{"id":91440,"date":"2013-06-14T09:57:08","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T04:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=91440"},"modified":"2013-06-19T00:06:35","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T18:36:35","slug":"reimagining-development-the-journey-begins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/reimagining-development-the-journey-begins\/","title":{"rendered":"Reimagining Development \u2013 The Journey Begins"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vagisha I. Gunasekara<\/a><\/span> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Dr. Vagisha Gunasekara<\/p><\/div>\n

The Symposium<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the beginning of Development Economics, the notion that economic growth by itself with a correlative increase in the amount of goods and services produced and consumed within a country, is a sufficient condition for development, has been one accepted and propagated by the mainstream.\u00a0 For far too long it was given that the nations of the global South must \u201cgrow\u201d and \u201cdevelop\u201d; and government policy is often based on the premise that higher growth rates and greater affluence are conducive to development and wellbeing \u2013 if the GDP is rising, we should all be better off, in every sense.\u00a0 However, can we equate economic growth with development and the wellbeing of citizens?\u00a0 Or should we recalibrate our idea of development?\u00a0 These were the fundamental questions that the Center for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) put forth in the 11th<\/sup> Annual Symposium \u2013 Reimagining Development<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Reimagining Development <\/em>symposium was a culmination of a series of events that debated and discussed the usefulness of existing notions of development, both mainstream and alternative, in the current Sri Lankan and global contexts.\u00a0 The event that took place on the 11th<\/sup> and 12th<\/sup> of December, 2012 was in many ways, a stock-taking exercise that was intended to:\u00a0 provide an opportunity to reconfigure the concept of development by critically examining it in light of current, lived experiences; gather a diverse group of economists, policymakers, artists, and thinkers and facilitate a cross-fertilization of ideas that would allow us to take development outside of the current narrow confines of economics; and, create a space for dialogue on alternative thought, which in turn may flourish into a broader space for development discourse.\u00a0 This critical assessment of current development paradigms and the evaluation of core ideas about development took place in seven parallel sessions, each discussing development in relation to a particular area in our political, economic, and social realms:\u00a0 wellbeing, ethics and values, art, women, urban development, the environment, and knowledge hierarchies.\u00a0 Each parallel session was a unique thought experiment in which attendees came together to reflect upon the unresolved tension between material progress on the one hand, and human wellbeing on the other.<\/p>\n

What is the Urgency to Reimagine?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since the mid 1980s, development thought has been stuck in a cul-de-sac as both grand meta narratives of development theory \u2013 Modernization Theory and radical Marxist approaches \u2013 lost their hegemony, and the neoliberal paradigm emerged as the dominant way of thinking about development.\u00a0 Three decades of neoliberal economic thought with its commitment to methodological individualism (\u00e0 la Max Weber 1922, 1968; Schumpeter 1909) and principles of private property, has attributed primacy to the role of free enterprise, free trade, and the market in the quest for development.\u00a0 This shift to market that aims at transforming society as a whole into a \u2018market society\u2019, has not only influenced the behavior of government institutions, NGOs, and private organizations active in the domains of development, but also dampened intellectual diversity of ideas about human progress.<\/p>\n

Developed in the 1960s by a minority cadre of conservative economists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and strengthened by a large network of international foundations, institutes, research centers, publications, scholars, writers, and public relations hacks that package and push its ideas, the doctrine of neoliberalism has emerged as the dominant paradigm, and the ideological fuel of the global economy.\u00a0 Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan gave neo-liberalism a big boost in the 1980s.\u00a0 By then, many economists treated it as an unquestionable and inevitable truth \u2013 rather than as a vested economic construct \u2013 enabling Thatcher and Reagan to lead the neo-liberal \u2018revolution\u2019 with their rallying cries of \u201ccompetition\u201d and \u201cefficiency\u201d.\u00a0 Allowing these mantras to shape all decisions regarding economic, political and social policy, and driven by a strict social Darwinism, neo-liberalists reshaped the face of the world economy in less than a decade.\u00a0 But while competition and efficiency govern life at the lowest levels of society and economy, transnational corporations still reign virtually unhindered in an almost monopolistic alliance.<\/p>\n

After restructuring many western economies, neoliberalists turned their attention to the \u2018Third World\u2019, where the doctrine of privatization has come to pervade influential economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank (via the Washington Consensus).\u00a0 By the 1990s, loans from these and other international financial institutions were contingent upon their recipients implementing neoliberal agenda of privatization, fuelled by the dicta of competition and efficiency.<\/p>\n

Despite the \u2018tried and true\u2019 formula of neoliberal growth, cemented by randomized trials to assess its interventions (indicating links to positivism), an intellectual query about the core of the current paradigm is much needed, especially in the face of global issues such as, recent economic crises, persisting imbalances in trade and financial investment between the global North and the South, lingering problems such as hunger and inequality, and physical limits of planetary resources.<\/p>\n

The urgent call to reimagine development is also timely given the relationship between development and conflict, particularly in the context of post-war Sri Lanka<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 Did the armed conflict in this country contribute to a lack of development, or does the causal relationship go in the other direction?\u00a0 The notion that grievances of the conflict are development oriented surfaced during this symposium (as emphasized by Mr. Sunil Bastian<\/a><\/span>), bringing attention to the lack of linkage between development and political power and human rights in the current development model (\u00e0 la Prof. Savitri Goonasekere<\/a><\/span>).\u00a0 Development\u2019s transformative capability was also contested (by Dr. Harini Amarasuriya):\u00a0 how can development claim to be a transformative force when it is fixated with the future, and has sterilized itself from \u2018sticky\u2019 elements such as politics and history?\u00a0 The idea that development cannot be divorced from the historicity and contingent nature of social processes, routine practices, and moral frameworks of people\u2019s lives was another highlight of the inaugural session of the symposium.\u00a0 The need to decode our current model of development and the latter\u2019s captivity to the same processes that shapes the world it seeks to change, marked the climax of this discussion and called for further dialogue on understanding individual and collective visions of society and development.<\/p>\n

Continuing to Reimagine<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, the symposium attempted to \u2018undomesticate\u2019 development by looking beyond the narrow frame of the apolitical and ahistorical individual or the household, and revisiting political and social relations within which both entities exist.\u00a0 While some of these key questions were discussed during the seven parallel sessions, many other important ideas were not addressed due to time constraints.\u00a0 Understanding the goal of development, what we are striving to achieve, and who really matters in this process are crucial questions that require further discussion. \u00a0Let us carry forward this conversation that CEPA kick-started with Reimagining Development<\/em>.\u00a0 This is the preliminary of a series of forthcoming articles inspired by the deliberations of the symposium.\u00a0 The ideas that are presented by these articles are subject to debate and your critiques and commentary is highly encouraged, as we strongly believe that reimagining development should be a collective exercise.\u00a0 So, come along, let\u2019s reimagine\u2026<\/p>\n

*The Centre for Poverty Analysis(CEPA) is an independent, Sri Lankan think-tank promoting a better understanding of poverty related development issues.\u00a0<\/em>Vagisha Gunasekara is a Senior Research Professional at the Centre for Poverty Analysis, Sri Lanka. \u00a0Vagisha received her PhD in political science from Purdue University, USA. \u00a0Her research straddles issues at the intersection of post-war reconstruction, gender, feminism and international relations.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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