Development in the wrong direction?
- Development cooperation can neither be reduced to fighting terrorism nor can development policy remain a repair shop for the longstanding damage done by a whole series of wrong –purportedly anti-poor (??)– economic policies.
- Those responsible for those wrong policies, i.e., the (macro) economic and trade policy makers, we have not seen and still do not see as the persons or institutions to whom we should be addressing our angry criticism. Ergo, we have been sending the letter to the wrong address…
- We, as part of civil society, should therefore, not look to Development Ministries and Development Policy Agencies, but rather to Ministries-of-Trade-and-Finance-senior-officers to take our claims to. [Our claims should also go to the private-sector-that-so-clearly-influences-the-latter and interprets business ethics only as (sometimes) ‘honest-book-keeping’ and not as ethics also shouldering a clear responsibility for domestic and Third World poverty. In the same context, do not overlook the fact that the existing body of laws is like a tailor-made-suit that fits the interests of the more privileged in the private sector].
- In part, this has happened, because in our development and human rights (HR) work we have not focused on finding the hidden (or not so hidden?) connections between the different forms of injustice, inequality and HR violations we witness day-in-day-out and their (sometimes removed) basic causes.
- That is why this Reader has insisted we need ideology: to become aware of how hidden (political and philosophical) assumptions influence us, our theories and our praxis. The price for showing contempt for ideology has been that many of us are liable for grave past and present political mistakes.
- The Reader has many times, and in different ways, pointed out that –in the words of E.F. Schumacher– ‘markets are the institutionalization of individualism and irresponsibility’ and that the basic principle of Capitalism is money-making which is always valued higher than democracy, HR, environmental protection, or any other value dear to us. So, changing the rules of the game will mean, first, changing this basic principle. (Note that the right to ‘material acquisition or accumulation’ has falsely been portrayed as another HR…!!).
- The Reader has also repeatedly made calls to de-mistify the false division many among us still see between what is considered to be political and non-political: HR is politics, as is food, health, education, the environment…and we unfortunately have little sustainable progress to show for in any of these fronts.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City