Human rights: Food for a tampered-with thought ‘HR and maldevelopment’
HRR 768
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader gives you an idea of why the current ‘development’ process has been unable to tackle the myriad HR problems. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. A dominant part of the new world order is the forceful spread of the ‘religion of development and the religion of the free market’ …as interpreted exclusively by self proclaimed prophets. We need to overcome our inherited perception that the North is the hub of the world. (Mahatir bin Mohammad)
2. A mix of good advice and bad advice is being pushed by strong, charismatic development professionals who have spent years learning how to argue these viewpoints persuasively. Decision-makers often are getting advice from totally unqualified persons who have an axe to grind and who too often give the same advice to everyone, regardless of their individual situations. In that way, many duty bearers are getting only one side of the story and seldom hear any refutations. (J. S. James) Wither claim holders…
3. The cultural baggage consultants bring/take along often weighs more than what they have in their suitcases. Vast cultural gulfs frequently combine with arrogance. They are simply not isolated from the legacy they bring along. At best, they keep making little marginal adaptations: they add small new elements and write a lot of reports, but the model only changes around the margins. (Susan George)
4. In that way, and in the name of progress, Northern-led development gets too much involved in convincing local elites to adopt life paths and lifestyles of the Northern overconsumers. The problem is that, in the process, the North extracts resources from South countries rendered poor to support its own extravagance. (David Korten)
5. Be warned: It is an untruth that good policies are all that is needed to achieve development nirvana.* (R. Davies and D. Sanders)
*: Policy is not a rational problem-solving process, but a political process in which many actors are involved, to get the job done. We need both intellectuals, as well as activists (that are organized, articulate, persistent and representative) to solve development problems. But beware: Social justice and human rights (HR) will not succeed if they remain the sole concern of intelllectuals. (T.Verherst)
6. Let me complement the above with what I often offer you: my favorite one-liners on the topic (or iron laws, if you prefer)
- In development work, setbacks can and do demobilize.
- As development workers, we must make sure claim holders do not make the trip alone…
- Communities measure their progress in subjective, qualitative terms. We do not. (J. Joseph)
- The Northern development industry has mastered the techniques of saying much and meaning nothing. (E. Goldsmith) This is at best unprofessional and at worst irresponsible.
- Northern decision-makers too often have distorted visions of a reality learned from the far.
- The Northern development model suffers from a rhetorical surplus and an ethical and political deficit.
- Policy has been delivered by excessive conservative ideologizing at the expense of down-to-earth pragmatism.
- Development is not brought about by stability; it is stability that is brought about by development. (Sarvodaya)
- Young development professionals have been brought up in the neoliberal ideas where they learned dangerous games.
- Better to land development today than troops tomorrow. (J. Gustave Speth)
And mind you:
- Developed countries have never been richer in history than at present. (Gamani Corea)
The need for structural changes is absent in Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a global failure
7. Aha! The call is for multidisciplianarity…! Multidisciplinary work seeks consensus through an expanded dialogue. Yes, but we fail to clarify the political underpinnings of contributions of each discipline’s representatives. If those who share suggestions-for-action have the same conservative ideological outlook, they agree on priority problems and development coordination strategies for what they suggest is need for true change —coming from that conservative stands! (J. Sebstad)
8. Multidisciplinary approaches to Northern development thus have long reached a point where the tradition of consensus building has only allowed us to advance at the pace of the most reluctant mover (in each discipline); and the reluctance, more often than not, is political rather than technical.
Take ‘sustainable development’
–Sustainable development has become an empty term.
9. For long now, sustainability has been merely made a technical quest thus only really ‘projectizing’ development assistance. This ought to make us wonder: Are we talking about sustainable projects or are we aiming at initiating a sustainable process? We have to keep the focus: Sustainability is a process rather than a product. (Adriano Stefanini)
10. Sustaining the present development model is different than sustaining livelihoods for all. The risks are old, the perspectives and actions needed, not really new thus the need to change and reconceptualize –particularly in terms of adopting the HR framework.
11. Do not kid yourself: Essential for sustainability is to translate development’s ethical concepts into politics (because what we are really talking about is politics). Politics is the translation of all our scientific, ethical and historical knowledge into society’s (better and fairer) management. (Dragojull Najman)
Take NGOs
12. Too many NGOs work to strike deals with unrepresentative governments ‘for the good of the people’ (?). This, easily distances (particularly Northern) NGOs from the very social movements they should be allied with. Northern NGOs ought to support local efforts to address larger systemic issues in an open way letting people’s movements, not elites, define the ‘partners’ they work–with. (Carol Barton)
13. Forty years ago, NGOs were the minor, ignored, junior actors in the development process. Since then, NGOs have become popular, even fashionable as the route to enhanced democracy (?) and sustainable development and, unfortunately, this has meant accepting-privatization–of–development–operations-at-face-value. We need an impact or results-oriented analysis to redefine the respective roles of NGOs. (A. Green, A. Matthias)
Bottom line
—Instead of a war against poverty, development has turned out to be a war against the poor. It always was and is easier to blame the victims than to attack the structural factors that perpetuate poverty. (Fantu Cheru)
14. The North-South debate over develoment is not really a geographical one; it is rather a class-bound and an ideological one. There is a North in the South and a South in the North.
15. There is always the danger that the self-cleansing, self-righteousness of giving to the unfortunate poor will blind the givers to the need for more structural, long-term solutions. That danger is with us today and is largely unspoken. Emergency giving has emotional appeal, the longstanding one does not. People in developing countries are not disabled. They simply lack opportunities. The greatest crisis is the crisis of confidence in grassroots development. (Halfdan Mahler, 1985)
16. And finally, should ‘development’ not be laid to rest and replaced rather than endlessly resuscitating it using new qualifying adjectives such as: sustainable, people-centered, bottom-up, or participatory? (A. Ecobar, G. Esteva)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–Living as we do, at the onset of what some call a global revolution, on a small planet which we seem hell-bent to destroy, beset with conflicts, in an ideological and political vacuum, faced with problems of global dimensions which the fading nation states are impotent to solve, with immense technological and scientific possibilities for the improvement of the human condition, rich in knowledge, but poor in wisdom, we still search for the keys to survival and sustainability. (Club of Rome, 1992)
-The future has many names: for the weak it is the unattainable; for the fearful it is the unknown; for the bold it is opportunity (Victor Hugo) I add, for the powerful it is status-quo.