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A Developing Ideas series

DEVELOPMENT AT THE CROSSROADS

Part 4 of 4:

The Developing Consensus

Developing Ideas surveyed some of the world's most influential practicioners on how the global development agenda is - or should be - changing. Here's what they advocate.

A wider Approach to Development

Wide agreement now exists that no one group of professionals has a monopoly on expertise in development. As economist Herman Daly says, "I would like to see more influence of sociologists and anthropologists and certainly ecologists and environmentalists." But he warns that no single group should be allowed to dominate. "I wouldn't want any of those disciplines to be as dominant as economists are," he says.

Philip Stewart of the Oxford Forestry Institute puts it this way. "Fragmentation in the human sciences leads to inhumane nonsenses," he says. Jerome Rothenburg of MIT says, "We don't need better science, just better teamwork." Barbara Harriss-White at the International Development Centre at Oxford agrees. "Labeling and sectoralizing everything is the kiss of death for development projects," she says.

Researchers are finding that government regulations are not necessarily the only or best way to achieve positive results. When government regulations cannot be easily enforced, such as during wars or when enforcement efforts are hampered by corruption or low budgets, alternatives must be found. The World Bank's Policy Research Department recently discovered that improving people's access to information can work wonders. For example, when detailed information about pollution emissions was given to local communities in South-east Asia, people suddenly found themselves armed with solid evidence for fighting local polluters in court. David Wheeler, the leader of the study, concludes, "For proper regulation of environmental damage, the three relevant concepts are: Information, information and information."

Development projects are more likely to succeed when the people affected feel they have a say in the planning process, say Stephen Marglin of Harvard and Paul Ekins of the University of London. This should tell development agencies that forced approaches don't work and that project management should be fundamentally democratic, they say.

Ideas for the Environment

Everyone has heard about measurements of general economic health like Gross National Product (GNP) or Net National Product (NNP, or GNP adjusted for international flows). Such measures have long been criticized for ignoring negative environmental and social impacts, and Partha Dasgupta at Cambridge University wants to do something about it. He proposes a new measure called 'Green NNP', that takes better account of the environmental costs and benefits of pursuing different national development paths.

Many old taxes and subsidies create incentives for people to harm rather than protect the environment. In France, for instance, undeveloped land in the countryside has long been taxed at nearly double the rate of built-up land. Herman Daly says it's high time governments got rid of these outmoded and destructive incentives. Instead, he says, governments should introduce 'brown' taxes that penalize environmental 'bads' like pollution, and 'green' subsidies that reward environmental 'goods' like nature conservation.

"Currently it's very difficult for the North to tell the South, 'You should limit your numbers so you save all these resources that we can gobble up in overconsumption. And it's difficult for the South to say to us, 'You should limit your per capita consumption and save these resources so we can dissipate them all in population growth down here'," Daly says. Reducing both together "might be the basis of a kind of North-South bargain," he says.

Ideas for Helping People

Development projects may sound more important when they focus on 'big' tasks like building dams or creating industries where nothing existed before. But as Michael Cernea of the World Bank says, unless you have local people in place who are organized and committed to maintaining them over the long term, failure becomes almost assured.

A large contribution to making development projects more caring will likely come from anthropologists. By adopting the 'participant-observation' method, development professionals such as foresters and health experts can learn to start by understanding the situations of actual people on the ground, before trying to change things for the better, says William Partridge at the World Bank.

Alfred Maizels of the International Development Centre at Oxford says policy-makers in developed countries need to learn that "the economic interests of developed and developing countries are inter-connected. Today, developed country governments too readily ignore this. But this is shallow self-deception. It's not 'us' versus 'them' - it's all of us together," he says. Depressed developing country economies end up depressing the global economy - by increasing uncertainty and interest rates and putting a premium on short-sighted short-term investments, he says.