What's hot and what's not: How has development thinking changed in the last five years?
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PowerPoint presentation from Duncan Green's (Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB) Sussex Development Lecture on 6 March 2013
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What's hot and what's not: How has development thinking changed in the last five years?
- 1. What’s Hot and What’s Not? Changes in development thinking in the last 5 years Duncan Green IDS 2013
- 4. Global Food Price Spikes
- 7. New Thinking on Development: Where do Poor People live?
- 8. Women for Development v Development for Women
- 9. The nature of poverty: volatility, well-being, chronic v churning
- 10. Complex Systems v causal chains
- 11. Multipolar world – who’s in charge?
- 12. Helping Others v Do No Harm Make Poverty History (2005) IF (2013) • Aid • Aid • Debt • Tax Loopholes • Trade • Land Grabs • Transparency
- 14. People on the move: global
- 15. People on the move: Urban
- 16. Waves of New Technology
- 17. So what did FP2P get right/wrong? • How Change Happens as key area of study • Inequality and redistribution (banks, resources) • Active citizens and effective states, but – Market power needs to be in there • ‘The national’ > global, but...... – Climate change/boundaries a game changer (and a present not future threat) – Financial system remains a huge threat
- 18. “In telling us what can be achieved by ordinary people through organised action, this book generates hope even as it enhances understanding of what is involved in the removal of poverty.” Amartya Sen
- 19. But blogging is more fun....
Notes de l'éditeur
- FP2P’s core argument was that the driving force behind development (understood in the Sen formulation as ‘freedoms to do and to be’) is a combination of active citizens and effective states. Why active citizens? Because people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, fighting for rights and justice in their own society, and holding the state and private sector to account. Why effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state than can actively manage the development process in terms of infrastructure, rule of law, human capital and industrial upgrading. In addition, the first edition stressed the importance of inequality and redistribution, both in terms of human and economic waste, and social justice. What’s new in the second edition? An update chapter covers the main events of the intervening years, which it identifies as three shocks – the global financial crisis, the food price spike(s) and the Arab Spring - and a slow-motion train wreck in the form of climate change.
- The global financial crisis was a watershed event, triggering historic geopolitical change, including the shift from G8 to G20 and the rise of the emerging powers. It drew attention to the risks of an excessively ‘financialised’ global economy, but failed to lead to a reining in of the excessive size and volatility of ‘hot money’, condemning us to future financial crises, possibly starting with Europe in the coming months. More broadly, the advent of the G20 has failed to reenergise the multilateral system, with global talks on climate change, trade and arms control all paralysed. Some commentators are even talking of a ‘G zero’, with no-one in charge.
- The food price spike, which in many countries traumatised the lives of poor people to a much greater extent than the financial crisis, reversed decades of low and falling prices, threatening long-term progress on hunger and nutrition. That has led to renewed attention to food security worldwide, but with some unfortunate side effects such as ‘land grabs’ across the developing world by investors from rich countries.
- The Arab Spring confirmed the importance of active citizenship in processes of change, and made us think much harder about the role of women (who were very active) in Islamic contexts, along with the granular and complex nature of social movements .
- The location of poverty: LICs (external: aid, poverty) MICs (internal: equity, social contract) Fragile and Conflict Affected States
- Taken together, the three shocks, along with the growing frequency of extreme ‘weather events’, have made us much more aware of the impact of volatility, risk and vulnerability on the lives of poor people. That leads both to a focus on building resilience, and on trying to dampen or prevent them in the first place. Shock absorbers, from social protection to food reserves to ‘circuit breakers’ in financial markets, have become a much more central part of the development debate.
- But it goes deeper than that. The unpredictability and systemic nature of the shocks has driven home the inadequacy of development thinking predicated on linear processes of change. That raises real challenges for traditional systems of planning and measuring results. Oxfam recently sent a complexity physicist to visit its programme in Northern Kenya, and the insights from this kind of interdisciplinary work are likely to play an important role in transforming our thinking in coming years.
- So how has the first edition survived the assault of history? I think the central argument still holds - that development happens primarily through the interaction of citizens and states, with aid and the global system playing only a second order role. However climate and finance are two examples of collective action problems that cannot be resolved at national level. The paralysis of international action in those areas is perhaps the darkest cloud on the development horizon, threatening to reverse 60 years of unprecedented human progress. Inequality and redistribution have become far more mainstream debates, with even the IMF weighing in on how high levels of inequality imperil both growth and stability. Tighter constraints placed by ecosystem boundaries (for example on the right to pollute), further heighten the importance of who gets which slice of the pie. Many people, both inside and outside Oxfam, have questioned the absence of the private sector from the citizen-state binary. My response has been that an effective state creates the enabling conditions in which private enterprise can flourish. However, I now think that I, along with many others, confused and conflated the roles of private sector, markets and economic power. The lacklustre response to the financial meltdown has demonstrated the central role of economic power, and we do need to make the visibility and regulation of economic power a more central part of our narrative. Finally, one area of the first edition has expanded enormously in the last five years – its focus on ‘how change happens’. Better understanding processes of change, and the accompanying analysis of the distribution and redistribution of different kinds of power within change processes, is rapidly becoming a central component of development thinking at Oxfam and many other development agencies. It is also the subject of my next book – now there’s a hostage to fortune!