfalls could be and were measured and publicised by the UN. There is, of course, much that can be criticised about the MDGs, perhaps especially the reductionist tendency of the World Bank, the media and many others to concentrate almost entirely upon the goal of reducing poverty and economic growth as the main means towards it. The 'dollar a day' indicator of poverty is also seriously inadequate.12
In spite of all these inadequacies, the MDGs achieved sustained global attention and were followed up by many countries. IDS was often involved at the country level in helping to critically review progress.13 As 2015 approached, it was clear that the MDGs had achieved considerable progress (UN 2015) and governments and a vast number of civil society groups became engaged in the formulation of what should follow. These have become the SDGs, adopted by governments at the UN in September 2015. As before, there is much that can be criticised – though they now encompass, in our view, major advances on the MDGs. The SDGs are universal, applying to all countries. They have been assembled through an unprecedented process of participation, country by country, often with strong civil society participation, in countries of the South as well as in the North. In their diversity and multiplication, the new SDGs
appear to have answered concerns of representation. They are the first
global set of policies to have truly been originated from the contributions of multiple actors, stepping beyond the 'ivory towers' of 'developed' countries' wisdom or top-down UN leadership.
These are major virtues, in our view, far outweighing their oft-derided number: 17 goals, 169 targets and 304 indicators. As each country is required to adapt the goals to their own situation and set national priorities – in consultation with civil society organisations – these seem narrow criticisms,14 compared to the remarkable achievement of all the nations formally agreeing on goals and targets for future development.
A growing awareness of the earth's planetary boundaries, through evidence of climate change, shows clearly that all development paths need fundamental change. No previous path provides adequate guidance for the challenges of the future. New technologies as well as new directions and political alliances are needed. Global sustainable development cannot be pursued without fundamental changes by all major actors, of each country's own development structure and path, as well as strengthening the structures of international global governance in support of them. The concept of 'development' itself requires fundamental changes.
Moreover, at the time of writing, many regions of the world are torn by war and civil strife, often aligned with religious and other factions. The global economy has been slowing, with the institutions of global governance weak in their capacity to command consensus, let alone to mobilise action. The multinational corporations seem able to increase their monopolistic dominance in markets throughout the world, with
mostly inadequate efforts of governments to exert control let alone to
levy reasonable contributions to national taxation.
The future for development needs to be framed by five fundamental
objectives – universalism, sustainability, equity, human development
and human rights. All five are embodied in the SDGs, an important
advance as well as a formal political endorsement, internationally and nationally, even if with varying levels of commitment by the majority of the world's countries.
First, Universalism. This is a great advance, as it removes the longstanding weakness of development, where for 50 years, people from the North prescribed desirable solutions to problems faced by people in the South. In our view, universalism does not mean a total change of content and agenda but a broadening of context and application. It also means, as Dudley Seers demonstrated in his own work during his last ten years, that development experts will use approaches and techniques developed in and for developing countries and apply them in and for
developed countries (Seers 1980; Seers, Schaffer and Kiljunen 1979).
For many development specialists (though by no means all) universalism may also bring a welcome change of attitude – no longer lording it over others as experts but relating to those in policy positions in a more questioning, learning and empathetic way, recognising the social and political complications which often constrain doing what we experts think is obviously desirable. It may also help strengthen the political economy analysis of strategy and policy action.
What might a more universal development agenda mean for research and teaching? Bringing together analysis of development in so-called developing countries with analysis in so-called developed countries would broaden both approaches. It would combine attention to comparative work in developed countries, with more attention to context and institutions – and long-run changes – and perhaps to the political economy of policy proposals. One can only be surprised and somewhat appalled at the narrow national focus of economic policy debate in the UK, which is so often limited to UK issues with little, if any, attention given to the experience and policy approaches of other countries in Europe, let alone of countries beyond.
For developing countries, and for teaching in institutions like IDS, a universal approach would deal with one of the curious weaknesses of teaching – bringing students from the South to the North to learn about how to analyse problems and reach policy conclusions in their own countries. IDS students complained about this in the 1970s. In response, Dudley Seers took the students to Scotland to help analyse the consequences of new discoveries of North Sea oil (M.Phil Faculty 2012) and also got policymakers from Norway and Venezuela to share their experiences. This is an example of a new approach, well ahead of the changes which a more universal agenda for development and analysis would bring.
Sustainability. The challenges to achieve sustainability are to keep resource use within the external boundaries of planetary sustainability while ensuring enough production to meet the human needs of the world's population. Many have shown that with reasonable distribution this could be feasible (Leach, Raworth and Rockström 2013; Raworth 2012). Yet at the moment, the needs of the poor and marginalised are mostly seen in poor countries and in rich as requiring more economic growth, both to generate more employment and more taxation to
ensure the finance required to create more social services, especially
for the youngest and oldest sections of the population. With the older sections of the population increasing in many parts of the world, the implications of this human approach to long-run sustainability are often neglected in the focus on environmental issues and survival of the planet, which though vital, is only part of the total problem. Both elements of sustainability must be explored, and both will require
serious challenges to ever-growing consumption among the better-off
sections of the population in both rich and poorer countries.
Equity. Inequality has at last been put centre stage, especially thanks to the work of Piketty (2014) and the econometric work of Berg and Ostry (2013) of the IMF. The opportunity of working on inequality must not be missed, because the forces of opposition to action will not remain sidelined for long, even though the extremes of income inequality within countries are at unprecedented levels. Already the dramatic
reductions of Gini coefficients in the majority of Latin America countries, as shown by Cornia (2014) and López-Calva and Lustig (2010), are slowing and sometimes being reversed.
The work by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) is also an important reminder that inequality must be analysed in a multidimensional manner and brought into mainstream policy. The Spirit Level shows ten dimensions of wellbeing where inequality has a major impact on mental illness, child and adult mortality, obesity, educational performance, teenage births, homicide, imprisonment rates, levels of trust and social mobility. Wilkinson increasingly believes that the common factor behind these many and widespread repercussions of inequality is stress – and a reminder that the future universal agenda of human development must encompass a wide range of multidisciplinary work. Naila Kabeer's (2010) IDS publication on intersecting inequalities explores a range of issues which merit further research.
Human Development. The human development (HD) paradigm has its own stimulating richness and subtleties. But it needs to be pursued within the framework of capabilities, functionings and choices as so brilliantly set out by Amartya Sen (1999), now also backed up by many others like Martha Nussbaum, Des Gasper, Ingrid Robeyns and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr.15 The fact that some 140 countries have produced their own national HDRs is a further example of its widespread application.
Yet one must note that HD is still rarely part of mainstream work, either in the teaching of development or as a frame for policy analysis and policymaking, even among the UN agencies. Human development theory, techniques and applications need to be brought into development teaching, as well as into policy studies and consultancies. This would be
an important step towards offsetting the narrow applications of neoliberal
economic teaching and policymaking – and the narrowness of austerity policies being promoted across Europe today. As Mahbub ul Haq put it in the 1992 HDR, it is illogical and absurd to think that one can restore balance to a country's economy by unbalancing the lives of its people. Human development analysis is also a better frame for considering the
unique problems of different categories of people, perhaps especially
today of older people, and how to strengthen their capabilities for the choices that make sense in their stages of life.
Human Rights. Human Rights is not separate from Human Development but integral, although not identical, to it. As Sen has shown, human rights add international legitimacy and a process of law to concern for human rights (Sen 1999; UNDP 2000). Human development adds analysis and experience of national institutions, structures and experiences of how countries can advance economically and socially in development in ways which combine respect for human rights with
human rights fulfilment. There are implications for both policy and
research, examples for policy in how this has been done and research as to the positives and negatives of these situations and the political economy
and costs and benefits of lessons for other countries in the future.
The above objectives set an international agenda of goals, to which every country needs to take action. For the poorer and least developed countries, international support is still generally required. But for middle-income and richer countries – even the richest – international action and stronger global governance is also required if the world is to ensure a peaceful, inclusive and stable frame within which all nations can advance. As part of this, international regulation and initiatives are needed to ensure the provision of 'global public goods' in such key areas as guarding against the transmission of disease, attacks on cyber-security, as well as moving towards new global policies to control migration and to ensure fairer regimes for trade and technology development.
All these have important implications for development teaching and research in bodies like IDS. Universality means a broadening of teaching and research to apply development thinking and research from developing countries to problems in the so-called developed countries
– and vice versa. The paradigm of Human Development includes the concept of human security and humane global governance. Work on the SDGs in all countries requires support for the process of democratic priority-setting at all levels of policymaking and implementation as well as professional assistance in the processes of review, monitoring and accountability of them, especially by support of regional peer reviews of progress and summary assessments of progress to high-level UN fora. More attention to inequality will involve a wider multidisciplinary approach throughout the whole range of human development concerns, policies and actions.
There will be more than enough work for development professionals in the future – and the shift of focus and broadening of coverage and development approaches will enliven and energise the next generation of committed development professionals. There will be no lack of issues on which IDS can research and teach, increasingly in partnership with others around the world. May the Institute continue to challenge simplistic and self-interested orthodoxies and remedies, to promote a bold and humane global vision, and through research contribute to actions which help and encourage progress towards it.
Whose language brings forth our world and guides our actions? Who defines what words mean? The world brought forth is usually constructed by the powerful in central places or by those well placed to influence them. The words and concepts of development both express and form the mindsets and values of dominant linguistic groups, disciplines and professions, and organisations (Chambers 1997: 1746 quoted in Cornwall and Scoones 2011: 80).
1.As noted by Ferguson (1998).
2. For a summary of the ILO Kenya Mission, see Singer and Jolly (1973). A shortened version is included in Jolly (2012: 121–34).
3. 'Basic needs' were defined by ILO as comprising two elements:
(1) Certain minimum requirements of a family for private consumption: adequate food, shelter and clothing, and also certain household equipment and furniture; and (2) Essential services provided by and for the community at large such as safe drinking water, sanitation, public transport and health and educational facilities (ILO 1976: 32).
4. See also Milestones and Turning Points (Jolly 2012: 237–42).
5. World GDP did not record any growth in 1975.
6. A shortened version is given in Jolly (2012: 278–95).
7. John Kenneth Galbraith described Friedman as having received the compliment of being one of the few economists whose policies were almost perfectly implemented – and found not to work!
8. See Adedeji (2004). His chapter goes on to describe the Elliot Berg report under the heading of 'Battle for the African Mind'.
9. There is a vast literature on structural adjustment. On the impact on African politics see Herbst (1990).
10. At which Dudley Seers had first presented his views on the meaning
of development.
11. In 2007 James Raymond Vreeland reviewed a vast collection of studies on explanations for failures of adjustment policies and concluded that they had a strongly negative and statistically significant impact on economic growth in the long run. As he put it, 'the newly emerging consensus is that IMF adjustment policies hurt economic growth' (Vreeland 2007: 90).
12. Actually the indicator for the World Bank at the time of writing, 2016, is US$1.90, a still narrow and inadequate measure, though widely used and dominating internationally.
13. For some notable examples see Bossert (2005), Jolly (2010), Kabeer (2006), Manning (2010), Pollard et al. (2011) and Vandemoortele and Delamonica (2010).
14. See for example, Vandemoortele (2014, 2016).
15. See Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, www.tandfonline.com/ toc/CJHD20/current.
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© 2016 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2016.129
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This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 47 No. 2 May 2016: 'Development Studies – Past, Present and Future' 13–32; the Introduction is also recommended reading.