The Constitution of Development

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2005

The constitutional foundations of development can refer to a given political framework within which economic growth or social progress is to be engineered, or it can concern itself with the manner of composition and constraints which, through building up the rules of interaction among individuals in society, can enhance the potential for greater well-being. The first interpretation, as taken up in the Orthodox Development literature, refers implicitly to a model of the State. The second, examined here, set out how systems of collective action can be designed and conditioned to enable individuals in association with others to realize each their adaptive potentials.

2011

Development means progress, advancement, and a better life for everyone. In this highly uneven world, where inter-regional, inter-class, inter-group, and inter-gender differences in development are expanding, this course will critically examine what constitutes progress, advancement, or betterment, and conceptually explore whether and how equality can become a goal for all societies. This course will debate global policy regimes produced by organizations like Word Bank, IMF, and WTO to understand how the geography of global development, and in turn development in the Global South, is shaped.

Les Sciences Sociales, 2015

Development was invented more than six decades ago for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. Ever since, the ideas underlying this concept have changed drastically, influenced by the battle of different ideologies that shaped this hard-to-reach goal. Drawing on the enlightenment philosophers that considered the Western European as the pinnacle of civilization, development extended the imperialism and colonialism taking it to a higher level: opposing theories waged an intellectual war, as they attempted to explain developmental issues such as underdevelopment, inequality and poverty. Some thesis pictured the poor countries as crippled by their traditions and failures, while others stood in defense, blaming the rich countries for deliberately perpetuating underdevelopment to serve their own profit. As the developing nations failed to assemble to serve their own cause, they turned to international sponsors of development, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Such institutions monopolized development, and saw it as an insertion into globalized markets. They promised “development” to the nations that apply their “Ten Commandments” of austerity, deregulation and privatization! The results however were not very promising in practice, as evidence shows: even most long-term recipients of World Bank loans still are not achieving "sustainable development." After the success of the Asian Tigers (that embarked on successful programs of economic liberation and achieved great economic growth without the Bank’s help) the spell was broken, and post-development (antidevelopment) thought began to express openly its criticism against development projects, thus shifting the leading role in development from international institutions to the local culture, even to individuals rather than nations. According to what is known today as the grassroots approach, the focal point of development should move from top-down to bottom-up approaches. Despite the vast array of ideas that crowd into the horizon of this debated field, not one idea has managed so far to eliminate the others. Instead, all the theories and approaches have proved to be landmarks that shaped and is still shaping the history of development throughout the last six decades. This article highlights the failures of the global development organizations, as well as the new theories that aim at curing the negative effects of the development policies. In order to see the importance of combining ideas instead of watching their supporters clash and take sides, and to learn to respect cultural differences by helping local communities achieve development from within, without dictating on them foreign ready-made maps with imported milestones leading to fake development goals that may turn out to be incompatible with their culture. This way, people will be allowed to take their future into their hands, and draw their own way to their own development, by figuring out their own unique solutions to their own unique problems.

1999

What seemed at first would be a fairly simple task of writing an introductory text-something to be accomplished in my spare time and on the basis of already existing knowledge-has proved to require much in the way of rethinking and new intellectual analysis, together with a considerable effort to present the material in (I hope) a telling fashion. To begin with, it would have been impossible to complete the original book in Swedish without devoting a part of my previous so-called higher research appointment in political science-with a focus on developing countries (1991-97)-to the performance of the task. (An acknow ledgement is therefore in order of my debt to SAREC, the department for research cooperation within the Swedish Development Aid Authority, Sida, which financed my research appointment.) Thereafter, moreover, much of the extensively revised and expanded English edition has been written within the stimulating milieu of the Department of Political Science and Centre for Development and the Environment at the Uni versity of Oslo, to which I shifted in rnid-1997. A first draft was ready in the autumn of 1994. Students taking the basic course on development studies at Uppsala University offered valuable comments on the text, and inspired me to introduce extensive changes. The same goes for the Masters and Ph.D. students at Uppsala who attended the yearly course on ;State, Development and Democratisation', as well as several students at Oslo with similar interests. My thanks to all of you! I have also received encouragement and critical suggestions from Peter Mayers, who translated the original book into English, the editors and readers at Sage, and many colleagues. My special thanks to Maria Edin (who has both taken and taught the very course for which this book was originally intended), Lars Rudebeck (who has considered these questions since publishing a book in 1970 on a related topic), Ishtiaq

Concepts in International Law: The Construction of a Discipline, ed. Jean d'Aspremont and Sahib Singh (Edward Elgar, 2019)

This essay examines the institutional, discursive, and political economic dimensions of the postwar regime of development. In addition to discussing the twentieth-century approaches to development, such as modernization, dependency, basic needs, and human development, it offers an extended treatment of the ideological antecedents of "development" in natural law theories on property, classical political economy, late-industrialization, and the Mandate System. It is argued that the central axis connecting the development regime to its historical antecedents is a particular politics of universalism that belongs to the history of capitalism and European colonial empires.

For much the 20th century, development aid to the deeply impoverished nations of the Global South has taken the form of humanitarian assistance. Development projects have been motivated, first, by a humanist principle that all people everywhere deserve basic human rights and freedom from want; and, second, by the widely accepted belief that the Global South is entitled to receive extensive reparations for centuries of colonial exploitation. Together, these two views have made development work the near-exclusive province of liberal humanists, and thus most development projects are designed to advance ideological positions that are popular in Western democracies: individual liberty, equal social standing, fair opportunity, and fair political representation. But while the liberal-humanist ideology is valid on its own merits, it is neither the only nor the best available normative framework to underwrite development efforts. This paper argues that development workers—especially international NGOs and transnational activists—should design projects that incorporate a communitarian, morally particularistic, and non-liberal (but not illiberal) ethic that respects the collective determination of groups without requiring the affirmation of individual free agency. This proposal follows some recent collectivist shifts in the literature on Amartya Sen’s capability approach to justice, which is explicitly or implicitly adopted by many development projects based in the Global South. An increasing number of critics in the last decade have argued that the approach’s liberal-humanist foundations hinder rather than promote its usefulness in eradicating systemic poverty while respecting local communal values. This paper sides with these critiques and takes them a step further, suggesting that development workers who subscribe to the capability approach should commit more fully to a communitarian ethic founded on moral particularism.