dsa
development studies association
DSA Annual Conference – "Values, Ethics and Morality", 05/11/2010
Panel 6. Development studies: requiem or wake-up call
The retreat from modernity and
the future of development studies
John Toye
Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University
1. Summary
 The idea of development emerged on the public policy stage
at the apogee of enthusiasm for all things modern;
 Subsequently assailed by critics of modernity;
 The idea of development then reconstructed in the modernist
mould under the new label of “human development”.
 The reconstruction was only partially successful for two
reasons:
(1) The role played by reason in Sen’s capabilities approach
remained unclear.
(2) The Identification of development with “the overcoming
of unfreedom” neglects the tendency of modernisation
processes to undermine the expansion of capabilities.
1. Summary (cont)
 This is a tendency that needs urgent attention as the world
struggles to understand and ameliorate the crisis of man-made
global warming.
 Adaptation to climate change, the need for greater urban
planning improved national science and technology policy
and the crafting of should all form part of the core of any
development studies curriculum.
1. The starting point: H.G. Wells vs
J.R. Haldane 1941
 “We have the makings of a great international movement for
pulling our scatterbrained world into sane, effective mentality.
We are the small beginning that may start an avalanche which
will cleanse the world. Men of science have the alternative of
being like Greek slaves and doing what they are told by their
masters, the gangsters and profiteers, or taking their rightful
place as the servant-masters of the world”
H.G. Wells: address to the British Association for the Advancement of
Science’s 1941 conference on Science and the World Order.
 The growing gap between the material conditions of the
colonisers and the colonised could not be closed suddenly.
What was needed was “a studied adaptation of custom to
modern uses”. Three pre-requisites of all further social progress
that colonial administrations could and should provide –
adequate nutrition, medical facilities and popular education .
J.R. Haldane speech to the British Association for the Advancement of
Science’s 1941 conference on Science and the World Order.
2. The official concept of progress:
H. Frankel vs W.A. Lewis (1951/2)
 Herbert Frankel attacked the presuppositions of modernising
development by criticising the UN’s 1951 report Measures for
the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries as
representing conventional mid-20th century thinking about
development and as constituting “something like an Official
Concept of Progress”.
 Denied that progress could be measured in terms of increases
in national income.
 Denied that rapid economic change was desirable.
 Denied the role of government action in promoting beneficial
change in underdeveloped countries.
 Condemned government planning as authoritarian and largescale international capital transfers as unnecessary and
possibly damaging to the prospects of underdeveloped
countries if invested in relatively less productive projects.
2. The official concept of progress:
H. Frankel vs W.A. Lewis (1951/2
 Having served on the UK’s Colonial Economic Advisory
Committee in 1943-44, Lewis promoted what was in the early
1950s a radical development agenda: that economic
development
1. should proceed “as rapidly as possible”;
2. should be assisted by government planning;
3. required a “sudden jump into industrialisation”; and
4. needed an increased capital flows to the colonies.
 Lewis argued that what Frankel was rejecting were the
presuppositions of the UN member governments who had
sought his advice. His report answered the question the UN
asked him to answer – what should governments of developing
countries and the international community do if they wanted
the income gap between industrial and developing countries
not to widen further?
3. Two cultures? H.R. Leavis vs C.P. Snow
(1959-62)
 In his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, entitled “The
Two Cultures” H.R. Leavis took on two issues:
a) The need to “sharpen the concern of rich and privileged
societies for those less lucky” ; and
b) the cultural gap between scientists and literary
intellectuals.
 C.P. Snow held that “industrialisation is the only hope of the
poor (...) [I]n any country where they have had the chance,
the poor have walked off the land into the factories” (...)
“[I]t only takes will to train enough scientists, engineers and
technicians” (...) “[I]t is technically possible to carry out the
scientific revolution (...) within fifty years” if the essential capital
was made available “from outside” .
3. Two cultures? H.R. Leavis vs C.P. Snow
(1959-62)
 Leavis’s rejoinder was to distrust the benefits of industrial
progress for the “the Congolese, the Indonesians, the Bushmen
(...) , the Chinese [and] the Indians”.
 He had no sympathy with the export of a Western culture and
society of which he did not approve; he believed the
“civilisation” it would impose elsewhere would be destructive.
 C.P. Snow replied with 3 clarifications
a) Morally, he argued that it was “antihuman” to show no
solidarity with those whose basic needs remained unmet;
b) Politically, industrialisation did not mean the authoritarian
imposition of an alien culture: rural-urban migration was a
means of social liberation and political empowerment;
c) Educationally, the effort to understand the scientific
transformation of the world, past, present and future was
producing a third culture, bridging the gap between
scientists and literary intellectuals.
4. The appropriate technology debate:
Schumacher vs Kaldor (1960s)
 Schumacher’s main concern was that development be
human-centred: production, commerce and politics should be
of an appropriate (i.e. smaller) size, and technology should be
affordable. In developing countries, the consequences of the
strategy of economic development was a “mutual poisoning”
of the rural and urban sectors.
 Kaldor attacked Schumacher’s intermediate technology
proposals as romantic “nonsense”: where capital is scarce, it
must be invested in projects with the lowest possible capitaloutput ratio, since “the most modern machinery produces
much more output per unit of capital invested than less
sophisticated machinery that employs more people”.
 Overall, critics gave Schumacher the benefit of the doubt. He
argued for a better moral and ethical basis for development,
taking it out of the hands of economists who claimed to be
objective but in fact served the rich and privileged.
5. Reconstructing the Norm of Development:
Amartya Sen (1970s onwards)
 Sen found Rawls’s criticisms of utilitarianism persuasive, but his
contract-based theory inadequate. This led him to propose a
normative focus on the “freedom to achieve actual livings that
one can have reason to value”.
 His capability approach can focus either on the set of
functionings that a person has realised or on the set of
alternative functionings between which a person is free to
choose – that person’s “capability set”.
5. Reconstructing the Norm of Development:
Amartya Sen (1970s onwards)
 Sen’s capability approach resolved many of the questions
previously in dispute.
 Individual/international income levels/differences are not an
inadequate indicator of well being.
 Wellbeing has to be assessed over a much broader spectrum
of influences, of which income is only one.
 Nutrition, health, education, gender equality and personal
security are also vital ingredients of wellbeing.
 Development does not consist simply of increases in future
consumption.
 It is the exercise of agency by individuals, and that requires the
removal of constraints on the exercise of agency.
5. Reconstructing the Norm of Development:
Amartya Sen (1970s onwards)
 Sen also wanted to establish that greater opportunities would
result in better outcomes: better education results in better
health; better health results in higher income; expansion of
income results in better education, and so on.
 Sen admits that the unfettered exercise of human agency
generates forces the contradictions of which constantly
change the contexts in which citizens are able to act. Entire
populations should discuss how far to adapt their traditional
culture to secure the advantages of modernity.
6. Conclusions
 The core of development studies does exist. I persevere in this
view, advanced 30 years ago, though today I would accord
an important role to Sen’s normative reconstruction.
Alongside it, though, I should place an historical account of
capitalist modernisation and its contradictions, if only to explain
why, despite its past success in “overcoming unfreedoms”,
modernisation remains such a contentious process.
 Perhaps the most dramatic example of the auto-subversion of
modernity is the threat of dangerous climate change as a
result of two hundred years of industrialisation. Under
capitalism, the freedom to pollute the environment has
created economic opportunity and economic growth,
 Now the consequences of this freedom are better understood,
development studies either has no future, or must adapt to
climate change, creatively articulating with other disciplines to
identify new theories, new policies, and a new ethics.