PDM 212: Theories of Development – contentions, arguments,
alternatives
Chapter 1: Introduction – Growth vs. Development
• “Development” means making a better life for everyone.
o Essentially meeting basic needs: sufficient food for maintaining good health;
a safe, healthy place in which to live; affordable services available to
everyone; and being treated with dignity and respect.
o After meeting these basic needs, the course taken by development is subject
to the material and cultural visions of different societies. Methods and
purposes for development should be subject to popular, democratic decision
making.
• “Discourse of Development” (the system of statements made about development).
• Development is a continuous issue with several conventional and unconventional
positions within it, around which swirl bitter arguments and fierce debates.
• Development is a foundational belief underlying modernity. And modernity is that
time in western history when rationality supposed it could change the world for the
better. In development, all the modern advances in science and technology, in
democracy and social organisation, in rationalized ethics and values, fuse into the
single humanitarian project of deliberately and cooperatively producing a far better
world for all people. In this modernist tradition, the radical, unconventional version
of “development” is fundamentally different from the more conventional idea of
“economic growth”.
• Conventionally, economic growth means achieving a more massive economy –
producing more goods and services on the one side of the national account (GDP) –
and a larger total income on the other (GNI). Economic growth essentially occurs
when more productive resources (land and resources, workers, capital plant and
equipment) are employed to produce more goods and services.
• But economic growth can occur without touching problems like inequality or poverty
when all the increase in income goes to a relatively few people. In this case,
economic growth functions in the most basic sense to channel money and power to
the already rich and famous.
• “trickle down” theory (everyone benefits from growth as portions of the income
eventually trickle down from the rich).
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,• Development is interested not so much in the growth of an economy but rather the
conditions under which production occurs and results that flow from it.
o Development pays attention to the environments affected by economic
activity and to the labour relations and conditions of the actual producers.
o Development looks too at what is produced.
o Development attends to the social consequences of production,
o Development analyzes who controls production and consumption.
o Development is optimistic and utopian – it means changing the world for the
better, starting from the bottom rather than the top.
• As an ideal concept, development has evolved from Enlightenment notions about
how the modern scientific, and democratic mind can best intervene to improve
human existence.
• Development embodies human emancipation in two distinct senses:
1. Liberation:
• From the vicissitudes of nature through greater understanding
of earthly material processes as usefully modified by carefully
applied technology.
2. Self-emancipation:
• Control over one’s social relations, conscious control over how
human nature s conceived, and rational democratic control
over ones cultural proclivities.
• Development encompasses economic, social and cultural progress including finer
ethical ideals and higher moral values .
• As development entails demonstrable improvement in a variety of linked natural,
economic, social, cultural and political belief in the viability and desirability of this
kind of economic progress.
• Development is quite different from growth in that development springs from the
most optimistic motives of the modern rational belief system whereas growth is
merely practical and technological – yet also prejudiced.
• Critics from the poststructuralist school of modern critical social theory assert that
developmentalism presumes to define all aspects of progress, thereby destroying
alternative conceptions of the future.
• Post -structuralists believe modern reason drains ones emotions so that people
become machine-like or air-headed, or both.
• What appear to be the finest development principles at the centre of the best of
modern existence are subjected by post structuralists to intense skepticism, and
they conclude that modernity, reason, development, and consumption cannot
automatically be deemed “good”.
• Development is a complex, contradictory, contentious phenomenon, reflective of
the best human aspirations, subject to the most intense manipulation, liable to be
used for purposes that reverse its original intent by people who feign good
intentions in order to gain greater power.
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,The Geography of Development
• The academic discipline of geography looks at two interrelated aspects, or
characteristics, of human life:
o Nature – the relations between societies and environments
o Space – the relational variations in societal type and the relations across
space among these regionally disparate societal types as well as broad
tendencies toward global metaformations.
The chief connection between the two aspects is that regional
variations in human characteristics are essentially produced by
different modes of socially transforming nature.
• In this geographic system, each type of society is spatially related to all others.
• The most obvious spatial connection is through trade.
• Societies with different types and levels of development interact significantly
through power relations – societies with large economies tend to dominate those
with smaller ones.
• Specialized components of society are also bound together through various other
kinds of spatial relations, such as commodity chains, the communication of
ideologies, ownership systems, flows of investments and profits.
• The entire complex of regional economic forms, tied together by spatial relations,
makes up the global totality.
• This “geographic” approach goes through the regional and local parts to reach and
understanding of the global whole of human existence.
• Existence has universal qualities of life and needs as well as particular qualities or
characteristics of livelihood and life chances.
Measuring Growth and Development
• Development is important because it produces an economy (a society and culture)
that determines how people live.
• “Development” is conventionally measured as economic growth, with “the level of
development” seen in terms of “size of economy”.
• The size of an economy, under what is called the “income approach” in national
accounting, is derived from totaling the wages, rents, interests, profits, nonincome
charges, and net foreign factor income earned by the country’s people – the gross
national income is basically what everyone earns.
• Total expenditures on goods and services must be equal to the value of the goods
and services produced, and this must be equal to the total income paid to the factors
that produced these goods and services.
• GNP is the total value of final goods and services produced in a year by the factors of
production owned by a countries nationals.
• Nominal GNP measures the value of output during a given year using the process
prevailing during that year.
• Overtime, the general level of prices tends to rise due to inflation, leading to an
increase in nominal GNP even if the volume of goods and services produces is
unchanged.
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, • Real GNP measures the value of output adjusted for inflation. When economic
growth over a number of years is measured, change in “real GNP” is the figure
usually used to express that growth.
• GDP is the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced
within a country in a year or even a given period of time.
• Dividing the GNP, GDP, or GNI by a countries population yields the average (mean)
GNP, GDP, or GNI per capita.
• The higher the per capita production or income, the more “developed” a country’s
people are conventionally said to be and the higher the annual growth rate in GNP
per capita, the more rapidly a country is said to be “developing”.
• In 2012, the World Bank, divided countries into 4 categories depending on the
income level:
o Low-income
o Lower-middle-income
o Upper-middle-income
o High-income
• Read pg 7-10 for income stats.
Alternative benchmarks
• Refers to income and economic growth as conventionally understood – although
discussions of inequality are usually left out of conventional accounts.
• There are many other datasets frequently used to measure not only growth but the
levels and changes in average age of death, infant mortality, population per
physician, secondary education, and use of electricity.
• An alternative summary measure that takes these into account is the HDI calculated
by the United Nations Development Programme.
• This measure derives from a difference conception of development than usual –
what the UNDP calls “enlarging people choices”.
• The HDI measures development in terms of longevity (life expectancy at birth),
knowledge (adult literacy and mean years of schooling), and income sufficiency (the
proportion of people with sufficient resources for a decent life).
• The HDI adjusted for inequality (higher inequality reduces human development).
• The idea behind this kind of work is to capture more and different aspects of the
human condition in a broader redefinition of development.
• Human development can be achieved through the promotion of “more equitable”
economic growth an more participatory democratic practices
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