Eur. J. of Polit. Econ, Vol.5, 1989.
CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
“The 90s” are one of those arbitrary time-locks we in development work like to use to make new resolutions to tackle, once and for all. the problems of underdevelopment in the world. But there is nothing magical about a new decade. In development work, milestone breakthroughs rarely happen, and much less do they occur on nicely rounded dates. I would argue that no progress will be made in the decade to come unless we make some major changes in development thinking and development work.
While there is, understandably, a temptation to look at the hopeful side of the new decade, the reality is likely to be harsh. Lowered East-West tensions will mostly mean shifts favoring Eastern Europe, not the Third World. Peace dividends resulting from disarmament talks in the North will not spread to regional or national conflicts that contribute to the planet’s worst underdevelopment problems.
Furthermore, present global economic and political realignments are not of the kind needed to favor unequivocally the world’s poor and hungry. The search for consensus on global environmental reforms is overshadowing the search for solutions to our most pressing equity concerns related to needed sociopolitical changes.
Take the battle against hunger as an example. One cannot but be amazed that experts are now saying that the 90s offer a breakthrough, because “we have now discovered the real causes of hunger”. Where have we been all these years, then, that it has taken us until now to discover these causes which have been around us since time immemorial? The hungry could have told us long ago what the problems were.
One wonders, then, what can we development workers, especially those in the jet-set category, be accused of when confronted with all these years of “stagno-deterioration”? Not necessarily of a lack of commitment, nor mediocrity; I hope not of cynicism, although I am not always sure: not of profiteering or lack of professionalism.
But I think we can stand accused for the staleness of our approaches; for our complacency towards the status quo: for our lack of criticism of I he overall lack of progress; for our political naïveté or – more likely – for. our choice not to get involved in the politics of it all: for uncritically pushing forward to do something and get things done and over with; for not solving problems boldly using workable approaches agreed upon with those who must live with our decisions; for our paternalistic and ethnocentric approach. In sum, we cannot escape taking part of the blame.
A minimalist approach dominates our development philosophy, resulting from our obsession to sharpen the focus of the interventions through which we choose to tackle development issues. Many of these interventions, especially by the United Nations, mainly contribute to better chronicling and record-keeping of how bad the situation is.
These minimalist strategies – still dominant in 1991 – concentrate on doing the “doable” and thus apply a “shish-kebab mentality” as one prominent United Nations official has called it. This approach looks at the various problems of maldevelopment as if they were all separate events skewed together by tragedy. But the skewer is not tragedy! The skewer represents, the sum of the structural constraints that perpetuate the poverty and powerlessness cycle with all the ill health, malnutrition and other problems that come with it.
A minimalist approach dominates our development philosophy, resulting from our obsession to sharpen the focus of the interventions through which we choose to tackle development issues.
The fallacy is to keep concentrating on the pieces of meat in the shish-kebab as the only “doable” alternative; the tackling of the structural problems in the skewer is also “doable”. But only to the extent that we – together with the victims of non-development – concentrate our efforts and energies on doing so, since these problems will not go away by themselves. Therein lies the real challenge for the 90s.
The question of how we can more effectively work together to heighten the priority for an all-out battle against under-development cannot be posed in isolation anymore. We must ask if we are willing to drop much of what we are currently doing as development professionals and institutions and more decisively move, with the beneficiaries, into new directions with a greater potential to make a dent on the chronic and self-perpetuating problems of maldevelopment.
Looking the other way, or conducting business as usual to deliver more of the same during the decade of the 90s, even if “more focused” (as the present mood seems to call for), will not do. We cannot forget that the next time-lock marks a millennium in our civilization, a civilization that has for so long pursued the wrong development priorities.
[Claudio Schuftan is a Chilean medical doctor and independent consultant based in Saigon].