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Summary Lecture week 1 to 6 IDS
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Lecture 1Part 1 Intro to Theories of Development
• Birth of Development
• Modernization theory
• Dependency theory
• Neoliberalism
• Critical Post-development theories
• Institutions of Development
• Measuring development
What academic justification has IDS?
- Why does a study focus only on one part of the world? What makes IDS distinctive from other
social sciences?
- Studying Development (historic patterns of progress) or intentional plans to ‘develop’
(development practice)?
- What are the discipline’s boundaries? What thematic concentration?
- An “asymmetric business” of Northern researchers studying the Global South?
While Development Studies is relatively new as an academic discipline, the questions being
asked are not.
Defining development studies
- International Development Studies is a multi-and interdisciplinary field of study that seeks to
understand social, economic, political, technological, ecological, gender and cultural aspects of
societal change at the local, national, regional, and global levels, and the interplay between
these different levels and the stakeholders involved.
- And……
- Development studies is a broad field united primarily by thematic concentration.
- However, ambiguity in what is multidisciplinarity, cross-disciplinarity, pluri-disciplinarity and
trans-disciplinarity.
- See Box 1.2
,Development studies: a multi- and inter-disciplinary field of study that seeks to understand social,
economic, political, technological, and cultural aspects of societal change, particularly in developing
countries. It encompasses and involves a variety of disciplines.
It’s context sensitive and normative. Knowledge is created as an instrumental means of contributing to
the improvement of natural and social conditions.
Dimensions of Development
Development as short-term goals: aid effectiveness
The real problem with the “aid effectiveness” craze is that it narrows our focus down to micro-
interventions at a local level that yield results that can be observed in the short term. At first glance this
approach might seem reasonable and even beguiling. But it tends to ignore the broader
macroeconomic, political, and institutional drivers of impoverishment and underdevelopment. Aid
projects might yield satisfying micro-results, but they generally do little to change the systems that
produce the problems in the first place. What we need instead is to tackle the real root causes of poverty,
inequality, and climate change.
Development ≠ Development Aid
Development ≠ Economic Growth
- “There is no perfect measurement of development”.
- Aid and development are now separate topics with separate debates.
- Foreign aid is one of the least important ways in which rich countries affect poor countries
- There simply is no accepted recipe for how to make poor countries achieve permanently high
growth. The bottom line is that the true ingredients of persistent economic growth remain
mysterious.
Defining Inequality and Poverty
Poverty (see chapter 26):
- Absolute poverty (“being unable to subsist”, e.g., less than $1.0/$1.25/$1.90 a day) vs. relative
poverty (“inability to reach a minimum accepted standard of living”, “live a good human life”),
also multidimensional poverty index, poverty as unfreedom, relational poverty
- Objective vs. subjective measurement
- Transient vs. chronic poverty
- Human agency vs. social structure as underlying causes (see next week)
“The WB’s poverty threshold of $1.90 a day embodies wide-ranging assumptions.”
Defining inequality
- Gini index (coefficient) measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income
in a country.
- Inequality: During much of the 1970s and 1980s, Indonesia’s low level of income inequality
helped raise living standards and reduce poverty. In 1970, just 25 years after independence,
the country managed an enviable distribution of wealth among a diverse population, with a
Gini coefficient (a common measure of income inequality) of 0.35 (with zero representing
maximum equality). By comparison, neighbouring Malaysia had a Gini coefficient of 0.50.
Study poverty and inequality rather than development (at what level of analysis)?
, - Living standards have increased by many times, life spans have more than doubled , and people
live fuller and better lives than ever before.
- The principal polarity is not between rich and poor countries, but between rich and poor people
across the globe.
- The binary concepts that have underpinned the dominant Development Studies narrative—
developed/developing, rich/poor, North/South, donors/recipients—are increasingly inoperable
in analytical terms.
If global wealth and global poverty are interconnected, then the object of development studies should
be refocused. The polarity is not between rich and poor countries but between rich and poor people.
Relevance of studying poverty? The optimistic story
- “If you had to choose any moment in history in which to be born, you would choose right now.
The world has never been healthier, or wealthier, or better educated or in many ways more
tolerant or less violent.”
- For all the worries today about the explosion of inequality in rich countries, the last few
decades have been remarkably good for the world’s poor. Between 1980 and 2016, the average
income of the bottom 50 percent of earners nearly doubled, as this group captured 12 percent
of the growth in global GDP.
- Never before in human history have so many people been lifted out of poverty so quickly.
Inequality as a consequence of progress. Poverty used to be a reflection of scarcity. Not it’s a problem
of identification, targeting and distribution. And that’s a problem that can be solved.
Building on the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the germ theory of disease, living
standards have increased by many times, life spans have more than doubled, and people live fuller and
better lives than ever before
Inequality remains or even deepens: what stories tells this figure?
Deepening national inequalities
- Even if globalization were to be associated with an absolute real income improvement for all,
or almost all, and reduced global inequality, if it is also associated with rising national
inequalities, the unhappiness stemming from the latter may dominate .
- While average per capita incomes are growing in most countries, inequality is also growing
almost everywhere.
, - Rather than merely looking at the net number of people who leave poverty in any given period,
it is better to take a dynamic approach to measuring how people move into and out of poverty
over time.
- The explosion of inequality in economies that are no longer growing is bad news for future
growth.
Global inequality 1990-present
Decades of progress on extreme poverty now in reverse due to Covid
- Two decades of progress in the reduction of extreme poverty, the elimination of which is one of
the sustainable development goals, have been pushed into a sharp reverse by a combination of
the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing climate emergency and increasing debt.
- Global poverty has seen a spectacular decline since the 1960s –when about 80% of the world’s
population lived in extreme poverty. Today that number has been reduced to nearer 10%, with
hundreds of millions of people removed from the extremes of hardship.
- But the numbers are forecast to rise in the coming year, and it has not only been in the category
of those living below the poverty line of $1.90 (£1.30) a day that increases have been seen.
Experts have noted a worrying rise in numbers of people living on less than $3.20 (£2.35)
between June last year and January 2021.
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