The Problems of Development
Time to tell the truth as to who development really helps and reckon with what this means for us all
Most of us think development is a force for good in the world – a way to improve the lot of the world’s poor. Yet, development has long been criticised as a project of Western hegemony maintaining the status quo of the global economy and political power[i].
This status quo was set up under European colonisation and continues through our global institutions, governments and those parading as socially responsible corporations.
For Mali, it was the French who took over most of West Africa using the people and the land as its own backyard to pillage and accumulate from. Even before the French came, the Portuguese, Spanish and British all took part in the Atlantic slave trade which depopulated West Africa and brutally enslaved people in their new colonies established across the Americas. The grand plazas of Paris, Madrid and London to which impress those that visit, are in fact made of the resources expropriated from its colonies. The wealth in the Global North is directly linked to the demise of its colonies.
Your see, even after independence was won by Global South populations which effectively ended colonial rule, Global North governments including France, but also the UK, the US and others have continued to exert power over the Global South through their international agencies, businesses and elite[ii]. This new ‘neo’colonialism has operated through imposed prescriptions of what global South populations must do to improve – to develop. Much of the aid money given in the name of doing good and development, have been conditional on specific economic policies such as Structural Adjustment which promoted a range of economic policies that devastated local economies and communities, yet benefited the West.
The US-based Global Financial Integrity and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published research finding that, whilst Global North governments are espousing such positive development talk, their private organisations extract around US $2 trillion annually from “developing countries”. These researchers tallied up all the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done), but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances and unrecorded capital flight[iii]. In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of US $1.3 trillion, including all aid, investment and income from abroad. But that same year, some US $3.3 trillion flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent US $2 trillion more to the rest of the world than they received.
The research also looked at all the outflows from the years since 1980 – adding up to a huge total of US $16.3 trillion. That’s US $16.3 trillion drained out of the Global South over the past few decades. To get a sense of the scale of this, US $16.3 trillion is roughly the GDP of the United States[iv].
The inherent paradox underpinning the development industry and the status quo it promotes cannot be overlooked. The institutions, structures and discourse that the development industry upholds to better the world, in fact, contributes to growing poverty, inequality, instability and oppression. Our governments negotiate trade rules to protect Western farmers, at the expense of the global poor. On our watch, companies pollute and decimate local means of production and environments, creating environmental and economic refugees. Further, when people impacted by all of this try to migrate for a better life, our pitiful border policies criminalise them and – in the case of Australia – deny them their right to claim refuge, instead sending them to indefinite detention.
Some point to the numbers that technocrats and bureaucrats regularly produce to highlight the successes of development – the many who have been lifted from poverty, treated for AIDS, malaria, the number of children in school, those that have had their life expectancy extended, how much maternal health has improved.
At the World Economic Forum in 2019, Bill Gates tweeted a misleading infographic developed by Max Roser that purported to show that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 94% in 1820 to only 10% today: “A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries.”
But, as critical development scholar Jason Hickel has pointed out, Gates is completely wrong[v]. The graph uses numbers that are very sketchy and were not meant to be used to describe poverty; in fact, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Hickel instead shows us that these numbers actually reveal a world that:
“went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality, what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the Global South. … Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place. In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress[vi].”
Hickel also shows us how the poverty data since 1981 is collected based on a poverty measure of US $1.90 per day – this is a poor measure by any standards. Who can live anywhere on US $1.90 per day? Even living just above this, say on US $2 per day or even US $5 per day, doesn’t mean you aren’t in poverty[vii]. Hickel takes a more realistic measure of poverty of US $7.40 per day, which then exposes the fact that more than 4.2 billion people today live in poverty. That is more than 55% of the world’s population[viii].
Beyond Gates though, some numbers do show some improvement for some people. A reduction in maternal deaths and in the deaths of children under five are good things.
Yet, development as whole comes at a cost. These numbers of slight progress are more like plugging holes in a bursting dam wall.
The dam wall has to be fixed.
Originally written 2019-2020
[i] Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995); James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticisation, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
[ii] Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.
[iii] Kar, Dev and Schjelderup, Guttorm (2016) Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People, Global Financial Integrity and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics, Washington, DC, https://www.gfintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Financial_Flows-final.pdf
[iv] Kar, Dev and Schjelderup, Guttorm (2016) Financial Flows and Tax Havens: Combining to Limit the Lives of Billions of People, Global Financial Integrity and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics, Washington, DC, https://www.gfintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Financial_Flows-final.pdf
[v] Jason Hickel, "Bill Gates Says Poverty Is Decreasing. He Couldn’t Be More Wrong " The Guardian, 2019-01-29 2019.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.