FOUNDATION OF DEVELOPMENTAL STUDIES I

Unit 1 Lesson

Table of contents

 1. WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?

 2. CONCEPTS OF DEVELOPMENT

 3. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

o 3.1. Discourses of sustainable development

o 3.2. What is to be sustained?

 4. DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINTS

o 4.1. Colonial and western pattern of administration

o 4.2. Lack of Skilled Personnel and Administrative Staff

o 4.3. Centralized Bureaucratic Structure

o 4.4. Lack of political support to improve administrative system

o 4.5. Multiplicity of Administrative Agencies

o 4.6. Limited Popular Participation

o 4.7. Lack of Motivation

o 4.8. Corruption
1. WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT?

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines the word ‘development’ as ‘gradual
unfolding, fuller working out; growth; evolution . . . ; well grown state, stage of advancement;
product; more elaborate form . . . ; Development area, one suffering from or liable to severe
unemployment’.

As this dictionary definition suggests all too clearly, ‘development’ is a word that is almost
ubiquitous within the English language. People talk about the ‘development of the child’ and the
‘development of the self’. Many firms have ‘research and development’ divisions in which the
creation and evolution of new products, from sports trainers and car exhausts to laptop computers
and mobile phones, is the specific focus of attention.

Turning to the level of the state, ‘physical development (land use) plans’ are produced; so too are
‘national economic development plans’, dealing with the economy as a whole. These sorts of plans
are expressly designed to guide the process of development and change in the sense of unfolding
and working out how things should be in the future. In this sense, development has a close
connection with planning. Planning itself may be defined as foreseeing and guiding change (Hall,
1982; Potter, 1985; Pugh and Potter, 2005).

Thus, in the arena of development policy, development processes are influenced by development
planning, and most plans are in turn shaped by development theories that ultimately reflect the
way in which development is perceived; in other words, by what we may refer to as the ideology
of development

However, the development process is affected by many factors other than ideologies (Tordoff,
1992), although ideologies often condition state and institutional reactions to these. The precise
nature of development theories, development strategies and development ideologies forms the
subject of the major review of development theories and strategies that is provided later on in this
course.

2. CONCEPTS OF DEVELOPMENT

There are main concepts that you will meet in this course and other subsequent subjects and some
of these concepts are: Theory, Poverty, Gender, Developed, Underdeveloped, Third world, Low
developed countries (LDCs), Economy, Dependency, colonialism and neo-colonialism,
environment, technology, etc.

Theory, Ornstein and Hunkins (1993) indicated that a theory is a “device for interpreting,
criticising and unifying established laws, modifying them to fit data unanticipated in their
formation, and guiding the enterprise of discovering new and more powerful generalisation.”
In other words theory is a system of ideas or body of knowledge that is sufficiently organised to
offer logical explanations of the interrelationships among certain phenomena.

Poverty, in a broader perspective, is deprivation and covers all aspects of hardship, while in its
narrow sense implies low in a household where the inmates are unable to have access to basic
needs of life such as food, clothing and shelter.

Poverty is the lack of basic necessities that all human beings must have: food and water, shelter,
education, medical care, security, etc.

Absolute poverty is a situation where a population or a section of a population is only able to

meet its bare subsistence needs where the group are unable to maintain some minimum levels of
living where malnutrition and death from preventable diseases occurs.

Relative poverty is inability to participate in activities that are customary in a given society.

Gender is qualities and behavior expected from males and females by the societies they live in
because of their biological differences. The role they play are culturally determined and are seen
as natural.

Capitalism, is a socio-economic system that is based on the private ownership of the means of
production and where the market as opposed to the state determines price levels and resource
allocation. It is sustained by unequal exchange relations between classes.

Dependency is a situation where a group of countries have their economies conditioned by the
development of another economy to which they adhere to.

Imperialism is the formal or informal control of local resources of the developing countries by
the developed countries in a manner advantageous to developed countries.

Colonialism is a formal control of a geographical cover and its people.

Neo-colonialism is an informal control of people.

3. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

3.1. Discourses of sustainable development

The expression ‘sustainable development’ has been used in a variety of ways, particularly within
the context of development studies. Today we are confronted with several different discourses of
‘sustainable development’, some of which are mutually exclusive. For example, campaigners for
greater global equality between nations, huge international corporations and local housing
associations have all had recourse to the term ‘sustainable development’ to justify their actions.

Sustainable development was defined by the Brundtland Commission in the following way:
‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs’(Brundtland Commission, 1987). This definition has been
brought into service in the absence of agreement about a process which almost everybody thinks
is desirable. However, the simplicity of this approach is deceptive, and obscures underlying
complexities and contradictions. It is worth pausing to examine the apparent consensus that reigns
over sustainable development.

First, following the Brundtland definition, it is clear that ‘needs’ themselves change, so it is
unlikely (as the definition implies), that those of future generations will be the same as those of
the present generation. The question then is, where does ‘development’ come into the picture?
Obviously development itself contributes to ‘needs’, helping to define them differently for each
generation and for different cultures.

This raises the second question, not adequately covered by the definition, of how needs are defined
in different cultures. Most of the ‘consensus’ surrounding sustainable development has involved a
syllogism: sustainable development is necessary for all of us, but it may be defined differently in
terms of each and every culture. Furthermore, how do we establish which course of action is more
sustainable? Recourse to the view that societies must decide for themselves is not very helpful.
(Who decides? On what basis are the decisions made?) At the same time there are problems in
ignoring culturally specific definitions of what is sustainable in the interest of a more inclusive
system of knowledge. There is also considerable confusion surrounding what is to be sustained.
One of the reasons why there are so many contradictory approaches to sustainable development
(although not the only reason) is that different people identify the objects of sustainability
differently.

3.2. What is to be sustained?

For those whose primary interest is in ecological systems and the conservation of natural resources,
it is the natural resource base which needs to be sustained. The key question usually posed is the
following: how can development activities be designed which help to maintain ecological
processes, such as soil fertility, the assimilation of wastes, and water and nutrient recycling?
Another, related, issue is the conservation of genetic materials, both in themselves and (perhaps
more importantly) as part of complex and vulnerable systems of biodiversity. The natural resource
base needs to be conserved because of its intrinsic value.

There are other approaches, however. Some environmental economists argue that the natural stock
of resources, or ‘critical natural capital’, needs to be given priority over the flows of income which
depend upon it (Pearce, 1991). They make the point that human-made capital cannot be an
effective substitute for natural capital. If our objective is the sustainable yield of renewable
resources, then sustainable development implies the management of these resources in the interest
of the natural capital stock. This raises a number of issues which are both political and distributive:
who owns and controls genetic materials, and who manages the environment? At what point does
the conservation of natural capital unnecessarily inhibit the sustainable flows of resources?

Second, according to what principles are the social institutions governing the use of resources
organized? What systems of tenure dictate the ownership and management of the natural resource
base? What institutions do we bequeath, together with the environment, to future generations? Far
from taking us away from issues of distributive politics, and political economy, a concern with
sustainable development inevitably raises such issues more forcefully than ever (Redclift, 1987;
Redclift and Sage, 1999).

The question ‘what is to be sustained?’ can also be answered in another way. Some writers argue
that it is present (or future) levels of production (or consumption) that need to be sustained. The
argument is that the growth of global population will lead to increased demands on the
environment, and our definition of sustainable development should incorporate this fact. At the
same time, the consumption practices of individuals will change too. Given the choice, most people
in India or China might want a television or an automobile of their own, like households in the
industrialized North. What prevents them from acquiring one is their poverty, their inability to
consume, and the relatively ‘undeveloped’ infrastructure of poor countries.

Is there anything inherently unsustainable in broadening the market for TV sets or cars? The
different discourses of ‘sustainable development’ have different answers to this question. Many of
those who favour the sustainable development of goods and services that we receive through the
market, and businesses, would argue that we should broaden the basis of consumption. Others
would argue that the production of most of these goods and services today is inherently
unsustainable – that we need to ‘downsize’, or shift our patterns of consumption. In both developed
and, increasingly, developing countries, it is frequently suggested that it is impossible to function
effectively without computerized information or access to private transport.

The different ways in which ‘sustainability’ is approached, then, reflects quite different underlying
‘social commitments’, that is, the patterns of everyday behaviour that are seldom questioned.
People define their ‘needs’ in ways which effectively exclude others from meeting theirs and, in
the process, can increase the long-term risks for the sustainability of other people’s livelihoods.
Most important, however, the process through which we enlarge our choices, and reduce those of
others, is largely invisible to people in their daily lives.

Unless these processes are made more visible, ‘sustainable development’ discourses beg the
question of whether, or how, environmental costs are passed on from one group of people to
another, both within societies and between them. The North dumps much of its toxic waste and
‘dirty ’technology on poorer countries, and sources many of its ‘needs’, for energy, food and
minerals, from the South. At the same time, the elevated lifestyles of many rich and middle-class
people in developing countries are dependent on the way in which natural resources are dedicated
to meeting their needs. Finally, of course, the inequalities are also intergenerational, as well as
intergenerational: we despoil the present at great cost to the future. Discounting the future (as
economists call it), valuing the present above the future, is much easier to do in materially poor
societies, where survival itself may be at stake for many people.

The final element in the redesign of ‘sustainable development’ policy was the creation of the
‘consumer-citizen’, the idea that the individual could best express their preferences for goods and
services through their own (and their household’s) personal consumption. Parallel with the
development of cleaner technology, and carbon markets, came the concern with sustainable
consumption. Partially as a result of their insufficient understanding of the link between social
structures and consumer habits, and the awkward politics of wealth redistribution, governments
came to favour consumer encouragement to live more sustainably and to reduce household
‘footprints’. This implied the design of new ‘lighter’ consumer goods, evocations to act in more
environmentally responsible ways, and an accent on ‘lifestyle’ and the consumer, at the expense
of livelihoods and citizenship.

From the perspective of those most critical of market-based environmental valuation, the
conjunction of newly ‘liberated’ markets and environmental concern was a necessary contradiction
of capitalism seeking a resolution, and could with hindsight be seen as a ‘managed senescence’, if
we continue with the biological metaphors of ‘development’ (Redclift, 2009; Bellamy -Foster,
2010). A more mainstream view, however, would be that they addressed system failures, and could
even lead to a rejuvenated, if scarcely recognizable, type of materials ‘light’ capitalism (Lovins
and Lovins, 2000).

4. DEVELOPMENT CONSTRAINTS

This section on Development Constraints will discuss things that hinders or slows down or in short
limits development. However, you will discover that some of these constraints can be dealt with
through economic and social policy, while others may be difficult to resolve. Remember, the
constraints listed below are not the end in themselves, there are so many of them and in this course,
we adopted the constraint discussed below:

4.1. Colonial and western pattern of administration

One of the distinctive features of administration of developing countries is that it is colonial and
imitative rather than indigenous. All countries including those escaped western civilization have
consciously tried to introduce some version of modern western bureaucratic administration.
Therefore, in former colonies, administrative systems generally imitate the administration of their
former metropolitan states. This colonial heritage has meant a carryover of the colonial
bureaucratic features such as elitism, authoritarianism, aloofness, and paternalistic tendencies.
Finally, the colonial legacy, carrying its own ethos and culture was seen as unsuitable for the tasks
of development.

4.2. Lack of Skilled Personnel and Administrative Staff

No lasting and significant development can be achieved in any developing economy unless there
are sufficient human skills and resources present there that can be used to implement and thereby
assist in prolonging the development cycle.

Lack of skilled manpower in the developing countries is the direct result of the following factors:

· Lack of human resource development planning including inadequacies in the educational

systems.

· Improper recruitment and training policies.

· Brain drain.

One major problem regarding the organization of public services has been the inability to recruit
and retain the right kinds of expertise. The scarcity of technical and industrial manpower will
become more acute as developing countries try further to apply science and technology for
development.

The problem of” Brian drain” is acute in the developing world. The loss by public services of
skilled and qualified personnel, particularly of personnel at the higher levels is a serious problem
in the developing world.

4.3. Centralized Bureaucratic Structure

Public services in developing countries are highly centralized in authority and control. This
excessive centralization is reflected in government ministers assuming overall and total control of
their respective ministries and departments in terms of decision making.

This situation continues to be perpetrated because the civil service in most developing countries
has become an institution in which personnel matters, such as service security, promotion, transfer,
etc depend on political affiliation or support a situation which does not conform to the regulations
governing civil service in developed countries.
Besides, there exists a great deal of friction, tension and mutual suspicion between government
ministers and career officials. Both the ministers and the career officials have adopted an attitude
towards implementation of policy and plans that has alienated the public and has hampered
effective functioning of the government.

The centralized nature of bureaucracy in most developing countries contributes to destruction of

channels of communication in the organization and tends to hamper development administration.

Thus after independence, bureaucratic colonial-oriented administration in the LDCs was

transformed into a bureaucratic organization that emphasized sovereignty of politics rather than
supremacy of administration. But since then considerable changes have taken place. Senior
administrators, now in most developing countries have forged alliances with politicians not only
to brighten their own career prospects but also to articulate political views and gain a greater share
of social resources.

4.4. Lack of political support to improve administrative system

There is a general lack of political leadership’s support for improvement of the administrative
systems of developing countries. Administrative reforms inevitably involve a challenge to
accepted modes of action and traditional values and prerogatives.

Administrative reforms for personnel or administrative capabilities must be supported by the

political executive of a country. “Many governments have been criticized for implementing rural
development programmes without a clear and full political commitment to programme”.

Experience show that political leaders in the developing countries have been primarily concerned
with maintaining their own existence as politicians which has resulted in much confusion between
the administrative and political functions in the policy-making process.

In many developing countries, services are delivered badly or not at all. Politicians often intervene
in the day-to-day operations of public agencies, and managers have limited flexibility.

4.5. Multiplicity of Administrative Agencies

The persistence of fractuated programme implementation has been attributed in part to the absence
of an integrated organization both at national and sub-national levels.

Many government offices, multi-sectoral committees, boards, councils, agencies and the like have
been created, but the performance of these authorities have often been found wanting.

The results inevitably are a duplication of functions and diffusion of responsibility. The spectacle
of sect oral programmes being implemented in parallel fashion, ignoring the beneficial effects of
joint planning and coordinated implementation is common and such development programmes
have been the targets, again and again of critics in many developing countries.

4.6. Limited Popular Participation

Career officials in most developing countries have not demonstrated patience and tolerance for the
necessarily tedious patterns of public debate and discussion of development programmes and
plans.

Many officials have considered community action to be a waste of time and effort and also an
inefficient process. In plan documents of the developing countries, there is emphasis on
community or people participation in the development programmes and projects which are going
to affect them.

4.7. Lack of Motivation

Many public services in developing countries continue to suffer from lack of motivating
incentives. The compensation paid to public employees is often low. Higher wages for comparable
jobs in other areas may prove to be a further disincentive.

The other factor affecting motivation is the work environment. The lack of amenities in the place
of work or hierarchical conflicts is the common features of public personnel systems of developing
countries.

The politicization of public services has affected commitment of public servants to the political
and social aims of the government.

4.8. Corruption

Corruption is a common phenomenon in all countries. Corruption in government has come to be

recognized as a major concern in public management of developing countries. However, it is
pervasive more at high political levels than in the bureaucracy.

Notwithstanding the diversity of conditions and approaches, national experiences reflect certain
basic common trends. Foremost among these trends is the awareness of the negative effects of
corruption, as well as its serious consequences on both the developmental processes and the
stability of government.

In developing countries forms of corruption from acceptance of money or other rewards from
awarding contracts, violations of procedures to advance personal interests, including kickbacks
from development programmes or multinational corporations, pay offs legislative support etc.
Corruption takes place as a result of poverty, greed, inadequacies in existing public management
systems, persistence of traditional values as well as social, cultural, political and economic factors.