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A Developing Ideas series

DEVELOPMENT AT THE CROSSROADS

Part 3 of 4:

The People Equation

Environmentalists may have changed the development equation in recent years. But many observers believe the next wave of change will come from factoring in the social side.

If the recent UN Social Summit in Copenhagen didn't bring food to the tables of the poor, it did put social issues onto the plates of development professionals. At the World Bank, for example, the buzz is that a new Social Department may be created and 'people professionals' like sociologists or anthropologists may be assigned to all development activities.

Anthropologists and others may indeed have something to contribute. In cultures where the traditional economist's assumption of individual actors is plain wrong, anthropologists are more likely to understand the different political system and way people organize themselves, observers say. The discipline's modus operandi - known as 'participant-observation' - painstakingly attempts to understand different patterns of cultural behaviour without interfering with them. This contrasts starkly with the typical development professional's approach of imposing Western models on wildly different cultures. Where entire systems of knowledge differ, as in many remote forest societies, mainstream economic models are apt to hinder rather than help local development.

As economic historian Robert Heilbroner wrote recently in Challenge magazine, "Economics is about capitalism. It has no relevance to any other form of social architecture." The fact that most economists do not understand this, he says, makes a mockery of economics by turning it into "ideology".

David Maybury-Lewis, the Harvard anthropologist, says economists working abroad often assume an aloof, 'Take me to the Hilton' attitude. "The style with which economics is practiced is highly abstracted and quite out of touch with normal people," he says. Anthropologists, in contrast, "are good at really listening to people. They also know what it's like to have no power."

The first sociologist ever hired at the World Bank says common sayings in economics like 'Get the prices right and everything will follow' are based on 'economythical' notions. "Prices are important," Michael Cernea says, "but other variables are too." He rejects Homo economicus as a gross oversimplification of different patterns of social organization around the world, be they families, kinship groups, castes or tribes.

Countless projects and millions of dollars have been lost, Cernea argues, because the social infrastructure of development was misunderstood. For example, water projects in Senegal failed because, though wells were dug, no-one was assigned responsibility for maintaining them. Malian projects, in contrast, created local committees of water users and met with much better results. In forestry, hundreds of millions of dollars have gone toward financing community woodlots despite the fact that "communities are not the proper social actors in forestry - there are too many divisions." Smaller groups are more realistic agents for planting trees because they allow tasks and benefits to be shared more fairly, he says.

Cernea wants to introduce 'social sustainability' - which he defines as building the social scaffolding for development activities - by putting people before technologies or markets or commodities. "Organizations are social capital," he says. Yet networks like credit unions or water users groups have long been neglected. Development projects have to become more 'organizationally intensive', he says, meaning that appropriate social groups have to be created to let local people take ownership.

A more controversial idea brings political savvy to the social and economic problems faced by poor southern countries. In the face of steadily declining commodities prices and a world trading system that favours the north, Alfred Maizels at Oxford advocates the formation of OPEC-like cartels among coffee, tea and cocoa producing nations. If producers like Brazil, India and Ghana modestly reduced output, the argument goes, prices would go up drastically on global markets because of the 'inelastic' or fairly constant demand for these products. Southern countries could then capture more earnings and so reduce poverty.

Herman Daly, best known for his ecological critique of economics, attacks free - or deregulated - trade on principally social grounds. "The idea of mutual responsibilities in a national community is being dissolved by the idea of the global world economy," he says. "That sounds good if you say it fast enough and don't stop to think about it. But it's empty. There is no global community. Where community really exists is at the national and sub-national level where people take on mutual responsibilities for each other."

After decades of academic prescriptions and mind-boggling models, the international development community is making noises about taking local communities more seriously. Common sense has long held people don't fit neatly into tidy equations. Reformers just hope the recent concern will translate into a new professional vanguard of better listeners.