1
November 2009
Social Wellbeing and Conflict: Themes from the work of Frances Stewart
John Toye*
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
incorrigibly plural.
Louis MacNeice
I Early Years
Frances Stewart was born in Kendal in August 1940. She had a famous father, the
economist Nicholas Kaldor, who in 1950 moved his family from London to a new
home in west Cambridge. As a young woman, Frances came to feel that having a
famous economist as a father was not wholly a blessing, if one was interested in
economics oneself. She preferred not to discuss her opinions on economics with her
father, because she feared he would say either “I have thought of that myself already”
or “it is wrong”, and she was not anxious to hear either message. At the same time,
her father repeatedly insisted that she was clever enough to think out problems for
herself and this positive message was confidence-building and intellectually
empowering for her.
Her mother was Clarissa Goldschmidt, the daughter of a stockbroker and a brilliant
history graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, whom Kaldor had married in 1934.
Her gift to Frances was her social and political commitment and her willingness to
campaign publicly for what she believed in: she was a lifelong active supporter of the
Labour Party. Even after Nicky had been elevated as Lord Kaldor, she was still
Comrade Clarissa.
After doing well at Cambridgeshire High School for Girls, Frances came to Oxford to
study PPE. Following her mother to Somerville, she had economics tuition from
*
Oxford Department of International Development. This paper is based on a series of conversations
with Frances Stewart, and has benefited in preparation from comments by Valpy FitzGerald, Judith
Heyer, Julia Knight and Rosemary Thorp, to whom I am most grateful.
2
Margaret Hall, a Fellow and a University Lecturer1, and Paul Streeten. She had
philosophy tuition from Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot; for Frances
philosophy was exciting and at one time she contemplated becoming a philosopher.
Paul Streeten was asked by her father to discourage this enthusiasm, and eventually
Frances concluded that philosophising all day and every day might be a rather too
much of a good thing. She decided to stick with the economics option, won both
Junior and Senior Webb Medley Prizes and was awarded a First Class in her Finals.
Frances was offered a tutorial post at LMH while still in her third year, but she turned
it down. A second academic offer was a studentship at Nuffield, but she decided that
at that point she wanted to do something else than take more exams.
She joined the Economic Section of Treasury in 1961. Her motivation was clear, if
over-ambitious: it was to change single-handed the economic policy of the then
Conservative government of Harold Macmillan. Initially, she was assigned to work
with Ralph Turvey on taxation issues, but she did not find him to be a good boss.
She quickly realised that it was not easy for one person on her own to influence
government policy. After an unsatisfactory four months she was recruited by Sir
Donald MacDougall to work with him and two others at the National Economic
Development Council. It was an eventful period when the NEDC was concerned
with setting target growth rates for the UK economy and exploring possible strategies
to raise the UK growth rate. She moved with MacDougall into the newly established
Department of Economic Affairs after Labour’s election victory under Harold Wilson
in 1964.
II Research in Kenya
There are many different ways in which a lifelong interest in development economics
can be acquired. Women economists who have economist husbands sometimes find
themselves living in a developing country on his account. That was what had
happened to Joan Robinson, when Austin was resident tutor to the Maharajah of
Gwalior in 1926-7. Something similar happened with Frances, who before 1967 had
never worked on questions of economic development.
She had met and married Michael Stewart, an Economic Adviser in the Treasury, who
was transferred into No. 10 Downing Street when Thomas Balogh moved there from
the Cabinet Office.2 Michael had long advocated the devaluation of sterling, and by
1967 both he and Balogh had lost patience with Harold Wilson’s refusal to devalue,
so Michael resigned. On the advice of Dudley Seers, he took a post as Economic
3
Adviser to the Finance Minister of Kenya. Frances and their children went to Kenya
with him as dependents. Michael did not know the Minister beforehand and in the
event found that did not really get on with him.
Kenya was the place where Frances’ interest in the economics of development
crystallised. She joined the University of East Africa (Nairobi) as a lecturer in the
Economics Department. Judith Heyer, a friend from undergraduate days, was
already there, and organised the appointment. Judith and Frances have been lifelong
friends and associates. Judith introduced Frances to Philip Ndegwa and Dharam
Ghai. There was a constant stream of interesting development economists who gave
seminars at the University, such as the young Joseph Stiglitz, Gerry Helleiner,
Richard Jolly and others. While in Nairobi she read Gunnar Myrdal’s mammoth
Asian Drama (1968) and was greatly impressed by its perspectives. Frances now
regretted that she had not embarked on a doctorate. She decided that it was
something that should be tackled and began the task even without having a supervisor
appointed.
Development economics was at a moment of change. The neo-classical growth
model’s assumption of a single universally available technology and the paradigm of
modernisation through industrialisation on the Western pattern were both losing their
credibility with development economists. George McRobie, a great friend of
Michael and best man at his and Frances’ wedding, was a disciple of E. F.
Schumacher, and had enthusiastically discussed the idea of intermediate technology
as a solution to the development problem with the Stewarts when they were still in
London. So an important theme of the moment was the development potential of a
technology that was intermediate between the modern technology imported from the
West and the existing labour-intensive but low-productivity technology used by the
traditional sector. Frances decided to investigate the validity of the ideas that George
McRobie had advocated. She decided to undertake case studies of the cement brick
industry and the maize grinding industry, and began to collect data on them that
would be needed for her planned doctorate. She put forward her research plans at
Nairobi seminars to gather reactions to what she was doing.
III Choice of technique
Returning to Britain, Frances registered for a D. Phil. at Oxford and embarked on a
research project on technology and development funded by the Ministry of Overseas
Development. Paul Streeten, himself a recent convert to the study of developing
4
economies through his association with Gunnar Myrdal and Asian Drama, became her
doctoral supervisor. Streeten, like Myrdal, was critical of many of the existing
practices of development planning in poor countries, and of the intellectual
narrowness of a purely economic approach to the study of development.
Frances herself was certainly critical of the neoclassical model and its implications for
the theory of the choice of technique. Its assumption that the number of efficient
techniques available is unlimited, permitting any combination of capital and labour,
and thus (given flexible prices of these factors) the attainment of full employment,
seemed to her quite unrealistic in the context of developing countries. Basing herself
on the history of technological development, and on her industry case studies from
Kenya, she argued that the vintage of machinery was important, because older
machines were more labour intensive, and thus in older industries the choice of
technique was greater. Yet later machines tended to be more productive because of
scientific and technical advances. Since later machines were normally designed to
produce a greater scale of output, earlier machines could sometimes remain efficient
when the required scale of output was small. Thus she concluded that the range of
efficient techniques available to developing countries was likely to be more restricted
than the neoclassical model assumed, although less restricted than a technological
determinist would assert – there was usually more than a single efficient method, the
one currently installed in the West.
En passant, Frances made a number of important conceptual points about the choice
of technique debate. She saw that the question of the choice of technique was rarely
separable from the choice of product: different machines tended to produce somewhat
different products. So the definition of “the product” mattered in the debate. If
“product” was defined widely, say in terms of function or the ability to fulfil needs,
such as shelter or food, the choice of technique might seem extensive (Stewart 1973:
117). If product was defined narrowly, say in terms of a precise physical
specification, the choice of technique would seem very restricted.
The proposition that older machines were more labour-intensive was derived from the
belief that most innovation takes place in developed countries, where labour is scarce
relative to capital. It implies that transfer of current Western technology to
developing countries may have adverse consequences for employment. This was not
a novel proposition (see, for example, Henry Bruton1955: 322-36), but it meant that
the theme of employment was already encompassed in Frances’s work on choice of
technique. The policy objective of intermediate technology advocates was to create
5
additional employment, but at the same time employment that was more productive,
and therefore more remunerative, than possible with the traditional technology.
The1972 ILO Employment mission took her back to Kenya, with a team of
economists led by Richard Jolly and Hans Singer, which included Dharam Ghai and
Keith Griffin. Her contribution was relatively minor, as one would expect from a
junior member of the team - a paper on Kenya’s tripartite mechanism – but she found
the whole process, including the non-stop team discussions, most exciting.
IV Social Cost-Benefit Analysis
In 1972 Frances became a Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Commonwealth
Studies in Oxford, the appointing committee being Wilfrid Knapp, Thomas Balogh,
David Fieldhouse and Ian Little. This appointment was followed by a nonstipendiary Fellowship at Somerville College in 1975, which meant that she was not
on the treadmill of undergraduate economics teaching. The Oxford economics scene
in the early 1970s was rather sharply divided politically. Streeten and Balogh were
both on the left of the spectrum, while others like Walter Eltis, Maurice Scott and Ian
Little were on the right. Ian Little and James Mirrlees had just produced for the
OECD Development Centre their manual on industrial cost-benefit analysis for
developing countries (1968). The manual acted as something of a lightning rod for
Oxford’s ideological divisions, which were displayed in a Special Issue of BOUIES.
Together with Streeten, Frances wrote an article that faulted the Little-Mirrlees
method on a variety of grounds – its limited applicability, its assumption of full
capacity working of capital equipment, its ignoring of externalities and so on (Stewart
and Streeten 1972). Their critique of neoclassical applied welfare economics was
taken badly by some of their economist colleagues in Oxford. Frances thought that
colleagues’ displeasure was an obstacle to career progression, but other influences
may have played a part. Her wish to live in London and to work half-time from 1976
to 1984 may have given the University an impression of semi-detachment. The rising
tide of algebra and econometrics in economics also pushed political economists in
Oxford, as elsewhere, towards the margins of the subject.
She followed up with another critical article on social cost-benefit analysis - or SCBA
(Stewart 1975). Having contested some of the technical assumptions behind the
recommended SCBA calculation procedure, Frances now went straight to its heart the incoherent political rationale for SCBA. Starting from Kenneth Arrow’s theorem
on the impossibility of aggregating diverse preferences while satisfying minimum
6
democratic criteria, she noted that both Little-Mirrlees and the rival UNIDO manual
relied on governments to establish the social valuations that are to be used to adjust
cash flow calculations based on market prices. She then asked: if governments could
enforce decisions made on the basis of their social valuations, why can they not adjust
actual prices by fiscal and regulatory measures and thereby render social cost-benefit
analysis redundant? Her answer was that they could not do the latter because they
were constrained by a multitude of political pressures. However, if that was so, she
concluded, they would be no more able to make Olympian social valuations stick in
their project selection procedures, once the politically powerful had realised what the
cost-benefit technicians were up to.
The significance of this paper in Frances’s thinking is its assertion that there is no
realm above the political fray from whence decisions that maximize social welfare
can be conjured. Such a radical view has consequences both for planners and for free
market advocates. If SCBA is envisaged as the microeconomic extension of a system
of aggregate planning, micro-planners are revealed as relying on a naïve assumption
of omnipotent and benevolent governments. If that assumption is rejected in favour
of the claim that markets maximize social welfare when allowed to operate freely,
such a claim requires a prior social agreement that the current distribution of income
is optimal – an agreement that rarely exists. Her rejection of the idea of benevolent
governments thus gives no warrant for the theories and policies of neo-liberalism.
Instead, it puts a premium on the economist acting as an advocate, consciously
operating as part of the political fray, rather than trying to stand above it. This key
insight informed the rest of Frances’s career.
V The Basic Needs Approach
When Frances was granted a sabbatical year in 1978-79, she chose to work with Paul
Streeten who had left Oxford for the World Bank in 1976. At the Bank, the
President, Robert McNamara, was again on the lookout for new ideas, and had picked
up the ILO’s theme of basic needs. The Bank’s work on basic needs was not located
in Hollis Chenery’s Research Department, but in the Policy Planning Division, run by
the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq. Paul Streeten had persuaded Mahbub ul
Haq of the importance of the basic needs idea and suggested that Frances be involved
in it.
This was the starting point for two important intellectual collaborations of Frances’s
professional life. The first was with Mahbub ul Haq, with whose qualities she was
7
quickly impressed. He was a powerful animator of teamwork, who picked up
interesting developmental ideas, had a way of conveying their excitement to others
and was able to synthesize the contributions that others made to developing them.
He could draw others into energetic participation and yet maintain the overall
organisation of the project intact. He always had some new, grand project on the
horizon. Frances enjoyed working with him and continued to do so, even during the
time he was President Zia’s Finance Minister in Pakistan, until his death in 1998.
On basic needs, Frances worked with Gus Ranis, John Fei and Norman Hicks. Ranis
and Fei contributed to the macroeconomic and planning framework of the BN
approach (Stewart 1985, chapters 2 and 3). This was the start of an enduring research
partnership with Gus Ranis. Ranis might not have seemed the obvious lifetime
professional collaborator for Frances, since he was more of a mainstream economist
than she was. Nevertheless, they have a shared field of interests – in poverty
reduction, inequality and redistribution and the human development paradigm.
Further, successful collaboration is based as much on knowing how to collaborate and
sharing an open mind about how exactly development takes place as on a pre-existing
identity of views about development economics. There is no fixed pattern for their
collaboration, both working on theoretical and empirical material as the task requires.
Initially, Dharam Ghai and the ILO had generated the idea of “basic needs”. The
original idea had a strong Aristotelian flavour; it was specified as comprising all the
components of a full life, including personal autonomy, as well as commodities.
However, the application of this idea was, as befits a Policy Planning Department,
aimed at getting the condition of the poor on to the international agenda. For this
purpose the term “basic needs” sounded more urgent and more likely to get political
attention than “basic desires” or “basic wants”.
At roughly the same time Amartya Sen started developing his notion of capabilities as
a measure of positive freedom. He was critical of the basic needs strategy as a form
of commodity fetishism, since different people converted commodities to functioning
at different rates. Disabled people, for example, would need more commodities than
able-bodied to achieve the same level of functioning, and there were other conditions
that caused differences in individuals’ needs for commodities relative to achieved
functioning (Sen 1984: 280). Sen argued that an increase in human capabilities was
the true objective of development, and thus thought that the basic needs strategy was
misconceived, because it focused on means rather than ends. Yet Sen parried
8
requests from those convinced of the rightness of this view that he should develop the
capabilities approach as an operational programme.
By contrast, the basic needs strategy was primarily a practical endeavour. Unlike
Sen’s capabilities, it was intended to be made into an operational policy programme.
The idea was to construct a meta-production function for the purposes of economic
planning that would relate a set of specific inputs to a measure of welfare distinct
from average income, setting up a series of basic needs to be remitted to government
departments to explore further and formulate appropriate policies for meeting them.
The intention was never essentially philosophical, as was Sen’s. It was an attempt to
advise planners and government ministries on how to do something for the poor,
rather than to change the way that people applied ethical principles to issues of
distribution.
The dissonance between the basic needs approach and the capabilities discourse was
thus, in part, caused by crossed purposes. That was not the whole of it, however.
Even in relation to changing people’s thinking, Frances found something unresolved
about Sen’s capability approach. She struggles with Sen’s concept of “capabilities
that one has reason to value”, wondering whether it functions as a device to block off
the possibility of people wanting to do crazy things and making ‘wrong’ choices in
pursuit of the fully human life – similar in purpose to the device of the ghostly
auctioneer in Walrasian general equilibrium theory. She also questions whether
problems of power can be adequately dealt with by Sen’s appeal to the existence of “a
democratic consensus”. In her view of politics, social consensuses hardly ever exist,
and when they do they may or may not be democratic and they may or may not be
ignored by those who currently hold power.
VI Adjustment with a Human Face
Around 1979, the international political tide that for decades had run in favour of
social democracy suddenly turned. Political support for the type of planning
approaches Frances had been promoting, and indeed for the whole development
planning enterprise, began to ebb. The basic needs strategy lost impetus in the face
of the election of Western governments of various mixes of liberalism and
conservatism. Their response to the problems of developing countries was to insist
on structural adjustment, meaning that developing countries should be told to adjust
their economic policies and management to their macroeconomic circumstances in
ways to be specified by the IMF and the World Bank.
9
Poverty reduction as a subject dropped off the international research and advocacy
agenda at this time, as economic growth was given priority over income and wealth
redistribution. However, the welfare of children was still regarded as a legitimate
topic, and this was very important because for the general public in Western countries
the welfare of children was and remained highly salient politically. So research on
the effect of structural adjustment on children was adopted by UNICEF as a way of
indirectly questioning the validity of IMF/World Bank forms of structural adjustment
itself.
During another sabbatical year in 1985-6, Frances went to UNICEF as a Special
Adviser to work on structural adjustment. Jim Grant acted as the political protector of
the work and rebuffed attacks on the group. Because Richard Jolly was too busy to
do much of the writing, the main work was done by Andrea Cornia and Frances, with
some assistance from collaborators such as Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Richard Longhurst
and Gerry Helleiner. In fact, the group had different views about whether structural
adjustment was desirable in principle, and the issue was never fully thrashed out
internally. What united them was a tactical belief that, if they publicly attacked the
principle of structural adjustment head-on, the rug would be pulled from underneath
their project, Jim Grant’s protection notwithstanding. Their tactics were therefore to
begin by conceding the necessity of structural adjustment at the macro level, as
previous UN expert groups had done (e.g. UN 1965: 1–8). Then they argued that it
should not be undertaken as a big bang – the liberalisation of everything, all at once as had happened with bad social consequences in Bolivia. Rather, adjustment should
be implemented in a phased manner that would reduce the costs of adjustment.
Phasing would give people time enough to make their own adjustments to announced
measures of liberalisation before the government policy changes came into effect.
Frances’s main conceptual contribution was the idea of the “meso level”, i.e. an
intermediate domain of decision making that lay below macro policy but above micro
policy. Questioning orthodox macroeconomic policy prescriptions might be off
limits for the UNICEF team, but at the meso level, they could point to many types of
policy-making that, if properly used, could improve the lives of vulnerable groups.
Examples were changes to the composition of public expenditure and to regulatory
policies that affect the distribution of incomes in the private sector.
Their proposals for the modification of the orthodox approach to structural adjustment
were published as “Adjustment with a Human Face” (Cornia, Jolly and Stewart 1987).
10
It was dedicated to the memory of Nicky Kaldor. While the book was careful not to
claim that the declines in economic growth and welfare indicators in the 1980s were
wholly attributable to the implementation of adjustment measures, the question of
whether they would have been worse without the adjustment measures was not really
explored. The book caught a growing public mood of disenchantment with the
results of a decade of adjustment. In retrospect, its publication can be seen as the
highest point of UNICEF’s international policy influence to date. It also changed the
nature of the debate on structural adjustment, leading to the reinstatement of poverty
reduction on the international agenda in the 1990s.3
Frances did further work on this topic with Gus Ranis and A. Ramirez. By
examining the chains that link economic growth to human development and human
development to economic growth in a process of mutual causation, and examining
empirical data, they argued against the view that economic growth must occur before
human development expenditure is undertaken. They concluded:
“Our findings do not deny the importance of economic reforms, but emphasize
that a focus on human development must be included from the beginning in any
reform programme” (Ranis, Stewart and Ramirez 2000: 213).
This challenged the neo-liberal wisdom of the 1980s that the sequence of reform
had to be economic stabilisation and adjustment first and human development only
later.
VII The Human Development Report
The North-South Roundtable was set up in the 1970s by Barbara Ward, and taken
over first by Maurice Strong and then by the Haqs. Frances went to Pakistan in the
early 1980s for a Roundtable on foreign debt. One Roundtable was also held on
“Human Factors in Development” and this was an important stepping stone leading
up to Mahbub ul Haq’s decision (1989) to persuade the Administrator of UNDP to
launch the Human Development Report to publicize UNDP’s new vision of
development – “human development”. The HDR project brought together the
advocates of the capabilities approach and the basic needs strategy under the common
banner of human development, defined as “a process of enlarging people’s choices”
(UNDP 1990: 10). Amartya Sen contributed Chapter 1 and Frances contributed
Chapter 2 to the first Report.
In fact, neither of them was in favour of including in the Report the statistical
innovation of the Human Development Index, which combined measures of income
11
per head with measures of life expectancy and literacy to create a composite indicator
of human development. It was only Mahbub ul Haq who really championed its
inclusion, though others, including Sen, worked on its construction. Mahbub ul Haq
correctly foresaw that the Index would attract great media and political attention (even
if most of the academic attention came from those who criticised its method of
construction), and that it would give some additional leverage to NGOs’ advocacy in
relation to the plight of the poor.
In subsequent research on the theme of human development, done with Gus Ranis and
Emma Samman, Frances has moved beyond the confines of the Human Development
Index, which they now describe as “a reductionist measure”, in favour of measures
which include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self-respect (Ranis,
Stewart and Samman 2005). This is not an attempt to provide a comprehensive
specification of the components of the good life in the style of Aristotle and Martha
Nussbaum (see Goodin 2000), but rather the use of a broader range of indicators to
investigate whether, in countries or regions, good things go together, and if not , why
not. Like Amartya Sen (1999: 286), the authors doubt that there can be an overall
rule by which development outcomes can be unambiguously ranked.
VIII War and underdevelopment
Nevertheless, it was her work for the HDR that led Frances into her big project of the
1990s, on the topic of war and underdevelopment. Having drawn up a table of best
performers and worst performers in terms of HDI relative to GNP, i.e. the difference
between a country’s GNP and HDI position, she noticed that the worst performers
were mainly countries at war. Although the HDR did not follow up this result,
Frances thought that there was much more to be said about this particular correlation.
At this point, Frances became the Director of Queen Elizabeth House. The research
project on war and underdevelopment was designed as the academic centrepiece for
the re-launching of QEH, an institution that rather badly needed to improve its
intellectual standing. Frances’s collaborator in this enterprise was Valpy FitzGerald,
who had recently joined QEH after being in charge of research at the Institute of
Social Studies in The Hague.
Heretofore war had not had a central place in development studies; it tended to be
assumed that a poor country at war needed the international community to provide
humanitarian relief, while only in peacetime did it need development aid. There had
been little academic probing of whether that dichotomy was still valid in the 1990s.
12
Research was beginning at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford on
the economic incentives that led to outbreaks of civil war (Collier and Hoeffler 1998).
That line of research did not seem likely to address the policy question of the role of
development aid during wartime, a topic of interest to some bilateral aid donors, the
Carnegie Endowment and to the UN, which was reappraising its modes of
intervention after the Rwanda genocide of 1994. The research focus was placed not
on the causes of war, but on its social and economic consequences and their
implications for development aid.
Little systematic information existed on the indirect costs of war, in terms of declines
in output, exports, investment, food production and social expenditures during
conflicts. It was valuable in itself to assemble this data, but additionally the study
demonstrated by a series of country case studies that country experience was quite
varied. Where countries’ economies and social systems were being eroded by the
costs of conflict, however, the study argued that development aid (although in altered
form and with varied conditionality) still had a role to play in reducing these costs
(Stewart, FitzGerald and Associates 2001). This was a major new insight which
affected public opinion and government policy.
The war and underdevelopment project was significant as another watershed in
Frances’s professional development. Up to this point, Frances could be clearly
defined as an economist, engaging with central issues of development economics,
although not from a mainstream position. Thereafter she moved more into crossdisciplinary areas of research. This was important in institutional terms, because it
set up collective tasks on which a new generation of development researchers at QEH
could cut their teeth. It also provided an opportunity for sociologists, political
scientists and those with a philosophical and conceptual bent (like Sabina Alkire) to
work with economists to provide insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
More generally, it facilitated the growing of a whole new generation of scholars, as
the QEH-trained students have gone out to other universities, UN agencies and
national governments. The war and underdevelopment project should thus be seen as
part of a new chapter in which Frances’s intellectual broadening coincided with her
guidance of the reform of QEH.
IX Reforming QEH
To be properly understood, Frances’s key role in reforming QEH requires a brief
flashback to earlier events. When Frances arrived at QEH in 1972, Paul Streeten was
13
by no means a conventional directorial figure. There were no plans for the future
development of QEH, which operated as an institution where those in the University
working on Commonwealth studies could meet visitors from the Commonwealth.
When on sabbatical leave in 1973, Streeten arranged for Keith Griffin, a Fellow of
Magdalen College, to deputise for him, but partly due to pressure from Griffin for a
decision about his future and also for personal reasons, he decided to join the World
Bank in 1976. During the Streeten era, there were only a few research officer posts
at the ICS – occupied by, apart from Frances, Stanley Trapido working on South
Africa and Neville Maxwell working on India and China. Colin Newbury, an
economic historian of Commonwealth African states, and Tommy Balogh, recently
returned from the Cabinet Office, also had offices at QEH. The main collective
academic activities were the weekly QEH seminar in term time, plus a once a term
staff meeting at which staff explained to each other their current work. The only
students were those on the Foreign Service Programme and a programme for Visiting
Fellows.4 QEH became a livelier place when Griffin took over as Warden/Director
in 1977, and generated research project grants that brought in temporary research
officers, but he quickly moved back to Magdalen as President in 1979.
The 1980s were a difficult period for QEH. There were weaknesses in its
organisational structure, its financial control and its management. The Governing
Body set up a Working Party for which Frances wrote a report on reforming QEH
(Rainbird and Stewart 1984) The University decided to develop a centre for
international studies, and merge QEH with the ICS and the IRAE, becoming a
University department within the Social Studies Faculty. Robert Cassen was
recruited from IDS, Sussex as the new Director, on the promise of a very substantial
fund-raising drive. Much managerial responsibility was placed on the shoulders of
the Pro-Director whom he brought in, Gowher Rizvi. Before very long the
University’s Vice-Chancellor was again increasingly drawn into QEH affairs. In a
new externally-funded unit a research report was not delivered to the sponsor because
of an internal clash over claims to authorship. On investigation, it turned out that one
of those involved was using the title Senior Fellow, although he was not an academic
and was not employed by the University. He was also operating a QEH bank account
independently of the University Chest. Perhaps these were minor misdemeanours,
but, for the second time within a decade, QEH had attracted high-level University
intervention.
In 1991, the University appointed a Committee under Colin Crouch to evaluate QEH
and make suggestions for its future. The Crouch Report said that, if its
14
recommendations were not implemented urgently, the ultimate option would be to
close down QEH and disperse the staff to other Departments (paragraph 87-8 and112,
pages 26 and 31-2). This option was stated to induce the “necessary commitments”
to follow the Report’s central recommendation that a strong inter-disciplinary core of
development studies should be built up. In the event, staff dispersal did not happen.
However, QEH governance was effectively placed under “special measures”. Cassen
was replaced by a triumvirate of which he was but one member; the V-C himself
chaired the University Committee responsible for QEH. The Directorship was then
advertised in a form that effectively restricted it to internal Oxford applicants.5
Up to this point Frances, although asked previously to put herself forward, had been
clear that she did not want to take on any administrative functions because of her
family commitments. By 1993, however, her family was grown up, Michael was in a
position to act as house husband and she decided to apply and was appointed.
Prompted by Rosemary Thorp to prepare an agenda, Frances identified three major
elements of change before her interview. The most important was to raise academic
standards, including by detaching from QEH the entities that were not strictly
academic in nature. The second was to develop QEH as a multidisciplinary
institution, firmly integrated into the University. The third was to create a taught
University course in development studies, partly to facilitate interaction and
integration of academics from different disciplines and importantly because it seemed
probable that future finance would be linked to student numbers.
In terms of raising academic standards, Frances opened the door of QEH to staff who
wanted to transfer from other related departments. Rosemary Thorp and Sanjaya Lall
responded enthusiastically by transferring from the Institute of Economics and
Statistics. Other faculty members who did not have the option of transfer became
associates, closely involved with Frances’s QEH. Judith Heyer was one of these.
Apart from these distinguished incomers, critical early appointments of new staff
were made. A system of Senior Research Associates successfully linked many
Oxford academics working on development issues outside QEH with the institution.
The appointment of outstanding younger scholars gave a signal that the next
generation was being built up that would be capable of leading QEH in the future.
QEH had always been dependent on external fundraising, and some units in it were
close to operating as consultancies and/or NGOs. One of these, the Food Studies
Group had run up a deficit, and in July 1993 was forced by the University (some
thought precipitately) to call in a guarantee of £173,723 that had been obtained from
15
the Sainsbury family trust, the Gatsby Foundation. The detachment of the Food
Studies Group was perhaps Frances’s most difficult act as Director. Walking into a
meeting and telling colleagues that they were about to be cut adrift from the
University was quite a challenge. Many in the FSG, however, were willing to go to
gain release from the University’s restrictions on their freedom of action. The
separation was eased by allowing the FSG to leave with its current research projects,
plus £50,000 to defray its legal and other employment-related transfer costs.
Other loosely articulated units, dependent on external funding, were dealt with in a
different way, including the Refugee Studies Centre was set up in 1983 by Barbara
Harrell-Bond. Its outputs were primarily addressed the external world rather than to
other University academics. Apart from not wanting another grand row, Frances saw
the academic potential and importance of the subject and adopted a different
approach. When Barbara Harrell-Bond retired in 1996, her successors were
recruited to fulfil a more academically-oriented job specification. This option was
pursued with the appointment first of David Turton and then Stephen Castles. The
RSC offered a one year non-degree course, which was well attended especially by US
students. As the University came to favour Master’s degrees more in the 1990s, this
course was converted to an M. St. by David Turton, and subsequently to an M Sc. in
Forced Migration by Stephen Castles.
An existing M Sc in Agricultural Economics (now defunct) was inherited from the
IRAE, but new vehicles for the recruitment of Master’s students were needed. A
Diploma in Development Economics had been started by Frances, Rosemary Thorp,
Judith Heyer and John Knight in 1984. Up-graded to an M Sc. in Economics for
Development, this degree was formally placed under the joint control of QEH and the
Economics Department, and Christopher Adam joined QEH to teach the quantitative
methods component. The most important development in teaching was a new twoyear M Phil. in Development Studies that started life under the outstanding care and
protection of Barbara Harriss-White. This required some careful attention to be paid
to the concerns of the Oxford anthropologists and the politics and international
relations faculty, who feared that the new degree might draw students away from their
courses – fears that soon turned out to be groundless. The degree was intended to
teach students in both a multi- and interdisciplinary way, basically incorporating the
topics and disciplines that Frances and Barbara and others involved would have liked
to have been able to learn, in a sort of PPE for grown-ups. The degree was
outstandingly successful in attracting very high calibre students, as well as bringing
QEH academics together on the project.
16
Whereas the top graduates of the Economic Development MSc. had a path of
progression to doctoral studies in the Economics Department, this was not equally
true of the graduates in Development Studies who were barred from most disciplinary
doctorates by their multidisciplinary background. So a D Phil. in Development
Studies was set up, and a large number of students were attracted into it, possibly a
number that initially out-paced the capacity of the staff to ensure their timely progress
to completion. The University’s agreement that QEH should have its own D Phil.
programme marked the culmination of the task of institutional renewal.
With these changes completed, QEH began to look much more like a normal
University Department than it had when it became one in 1986. It had a much
stronger focus on teaching and research. The University was reassured by the
reforms, and saw its policy of up-grading rather than closure and dispersal to be
justified in the event. This was timely because University help would soon be needed.
The 50-year lease on the QEH premises at 21 St Giles expired in 2005, and the owner,
St John’s College, would not renew it. Where else to turn? Various alternatives were
formulated and explored by Frances, Rosemary Thorp and Barbara Harriss-White
together with Julia Knight, but were found wanting. Eventually through the good
offices of Donald Hay, Head of the University’s new Social Sciences Division, the
University offered the former Geography Building in Mansfield Road. The
Department itself had already been re-titled as the Oxford Department of International
Development.
X Groups, Horizontal Inequalities and Violent Conflict
One of Frances’s moves to raise the academic profile of QEH was to re-launch the
journal Oxford Agrarian Studies, inherited from the old IRAE, as Oxford
Development Studies in 1996. Writing the first article for the new journal, she noted
that, because of its emphasis on optimisation by individuals, neoclassical development
economics had for many years relatively little to say about the role in development of
groups and about economic conflicts between groups. As a matter of fact, pertinent
questions had been raised by Peter Bauer in the 1950s, but throughout the Cold War
years they hung in the air as so many conundrums (Bauer 1954: 580-5). Frances’s
own insistence on the irreducibly conflictual nature of politics clearly implied the
clash of groups and not just individuals, but in the 1970s the relevant groups appeared
to be social classes. By the time of the 1996 article, the groups given prominence
were the entities that appear in the national accounts – families or households, firms
17
in the private sector, governments at different levels and community organisations.
Among these, the good groups, in the sense of raising efficiency and distributing
equitably, operated in a mode of trust and reciprocity, a norm that was orthogonal to
the neoclassical motive of rational self-interest. If that motive were encouraged
excessively, she warned, “groups will still emerge, but they will increasingly be more
destructive than constructive” (Stewart 1996: 23).
In subsequent work on groups, done jointly with Judith Heyer and Rosemary Thorp,
definitional emphasis shifted again - to local grass-roots groups. Examples included
producer co-operatives, saving and credit associations, management groups for
common resources, and groups formed to advance claims, self-empowerment and
identity formation. The compilation of this wide range of case studies was used to
show what collective action could do to improve the lot of the poor – from improving
economic efficiency to a more many-sided self-realisation (Heyer, Stewart and Thorp
2002; Stewart 2005). Although the primary concern was not to tackle the analytical
problem of specifying the conditions of successful and unsuccessful group formation
by the poor, some of the factors that handicap the poor in forming groups were
pointed out (Thorp, Stewart and Heyer 2005: 913-5).
The genocide in Rwanda in 1994, along with the humanitarian emergencies associated
with civil wars in Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, gave a
sudden powerful impetus towards serious investigation of conflict between groups
defined by their ethnicity. While acknowledging the modelling work of Collier and
Hoeffler (1998) in the neo-classical style on the economic causes of civil war, Frances
embarked on a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary path. She incorporated
into her analysis of group mobilisation the construction of group identities and their
instrumental use in the pursuit of political ambitions by group leaders. She argued,
however, that different group identities would not lead to conflict unless significant
economic differences between groups were present, and these differences were not
modulated by the exercise of political power. These group differences were labelled
“horizontal inequalities” as distinct from the vertical inequalities in the incomes of an
undifferentiated national population. They were seen as having four dimensions –
not just incomes and employment, but also political participation, economic assets
and social goods. Frances’s hypotheses were that group conflicts were not caused by
ignorance, but by deliberate manipulation; that they testify to a preference for relative
group advantage over absolute advantage; and that relative group advantage is
believed to be achievable by means of a drive for political power. The policy
implications of this analysis were that policies need to be framed in the light of
18
understanding the nature and intensity of the horizontal inequalities existing in a
country, with the aim of reducing them (Stewart 2000). She noted that the
conditionality imposed by international aid donors usually did not include that aim.
This line of research continued, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation, with an
examination of the role of diaspora and other international influences on the outbreak,
prolongation and resolution of conflicts (FitzGerald, Stewart and Venugopal 2006).
Frances then applied successfully for the resources to direct a DFID Development
Research Centre specialising in inequality, human security and ethnicity. Given the
acronym CRISE, the new Centre was set up in 2003 in the Oxford Department, but it
works with an international network of scholars in Bolivia, Ghana, Guatemala,
Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Nigeria and Peru. Such an extensive network put
Frances as its director in a relatively novel position – not directing an entire
Department, with its congeries of semi-competitive interests, but animating a
disparate team contributing to a common research objective. The experience of
working with Mahbub ul Haq must have stood her in good stead. Like him, she has
been able to motivate her team to give of their best, while exercising enough
intellectual leadership to deliver a coherent account of the variegated segments of
country research which have been undertaken under the CRISE umbrella.
That is demonstrated by Stewart (2008), an edited volume that brings together in an
ordered form the contributions of various members of the CRISE team on the topic of
horizontal inequalities and conflict. Groups are here further defined as cultural
groups, mainly ethnic or religious groups. Accordingly, the discussion ranges more
widely than just the developing countries, to include Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the
black community in the US and the fate of the Jews under the Nazi regime. A
chapter co-authored by Frances tackles the difficult issues of defining and measuring
horizontal inequalities. Here one senses that finding an appropriate statistical
measure for describing group inequality is more tractable than drawing appropriate
boundaries around groups when ethnic identities are both objective and subjective,
and both self-adopted and attributed by others. All the same, the statistical tests
presented appear not to contradict Frances’s initial hypothesis that horizontal
inequalities are conducive to violent conflict.
They also contribute the interesting finding that this effect may be stronger in
societies with democratic political institutions. Democracy does not cause violent
conflict, it is argued, but it does not automatically produce a democratic consensus
19
either. In the presence of egregious inequalities, the democratic political fray may
descend into violence.
XI Conclusion
Frances has been consistently dismissive of neoclassical versions of development
economics. She regards comparative statics as a useless technique for analysing
dynamic processes of development. The phenomena of economies of scale,
technological gaps, externalities, and indivisibilities are crucial to our understanding
of the real world and cannot be assumed away. However, her rejection of
comparative statics did not lead also to rejection of microeconomics. It was an
important part of her thesis and reappeared in her work on grass-roots groups.
Equally, her dismissal of neoclassical economic theory did not lead her reject out of
hand economic policies that are often recommended on neoclassical grounds, such as
trade and domestic economic liberalisation. She acknowledges that they could often
be very effective in generating economic development. In many poor countries they
succeeded because they reduced X-inefficiency, speeded up structural change, and
helped to transfer technology and skills. All this had nothing to do with improving
resource allocation in a static context.
Above all, the initial distribution of income in poor countries is unacceptable, so that
market processes proceeding from it cannot produce optimal outcomes (1985a). In
her recent important contributions, Frances has broadened the question of distribution
beyond incomes and wealth to include other dimensions, and analysed distribution not
just vertically, but also in terms of the horizontal inequalities that have the power to
wreak social and political havoc.
Her view of politics as inherently conflictual is consistent with viewing her own work
as active partisanship for the poor. Several of her contributions e.g. to the basic
needs strategy and to the campaign for “adjustment with a human face” had a marked
tactical element in their design, building in features that would give them leverage in
the political market place. This led to criticism from the more academically-minded
that empirical descriptions do not somehow speak for themselves and that the
interpretation of facts inevitably implies some kind of counter-factual scenario
(however difficult that may be to define).
20
Frances’s writings are certainly notable for a strong empirical approach. Her early
days as a government economist encouraged her interest on economic statistics. She
found that the Blue Books provided her with an ever ready source of data, from which
she could quickly get a sense of relative economic dimensions. In this she resembled
her father, of whom someone said that he could (in the words of Trollope) “occupy
himself with a blue book for hours together without wincing”.6 For her part, Frances
has the impressive skill, when opening up a new research topic, of quickly assembling
and laying out the relevant economic, social and political data.
Underlying all of her tireless efforts has been a personal commitment to understand
poverty in developing countries and a will, not just to empathise, but to use the power
of reason and advocacy to do something about it. Her career from the mid-1970s has
been devoted to an activity labelled by two international relations scholars ‘norm
entrepreneurship’, the promotion of a set of moral values as the basis for international
development policy (Finnemore and Skikkink 1998). Her achievement in the wider
world has been to move the international policy discourse forward on many fronts –
towards meeting basic needs, more socially sensitive macroeconomic adjustment,
humanising war and inequalities. She did this by producing simple ideas out of a
sophisticated understanding, ideas that policy makers could then seize on and put to
use.
Her long-standing engagement with the United Nations, including membership of
important UN committees has helped to extend the influence of her research. She has
been the UK member on the UN University Council and on the governing body of
UN WIDER in Helsinki. After serving on the Council of UNRISD in Geneva, she
became a member of the Committee on Development Policy at UN headquarters in
New York in 2007. Outside the UN, she has been President of the DSA (1990-2)
and is currently President of the Human Development and Capability Association.
Organisations that have appointed her to important governance positions include IDS,
Sussex, Brown University in Providence and IFPRI in Washington. Academic
journals to which she has given her time include World Development, Journal of
International Development, Journal of Human Development, Journal of Development
Economics and Development and Change. In all of these forums, her research ideas
have circulated.
Frances is after all an indefatigable communicator. Her stamina for producing and
spreading ideas is amazing. Colleagues marvel at her cheerful willingness to go to
yet another international gathering to expound the essence of her latest research, and
21
do so in a way that makes yet another influential audience suddenly feel ‘yes, that’s
it!’. It is fascinating to see it happening, and it is humbling to realise that it is done
always with one over-riding aim, “to do something for the poor”.
Oxford University held off from recognising Frances’s achievements in the field of
international development studies to the point when she began to contemplate moving
elsewhere. Then, relatively late in her career, Frances turned to academic
administration, and she proved to be so much more than just a good administrator.
Right from the start she was an excellent academic institution builder, recruiting
talent, managing change, gaining the confidence of those whose confidence was
needed and inspiring all those involved with her in contributing to the collective
enterprise. Her decade as Director witnessed a most remarkable improvement in the
academic fortunes of Queen Elizabeth House. Her commitment to raising academic
standards has continued since in the form of research team leadership, encouraging
young researchers – a task on which she thrives, building an academic network
dedicated to a central global issue and harvesting the fruit from the co-operative
effort.
In 1995, Oxford University awarded her the personal distinction of professorial status,
recognition that many of us felt was already by that time long overdue. Frances’s
other distinctions now include being cited as an “outstanding leader” in 2003 by the
journal Scientific American, receiving the 2009 Mahbub-ul Haq Award for Human
Development from UNDP and being given an honorary degree by the University of
Sussex in January 2010.
22
REFERENCES
Bauer, P. T. 1954, Book review, Economic Journal, 64 (255): 580-85.
Bruton, H. 1955, “Growth Models and Underdeveloped Economies”, Journal of
Political Economy, 63: 322-36.
Collier. P. and A. Hoeffler, 1998, “The Economic Causes of Civil Wars”, Oxford
Economic Papers, 50.4: 563-73.
Cornia, A., R. Jolly and F. Stewart, 1987, Adjustment with a Human Face, 2 vols.,
Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Finnemore, M. and K. Skikkink, 1998, “International Norm Dynamics and Political
Change”, International Organization, 52 (4): 887-917.
FitzGerald, V., F. Stewart and R. Venugopal (editors) 2006, Globalization, Selfdetermination and Violent Conflict, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Goodin, R. E., 2000, Symposium on Martha Nussbaum’s Political Philosophy,
Chicago, Chicago University Press.
Heyer, J., F. Stewart and R. Thorp (editors), 2002, Group Behaviour and
Development: Is the Market Destroying Cooperation?, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.
Kirk-Greene, A. H. M., 1994, Diplomatic Initiative: The Foreign Service Programme
1969-1994, University of Oxford.
Little, I. M. D and J. A. Mirrlees, 1968, Manual of Industrial Project Analysis,
Volume II, Paris, OECD Development Centre.
MacDougall, D., 1987, Don and Mandarin: Memoirs of an Economist, London, John
Murray.
Myrdal, G., 1968, Asian Drama, London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.
23
Rainbird, S. and F. Stewart, 1984, “Queen Elizabeth House: the New Phase”, mimeo.
Ranis, G., F. Stewart and A. Ramirez, 2000, “Economic Growth and Human
Development”, World Development, 28.2, pp. 197-219
Ranis, G., F. Stewart and E. Samman, 2005, “Human Development: Beyond the
HDI”, Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 916 New Haven, Yale
University.
Sen, A. K., 1984, Resources, Values and Development, Oxford, Blackwell.
Sen, A. K., 1999, Development as Freedom, Oxford, OUP.
Stewart, F., 1973, “Choice of Technique in Developing Countries”, Journal of
Development Studies, 9.1: 99-121.
Stewart, F., 1975, “A Note on Social Cost-Benefit Analysis and Class Conflict in Less
Developed Countries”, World Development, 3.1: 31-9.
Stewart, F., 1985a, “The Fragile Foundations of Neo-classical Development
Economics”, Journal of Development Studies, 21.2: 282-92.
Stewart, F., 1985b, Planning to meet basic needs, London, Macmillan.
Stewart, F., 1996, “Groups for Good or Ill”, Oxford Development Studies, 24.1: 9-25.
Stewart, F., 2000, “Crisis Prevention: Tackling Horizontal Inequalities”, Oxford
Development Studies, 28.3, 245-62.
Stewart, F., 2005, “Groups and Capabilities”, Journal of Human Development, Vol. 6,
No. 2: 185-204.
Stewart, F. (editor), 2008, Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group
Violence in Multi-ethnic Societies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Stewart, F. and P. P. Streeten, 1972, “Little-Mirrlees Methods and Project Appraisal”,
Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Economics and Statistics, 34.1: 75-91.
24
Stewart, F., V. FitzGerald and Associates, 2001, War and Underdevelopment, 2 vols.,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Thorp, R., F. Stewart and A. Heyer, 2005, “When and How Far is Group Formation a
Route out of Chronic Poverty?”, World Development, 33.6: 907-20.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 1965, International Monetary
Issues and the Developing Countries: Report of the Group of Experts, New York,
United Nations.
UNDP, 1990, The Human Development Report, New York, Oxford University Press
for UNDP.
1
Margaret Hall was at that time the wife of Sir Robert Hall, and was later to become the wife of Sir
Donald MacDougall. In 1965, she and Ursula Hicks became the first women members of the Oxford
University Political Economy Club (MacDougall 1987: 236).
2
Michael Stewart was the son of J. I. M. Stewart, the English Literature don at Christ Church who also
wrote detective novels pseudonymously. Michael became an academic at University College, London
and is the author of several popular books on economics, including “Keynes and After” which
expounded Keynesian economics and its implications for economic policy.
3
However, under the leadership of Carol Bellamy, UNICEF moved back to a more traditional strategy
of child-centred medical and nutrition interventions, although in the years since 2005 UNICEF has
begun to recruit socio-economists as advisors in its regional offices.
4
For a brief account of the Foreign Service Programme at Queen Elizabeth House, see Anthony KirkGreene (1994).
5
Because Robert Cassen did not relinquish his professorial position, the Directorship as advertised no
longer had a full salary attached to it, only an additional allowance. This change meant that external
recruitment (as had happened with Cassen) was no longer possible, and that only those who already
enjoyed Oxford University salaries were able to apply. There were four applicants from within
Oxford, including Frances.
6 From Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn, the Irish Member Vol. I, Chap. XXXI, Lady Laura
Kennedy’s Headache.